The Extraction

On the day ignorance stopped being an excuse

By: Jeff Kluge · AI Ethicist & Tech Strategist · Writes about what it costs to stop paying attention

The art world has always understood something that the broader economy is only now being forced to confront.

Value is not created by extraction. It is destroyed by it.

Every serious collector, every auction house specialist, every wealth manager who has built a practice around cultural assets understands this at a visceral level. A work stripped of its provenance loses not just documentation — it loses a dimension of its meaning. An artist whose image, style, or creative identity is appropriated without consent doesn't just lose revenue — something irreplaceable is taken. The integrity of the object and the integrity of the creative life behind it are not separable from its value. They are the value.

I have spent my career at the intersection of financial systems and cultural ones — first as an advisor to founders and family offices, now as EVP of Strategy at Authentify Art,  where we exist precisely because provenance and integrity are not administrative details. They are the foundation everything else is built on.

That foundation is what I want to talk about today. Not in the art world specifically. In the broader economy of human attention — and what happens when the people controlling the infrastructure decide that extraction is a business model.

On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first major social encyclical. I want to be clear that I am not writing this as a matter of faith. I am writing it as a systems thinker who has spent a decade watching a particular argument get managed, deferred, and defunded — and who watched that argument arrive, finally, with the full institutional weight of one of the oldest continuous moral authorities on earth behind it.

The encyclical names the mechanism. Not the cultural anxiety, not the general concern about technology — the mechanism.

It documents how digital platforms are engineered to monetize attention and time. How algorithmic systems are designed to surface violent, degrading, and hypersexualized content to developing minds. How the simulation of empathy and genuine connection by automated systems progressively extinguishes the desire for real human bonds. How a child's nervous system, forced to adapt to the speed and demands of a machine, emerges from that adaptation as something other than what it was meant to become.

Leo XIV names this anthropological regression. I think it's exactly right.

And then it closes the argument that has protected this industry for fifteen years: "Every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations."

There is no neutral. There never was. And that position is now formally, permanently, and publicly untenable.

For the audience reading this — people who manage capital, who sit on investment committees, who advise families on the stewardship of multi-generational wealth — I want to be direct about what this moment means.

Managed ignorance was the last refuge. That refuge is now gone.

This is not a provocation. It is a description of where we are. The research on adolescent harm from unregulated platform exposure has been accumulating for years. The internal documents showing that platforms knew what their systems were doing to children — and shipped anyway — are public. The clinical literature on sleep disruption, attention degradation, emotional dysregulation, and the erosion of the capacity for genuine relationship is not contested science. It is settled science that was successfully managed in public discourse for long enough to matter enormously.

What the encyclical represents is the crystallization of that consensus at a level of institutional authority that changes the conversation permanently. It is not the first voice. But it may be the last voice needed to close the escape hatch.

When the Vatican issues a formal social document drawing on a tradition that stretches from Leo XIII's confrontation with the first great wave of industrial extraction — Rerum Novarum, 1891 — through the present, naming the concentration of digital power, the exploitation of minors, and the abdication of moral responsibility by those who control the infrastructure, the conversation has moved. It has moved from "is this happening" to "what are we prepared to do about it."

For people who move capital, that question is not abstract.

I have spent enough time in investment conversations to know how this has been framed. The platforms are infrastructure. The engagement metrics are proof of product-market fit. The regulatory risk is manageable. The social cost is externalized — borne by families, by clinical systems, by the children themselves — and therefore does not appear on a balance sheet.

That framing is now significantly harder to sustain.

Not because the balance sheet has changed, but because the moral accounting has. And in my experience, the two are more connected than most investment frameworks acknowledge. The industries that successfully externalized their human costs longest — tobacco, opioids, leaded fuel — did not ultimately avoid accountability. They deferred it. And the deferral compounded the cost, both to the people harmed and, eventually, to the capital that funded the deferral.

The encyclical is explicit about the structural dimension of this. It calls for legislative frameworks that hold service providers accountable rather than externalizing the burden onto families. It calls for age limits, for protections against online exploitation, for the radical repositioning of the burden of proof onto the people deploying the system rather than the children navigating it. It names the concentration of digital power in the hands of a few as a structural problem requiring structural intervention — not a cultural problem addressable through better parenting advice.

These are not progressive policy preferences. They are the logical conclusions of a moral framework that has been consistent for 135 years: economic systems that treat human beings as means rather than ends are not sustainable. They are not just wrong. They fail.

Here is where the art world analogy becomes something more than analogy.

The question that has organized my professional life for the past several years is simple: does your art talk? Does it carry within it a verifiable record of its own origin and integrity — who made it, when, what its history has been, that it is what it claims to be?

That question matters because integrity is not decorative. It is structural. Remove it, and you don't just have a less valuable object. You have a different kind of object entirely — one whose relationship to truth has been severed.

The same question applies to the systems we are building for human attention. Does your platform carry within it a verifiable commitment to the integrity of the people using it? Does it know who it is serving, and at what cost? Or has it severed its relationship to that truth in the interest of engagement metrics?

The encyclical calls this the difference between a civilization that measures progress by the power of its means and one that measures it by the care it extends to its most vulnerable.

In the art world, we know what happens to markets built on the former. They collapse under the weight of what they failed to protect.

I am not writing this to suggest that the people who built these systems are uniformly without conscience, or that the technology itself is the enemy. I have spent enough time in rooms adjacent to the engineering of these systems to know that there are people inside them who have been waiting for exactly this kind of institutional moment — the moment when the cultural ground shifts enough that building differently becomes possible, and perhaps even competitively necessary.

That moment is now closer than it has ever been.

What I am writing is that the period of managed uncertainty is over. The period in which reasonable people could claim they needed more information, or that the science was unsettled, or that the market would self-correct, or that the regulatory environment was too complex to navigate — that period ended on May 15, 2026, whether or not the press cycle treated it that way.

For those of us who advise on capital, who steward assets across generations, who understand that the most durable value is always built on integrity rather than extracted from vulnerability — this is a clarifying moment.

The extraction ends when we decide it ends. Not when the platforms decide. Not when the market corrects.

When we do.

Jeff Kluge is EVP of Strategy & Corporate Development at Authentify Art and an AI ethicist and ForHumanity Fellow. He writes about what it costs to stop paying attention.