The Becoming-Black of the World

In the AI Story

The thesis is deliberately provocative. Mbembe is not claiming that a tech worker in Brooklyn experiences the same conditions as an enslaved laborer on an eighteenth-century plantation. He is claiming that certain structural features — the organization of life around the extraction of value from an exposed body, the contractual asymmetry between the worker and the platform, the absence of recourse when the platform's algorithm makes a consequential decision — are structural features that the colonial experience pioneered and that are now generalizing.

The AI transition accelerates this dynamic. Terms of service that no user reads govern access to the tools. Training data is scraped from the work of millions of creators who consented to nothing. Surveillance capitalism's behavioral surplus is extracted from every interaction. The gig worker's algorithm-mediated employment — with its opacity, its unilateral rule changes, its radical precarity — is not a peculiarity of Uber and DoorDash. It is a model that AI-assisted platforms are extending into white-collar knowledge work.

What makes the thesis important for reading AI is that it resists the narrative in which the AI revolution is a universal liberation. It was never possible to universally liberate a population whose liberation depends on the continued subjection of another population. The celebratory story — in which the developer in Lagos gains the same creative leverage as the engineer in San Francisco — is a story that can only be told by ignoring the content moderator whose labor makes the Lagos developer's model safe enough to deploy, and the data subject whose interactions trained it, and the miner whose cobalt powers the data center that serves it.

The thesis also has a generative dimension that is sometimes missed. If the Black condition is generalizing, then the intellectual and political traditions that emerged from the Black experience — the traditions of fugitivity, refusal, collective improvisation, the building of parallel institutions — become resources for a general politics, not the parochial concerns of a single population. Mbembe's work is a sustained argument that the future of humanity may depend on learning from those whose ancestors first had to figure out how to live inside the death-world.

Origin

The concept was developed in Critique of Black Reason (Éditions la Découverte, 2013; Duke University Press, 2017) and elaborated in subsequent essays. It extends earlier concepts in the Black radical tradition — Cedric Robinson's racial capitalism, Saidiya Hartman's afterlife of slavery — while also drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's language of becoming.

Key Ideas

Structural, not demographic. The becoming-Black names a structural condition, not a demographic change.

Precarity is generalizing. The conditions of disposability and extraction once reserved for the colonized are becoming more widely distributed, particularly under platform capitalism.

Resources from the margins. The intellectual traditions of the formerly colonized are resources for a general politics, not parochial concerns.

AI accelerates the dynamic. The training corpus, the terms of service, the behavioral surplus — each extends the colonial logic into new domains.

Refusal of false universalism. The thesis resists narratives in which technological change is a universal good, insisting on the question of who pays the cost.