Terricide
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 AI Story
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, and of the cultures that have developed in relation to them. The three dimensions are not separable. The river is destroyed by extractive industry; the beings that inhabited the river disappear; the community whose life was shaped by the river loses the relational ground of its existence. Each dimension compounds the others.
Escobar's 2025 essay 'Against Terricide' applied the framework to digital technology and AI. He identified the techno-patriarchs of new technologies as agents of a specific form of terricide whose violence is obscured by the immateriality of its products. The training of large language models requires massive computational infrastructure. The infrastructure requires data centers. The data centers require land, water, and energy. The energy requires extraction — mining for rare earths, fossil fuel combustion for electricity, water diversion for cooling. Each layer is material, and each layer produces terricidal effects that are not registered by the discourse that celebrates the productivity gains.
The concept connects the Escobarian analysis of AI to the Escobarian analysis of ecological crisis. The two are not separate problems requiring separate responses. They are dimensions of a single civilizational trajectory — one in which the progressive extraction of value from living systems, accompanied by the progressive displacement of the knowledge systems that had maintained those living systems, produces accumulating damage that no efficiency gain can reverse. The AI transition accelerates this trajectory while presenting itself as its solution.
Terricide is also, in Escobar's framework, a concept that illuminates what pluriversal AI would require. If the current AI infrastructure is terricidal, the alternative is not a better version of the same infrastructure but a fundamentally different relationship between computation, matter, and living systems. The concept demands what Escobar calls politics of care — infrastructures designed to sustain rather than extract, to maintain rather than consume, to support diverse forms of life rather than standardize them in the image of the extractive model.
Origin
The concept was developed by Moira Millán and the Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir in Argentina, particularly through the demand for the legal recognition of terricide as a crime.
Escobar has engaged the concept in his recent work, particularly his 2025 essay 'Against Terricide,' where he extends it to digital and AI infrastructure.
Key Ideas
Beyond genocide and ecocide. Terricide names the destruction of the relational fabric — human, non-human, cosmological — that genocide and ecocide fail to capture.
Three dimensions. The visible ecosystem, the invisible beings, and the culture formed in relation — all destroyed together.
Material infrastructure of AI. Mines, data centers, energy demands, and water consumption constitute terricidal infrastructure obscured by immaterial interfaces.
Continuity with extractivism. AI is not a departure from the extractive model but its latest iteration, accelerated and made more abstract.
Politics of care. The alternative requires fundamentally different infrastructures, not better versions of the same.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Moira Millán, El tren del olvido (Planeta, 2019).
- Arturo Escobar, 'Against Terricide' (2025 essay).
- Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021).
- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).