Achille Mbembe

In the AI Story

Mbembe's intellectual formation sits at the intersection of continental philosophy, African political thought, and the history of the postcolony. He takes from Foucault the analysis of power as distributed and productive rather than merely repressive, from Fanon the phenomenology of the colonized subject, from Deleuze and Guattari the vocabulary of flows and assemblages — but he departs from all of these European traditions by insisting on the racial and colonial specificity that they tend to universalize away. The result is a body of thought that can speak to the metropolitan center without being absorbed into its fishbowl.

For reading the AI revolution, Mbembe is indispensable because he sees what the industry's own discourse systematically refuses to see. When The Orange Pill celebrates the developer in Lagos as a figure of democratization, Mbembe asks who controls the infrastructure that makes her creativity possible, who governs the terms of service she did not negotiate, and whose labor — in content moderation centers, in cobalt mines, in data labeling sweatshops — supports the smooth interface of her experience. The answers to these questions do not invalidate the Lagos developer's empowerment. They contextualize it within a system whose structural features have more continuity with the plantation than the celebratory discourse admits.

Mbembe's concept of the becoming-Black of the world — the extension to broader populations of the conditions of precarity and disposability once reserved for the colonized — has acquired a grim new relevance in the age of gig work, platform capitalism, and algorithmic governance. The conditions that shaped the enslaved and the colonized are becoming, in modified form, the conditions of larger and larger populations: exposed to surveillance, subject to terms they did not write, valued only for the extraction of their data or their labor, disposable when no longer useful.

What makes Mbembe particularly valuable for the AI conversation is his refusal of both the uncritical celebration and the reflexive catastrophism that dominate most commentary. His position is not that AI is bad but that AI-as-it-is-being-built reproduces specific historical patterns of extraction and concentration, and that these patterns can be interrupted — but only by voices from the margins that the industry's self-congratulation has structurally excluded. His work is generative, not merely critical: it points toward what an African AI infrastructure, governance framework, and creative practice might look like if the continent's traditions of oral creativity, improvisation, and collective intelligence were brought into the design conversation on equal footing.

Origin

Mbembe grew up in Cameroon during the late colonial and early postcolonial period, an experience he has described as formative in his attention to how colonial structures persist through and beyond formal independence. He completed his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1989 with a thesis on African political thought, and spent the 1990s and early 2000s holding positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale, and Duke before returning to Johannesburg.

His concept of necropolitics, introduced in a 2003 essay, has become one of the most cited concepts in contemporary political theory. His more recent work on digital infrastructure, animism, and the ethics of the planetary condition extends his earlier analysis into a framework capacious enough to address the AI moment.

Key Ideas

The postcolony persists. Formal decolonization did not end the colonial distribution of power. It reconfigured it, often in more diffuse and harder-to-contest forms.

Necropolitics as the grammar of power. The sovereign right to determine who lives and who dies is not an exception but the organizing logic of modern power, especially at the racial and geographic margins.

The becoming-Black of the world. The precarity once reserved for the colonized is now extending to broader populations, as gig work, platform capitalism, and algorithmic governance reproduce colonial structures in digital form.

Epistemic decolonization. The training corpus is the latest frontier of the colonial project of knowledge domination. Decolonizing AI requires decolonizing what the machine has learned to consider knowledge.

Generative not merely critical. Mbembe's work points toward alternatives — indigenous AI infrastructure, participatory governance, the assertion of African creativity on its own terms — not merely toward refusal.