Educating for Extraction: Digital Literacy, International Organisations, and Planetary Defuturing

This article examines how digital literacy, as increasingly mediated through international development agendas, operates as a developmental technology that draws schooling into extractive digital economies. Drawing on critical development studies, decolonial scholarship, and the concept of planetary defuturing, the article examines how three differently positioned international organisations—UNESCO, the World Bank, and the OECD—frame and advance digital literacy through distinct yet convergent agendas around technological adaptation, economic participation, and ‘future readiness’. Situating these organisations within a wider assemblage of states, corporations, philanthropic actors, and technological infrastructures, we trace how digital literacy connects schooling to data-intensive, energy-dependent infrastructures that carry profound social and ecological costs while constraining alternative educational futures. Rather than a neutral skills agenda, digital literacy can draw schooling more deeply into extractive digital economies while translating structural problems into demands that learners adapt, reskill, and remain ‘future ready’. We conceptualise this buffering role as a form of planetary defuturing and consider how refusing such a role might reopen questions of what technologies are needed, on whose terms, for whose purposes, and toward what futures.