“Groundhog sweat, misery and early graves”: Such is Darby Suckling’s description in Against the Day (2006) of what the “prodigious American economy” promises workers (AD 1033). Suckling summarizes the destruction and dehumanization Pynchon finds in capitalist operations, whether his subject is the ecological impact of the Slothrop Paper Company in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the abuse of miners in Against the Day or the machinations of Internet entrepreneurs in Bleeding Edge (2013). Whether globalized and virtual or aiming to extract old-fashioned natural resources, capitalism is an innately imperial and colonizing force for Pynchon: Defense contractors’ and other companies’ collusion with fascistic governments were a major target in his early career, and from the 1960s to the 2010s he has also been deeply critical of the capitalist impulse to convert wilderness and communal space into real estate, from Mason and Dixon’s original boundary-drawing to the land-owning moguls of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Inherent Vice (2009). DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge, though made of pixels, becomes one more landscape for co-opting as well, just like super-rich Manhattan.