CONCEPT
The Becoming-Black of the World
Mbembe's thesis that conditions once reserved for the colonized — precarity, disposability, surveillance, the extraction of value from a body treated as disposable — are extending to broader populations through the mechanisms of platform capitalism and AI.
In Critique of Black Reason (2013), Mbembe proposed that the defining feature of our era is not the liberation of populations from colonial conditions but the extension of those conditions to populations that had previously been exempt from them. The gig worker, the platform user, the data subject, the citizen whose cognitive environment is shaped by engagement-optimized algorithms — all increasingly occupy a position that shares structural features with the colonial position: their labor is extracted, their data is harvested, their lives are governed by terms they did not write, and they are disposable when no longer useful. This is what Mbembe means by the becoming-Black of the world. Not that everyone becomes racially Black, but that the structural condition once reserved for the colonized is becoming the general condition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The thesis is deliberately provocative. Mbembe is not claiming that a tech worker in