Capitalism abstracts in order to extract and distances harm to dodge accountability

Evidence

Together these practices have heightened capitalism’s innate tendency to abstract in order to extract, intensifying the distancing mechanisms that make the sources of environmental violence harder to track and multinational environmental answerability harder to impose. Such distancing mechanisms include the rhetorical gulf between development as a grand planetary dream premised on growth-driven consumption and its socioenvironmental fallout; the geographical distance between market forces as, to an almost occult degree, production has become disaggregated from consumption; and the temporal distance between short-lived actions and long-lived consequences, as gradual casualties are spread across a protracted aftermath, during which the memory and the body count of slow violence are diffused—and defused—by time. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 111

Categorization

• XREF: The three distancing mechanisms (rhetorical, geographical, temporal) map onto the slow-noise harm in Soundscape: chronic noise is likewise diffused and defused across time and distance. — connects to: Fragmented production processes weaken individual accountability for harmful content — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 849; Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1556; Theorizing away the concept of totality serves capitalism by hiding it from political challenge — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 713 (+7 more)
• ADDENDUM: The rhetorical/geographical/temporal distancing triad directly supports the trees-as-infrastructure piece’s claim that extraction erases long-horizon attachments.

Broader Connections

• Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm #corroborates (0.88) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1556
• Structural diffusion of responsibility in corporations shields executives and strips morality from harm #corroborates (0.88) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1605
• Fragmented production processes weaken individual accountability for harmful content #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 849
• Slow, distributed environmental harms escape moral accountability because causation is invisible #exemplifies (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707
• Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity #corroborates (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
• Theorizing away the concept of totality serves capitalism by hiding it from political challenge #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 713
• Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475