CONCEPT
Necropolitics
Mbembe's 2003 concept of the sovereign power to determine who lives and who dies — extended in the AI age to the power to determine which knowledge lives in the training corpus and which is erased.
Necropolitics, developed by Achille Mbembe in his 2003 essay and 2019 book, names the sovereign power to expose certain populations to death — whether through direct violence, structural abandonment, or the slow erosion of conditions for life. Extending Foucault's biopolitics, necropolitics locates power not just in the management of life but in the creation of death-worlds: spaces where some populations are kept alive as disposable labor while others are rendered superfluous. Applied to the AI revolution, the concept illuminates the politics of the training corpus — which voices, languages, and knowledge systems are amplified into the machine's understanding of the world, and which are excluded, marginalized, or overwritten. The training data is not neutral; it is a political document.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mbembe developed necropolitics against the backdrop of the postcolony, where the formal end of colonial rule did not end the colonial distribution of life chances. The death-world is not always literal death. It