The thesis argues a structural parallel between colonial-era commodity extraction and today's digital platform economies: a population with high attention and low opportunity becomes highly monetizable, whether the commodity being extracted is coffee or creative labour. Global platforms capture that labour at close to zero marginal cost and return a thin slice of the value back to the people producing it. The research follows a design-science method: rather than only describing the extraction pattern, it builds a working artifact and tests it against the pattern directly. That artifact is the cooperative platform documented elsewhere on this map — member-owned, running on infrastructure the members effectively control rather than rented from a platform that could change the terms at any time — and the open question the thesis is still writing toward is whether that kind of ownership structure actually resists the extraction it studies, or only relocates it. The field is information systems; the method is design science; the artifact is real and live, not hypothetical.