CONCEPT
The Planetary Condition
Mbembe’s recognition that all human beings now share a single interconnected fate while occupying radically unequal positions within it—the conceptual
foundation for insisting that any adequate ethics of AI must operate at planetary scale, not merely metropolitan scale.
The planetary condition is
Achille Mbembe’s name for the defining feature of contemporary human existence: the recognition that no community’s fate is any longer separable from the fate of the whole, that the economic, ecological, and technological systems that organize human life are now irreversibly global in their operation, and that this shared fate is inhabited from positions of radical inequality. The climate crisis, the AI transition, and the governance crisis of digital infrastructure all exemplify the planetary condition: they affect everyone, in ways whose timescales and magnitudes differ dramatically depending on where one stands in the global hierarchy, and they cannot be addressed by any single nation, community, or institution acting alone. The planetary condition is not a call to ignore difference in the name of shared humanity. It is, on the contrary, a call to
insist on difference—to refuse the metropolitan universalism that treats its own particular experience as the experience of the whole,