Energy harvesting commodifies everything, including resistance
The concept of emotional labor, extensively documented by Rose Hackman and others, reveals how energy extraction operates identically across scales. At the individual level, narcissistic abusers extract emotional labor—demanding constant attention, validation, and care while giving nothing in return. At the systemic level, capitalism extracts this same energy through underpaid care work, uncompensated emotional labor, and what scholars term "the second shift" of domestic work.
Indigenous scholars reveal how colonial extraction of land parallels extraction from human bodies and spirits. Tthe capitalist system and extractivism damage the structure of the norms of exchange of benefits in both human and more-than-human relationships.
The fractal pattern is precise: extract value, externalize costs, abandon when depleted—whether applied to an intimate partner or an ecosystem.
Most insidiously, even resistance becomes a site of extraction. Just as abusers often co-opt their victims' attempts at independence ("I'm changing because you asked me to"), systemic oppression commodifies resistance movements. Corporate "wokewashing," the non-profit industrial complex, and academia's extraction of knowledge from oppressed communities all represent the same pattern: converting the energy of resistance into fuel for the system's continuation.