CONCEPT
Terricide
Escobar's recent concept for the systematic destruction of the conditions for life — originating in indigenous activism, extended to name the specific violence of development, extractivism, and now the infrastructural demands of AI.
Terricide is a term that entered Escobar's vocabulary through engagement with indigenous and feminist movements in Latin America, particularly the Argentine activist Moira Millán and the Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir. The term names a specific form of violence that exceeds the categories of genocide or ecocide: the destruction of the relational fabric that makes life possible — the territories, the ecosystems, the cosmologies, the communities of human and non-human beings whose interwoven existence constitutes what is actually being lost. Applied to AI, the concept identifies the material infrastructure of AI systems — the mines, the data centers, the energy demands, the water consumption — as components of a systemic terricide whose invisibility is maintained by the aesthetics of the frictionless interface.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept has specific content in indigenous activism. Moira Millán and the Mapuche-Tehuelche movement define terricide as the destruction of visible ecosystems, of the invisible beings that inhabit them,