This article analyses the genealogies of mineral extraction and financial abstraction as part of a shared colonial-capitalist complex. Its main idea is that extraction and abstraction are not only related; they are, in fact, each other’s condition of possibility. Abstraction is more material than we use to think. Its domain includes cartographic knowledge, global finance, speculative thought. Extraction is more abstract than we use to think. Its domain includes selective disposability, containers moving endlessly, globally, value being attributed in non-obvious, selective ways. Assuming that abstraction and extraction are connected, that they share a history, implies therefore redefining the critical vocabulary that shapes contemporary socio-political expectations and determines our very (in)capacity to design liveable futures.