PERSON

Frantz Fanon

The Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary who diagnosed colonialism as a system of classification before it was ever a system of force—and whose concept of being “overdetermined from the outside” describes, with uncanny precision, what algorithmic systems now do to billions of people who never consented to be read.

Frantz Fanon spent his short life describing what it does to a human being to be fixed from the outside—scored, sorted, and reduced to an object by a system of power that does not know him. Born in Martinique in 1925, trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon, he went to Algeria in 1953 to run a hospital ward during the bloodiest years of the War of Independence and died of leukemia in 1961 at thirty-six, days after The Wretched of the Earth appeared. His two masterworks—Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth—mapped the psychology of colonization with clinical precision, showing that the deepest injury of domination is not the whip but the gaze: the system that classifies a person without consulting him and hands him back a self that is not his own. He called this being “overdetermined from the

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