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Metabolic Capture From Trophic Closure and Prion Propagation to Vital Extraction, Plastic Persistence, and the Mineralization of Life
Summary
This is a theoretical essay (not a lab study) that connects seemingly unrelated problems—like burnout, plastic pollution, overwork, and exhausting "always-on" jobs—under one big idea: modern systems keep finding ways to drain people's and the planet's ability to rest, heal, and renew themselves. The plastic pollution angle matters especially for health-conscious readers because the paper frames plastic as a lasting man-made substance that doesn't break down naturally, quietly limiting the environment's (and our bodies') capacity to recover, much like chronic stress limits a person's ability to bounce back. The take
This paper develops the concept of metabolic capture as a general operator for understanding how living capacities are appropriated, redirected, and transformed into the persistence of structures that progressively restrict the future availability of life. Cannibalism serves only as an initial boundary case. The argument moves from trophic closure and prion propagation to broader forms of capture in which another human being is treated not merely as labor, but as a reservoir of time, attention, care, regeneration, and unrealized possibility. Plastic is examined as a form of post-metabolic persistence: matter extracted from organic history, mobilized for accelerated consumption, and returned to the environment as a durable constraint. Mineralization is then defined as the displacement of living variability by infrastructures, procedures, and material formations whose stability increases as the field of possible transformations available to living systems contracts. Using the Possest–PQF framework, the paper interprets these processes as reorganizations of accessibility rather than as isolated instances of exploitation, pollution, or institutional dysfunction. The central ethical claim is that violation begins not only when life is damaged or destroyed, but when its capacity for regeneration, transformation, and future openness is treated as metabolic infrastructure for another system. The paper also argues that academic specialization often neutralizes this problem by separating burnout, plastic pollution, precarious labor, platform extraction, and environmental degradation into distinct domains, thereby obscuring the common operator that links them. Metabolic capture is proposed as a concept prior to exploitation: a description of how systems appropriate the very capacity of life to renew and reorganize itself. Keywords: metabolic capture, trophic closure, prion propagation, living availability, plastic persistence, mineralization, Possest–PQF, accessibility, regeneration, exploitation, ethics of the Other, institutional metabolism, environmental persistence, academic neutralization