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Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 164-168, 2022,

First, achieving global ecological justice will require a planned contraction of economic activity to a globally equitable level and a deprivileging of those people who currently externalize the costs of their mode of living to others – humans and non-humans – elsewhere or in the future. And that means that the more affluent, who are responsible for most environmental impacts, would need to accept ‘far-reaching lifestyle changes [that] complement technological advancements’.41 A central element of a degrowth society is therefore that the material metabolism with nature, and therefore also economic production in different societies, is aligned with a long-term, ecologically sustainable, and globally generalisable level. Degrowth, in this sense, aims to replace the imperial mode of living with a solidarity-based one, to overcome the externalization society, and to foster sustainable lifestyles that end overconsumption by the affluent (which is environmentally unsustainable) and the poverty and need of the dispossessed (which is socially unsustainable).42 Degrowth has been criticized that it focuses on consumption and renunciation and its demands are thus directed against the working class in the Global North, who need more rather than less.43 However, this critique misses what degrowth is about. Degrowth explicitly aims at improving the living conditions for everyone – including those in the Global North who struggle to get along, who have to juggle three jobs to afford rent and cannot pay for health care. Degrowth, however, claims that this can be achieved without increasing overall economic output (which would be unsustainable and globally unjust) by tackling inequalities and guaranteeing public abundance. Indeed, degrowth is about challenging the very system in which working class wellbeing depends on accumulation – and shows how this can be changed. It’s not a politics of less, but a politics of enough for all.

Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 216-219, 2022,

Interstitial strategies that test alternatives in civil society ‘from below’, and the non-reformist reforms that shift the transformation of central contours of the social system ‘from above’, seem to be, at first sight, contradictory, or perhaps unconnected, strategies. They can be related in two ways. On one hand, the wider adoption of nowtopias presupposes changes in society as a whole, and vice versa, as argued above. On the other hand, however, the implementation of radical reforms depends on the establishment of a counter-hegemony in order to enforce ruptures in certain areas of society and around key conflicts – and this counter-hegemony needs nowtopias to grow and gain strength.

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 195-198, 2020

Enlightenment conceptions of colonial subjects as barbarous, childlike, innocent, and without higher intellectual capacity came to be embedded not only in intellectual property law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the very logics of global copyright, patent, and trademark law as well. Ruth Okediji observes that, historically speaking, intellectual property law from the nineteenth century onward discriminated against the developing world, centrally building upon the idea that colonial subjects lacked the intellectual sophistication to produce knowledge. She contends:

Carlo Wood, “Racial Security: The Unobserved Threat in IR”, E-International Relations, 12 November 2020,

International Relations perpetuates racially insecure strategies through its commonly shared interpretation of anarchy (that is, a belief in no higher authority than the sovereign state) and a racially biased cycle of knowledge. The assumption that democracy can be successfully coerced onto the Global South has shown racially induced inequities over time. During the Age of Exploration, imperialism and capitalism were at their peak with Eurocentric thought defining the parameters of international discourse. Racism thereby evolved from theological to anthropological justifications in pursuit of resources, primarily in Africa (Blatt, 2018). Today, oil and mineral extraction by Western powers have left African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Angola disabled by war and dysfunctional through corruption, with little infrastructure to advance education and health, the other building blocks of democratic societies (Al Jazeera, 2017).

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 155-156, 2020

Debora Halbert writes, “The work of asserting alternatives to intellectual property is an interpretive battle. Intellectual property remains in the process of definition—there is a struggle to define the scope and meaning of the law.”1 Examining the particularities of the struggle is useful for both imagining new ways of relating to intellectual property law and mapping new strategies for activism. The question of how resistance to intellectual property’s racial scripts works is an important one—and one upon which Lawrence Liang’s concept of porous legalities sheds light.2 Liang contends that (racial) capitalism produces residual humans—including migrants, squatters, and pirates—whose labor value is rendered obsolete. In doing so, it creates space for seepages, “the action of many currents of fluid material leaching on to a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores.”3

Natalie. B Trevino, “The Cosmos is Not Finished”, Western University, 30 October 2020,

The American cosmic order is not a replication of European hegemonic cosmologies, but rather, an evolution of it as part of the project of building the American Nation-State from the Puritans “city on a hill” to Manifest Destiny. Early Puritan conceptions of the New World invoked Biblical language and centered the Puritans of this New World as the Chosen Elect who were carrying out a mission from God. This mission was nothing less than the salvation of humanity. This early self-aggrandizing vision of the American mission was secularized during the events of the American revolution, the constitution of the United States, and westward expansion towards, and engagement with, the Frontier. The Frontier marks a vast political and cultural opportunity to expand geographically as the indigenous peoples and their ways of life are not considered legitimate. American exceptionalism continues to inspire and shape the belief that America is the leader of the free world.

Kevin Blachford PhD, “Western orientalism and the threat from Russia”, Comparative Strategy 39:4, 2020,

Historical patterns of geopolitical competition between the US and Russia have often been understood through their respective competing identities and cultural explanations of contemporary Russia continue to be mired in cliches, stereotypes and caricatures.10 Stereotypes of Putin “playing chess” 11 or “facing up to the bear” 12 also continue to shape Western discourse about tensions with Russia. Understandings of Russia then become mired in attempts to explain Russian foreign policy as irrational, deceptive and non-Western. This orientalist perspective deserves to be investigated because Russian culture is widely seen as a primary cause of conflict and tension with the West. Russia is accused of following a “perpetual” and “historical pattern,” 13 in which Russia’s actions can be understood largely through its history, national identity and its expansive geography. The culture of the Russian leadership and its “way of war” 14 are viewed as a significant source of tension with the West and one of the major causes of the Georgia15 and Ukraine crises.16 These cultural explanations of the tensions between the two sides portray Russia as diverging from Western norms.17 This creates an othering of Russia as it is portrayed as the “West’s mirror image” and antithesis.18 Orientalist perspectives limit the possibilities of negotiation as the othering of Russia leads to an increasingly militarized dispute viewed in cultural terms in which competing identities are seen as radically different and incompatible.

Errol A. Henderson PhD, “Hidden in plain sight: racism in international relations theory”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 12 February 2013,

A racist conceptualization of anarchy became the centrepiece of the major paradigms of world politics: realism and liberalism/idealism, and their recent offshoot, constructivism. Today, realism is the dominant paradigm in world politics; or, specifically, neorealism, which rests on Waltz’s revision of the traditional realism of Schuman and Morgenthau. Neorealism asserts that the international system is anarchic and that states are the dominant actors. The anarchic structure of the system mandates a self-help orientation among the states because absent an authority above them, individual states must ensure their own security. In such a system, security is the basic objective of states and power is essential to achieving state aims and resisting those of others. Realists argue that states seek to maximize their power to ensure their security; but the security dilemma ensures that, ironically, each state’s pursuit of its own security leads ultimately to its greater insecurity. Balance of power practices become essential in this conflict-laden global system in which power—especially military power—is the ultimate arbiter of conflicts of interest. Liberalism (or idealism)—the paradigmatic counterpoise of realism—is similarly grounded in a preoccupation with anarchy. Idealists accept the view that the global system is anarchic and that anarchy could lead to security dilemmas, balance of power politics, and interstate war, but, unlike realists, they do not accept that these are the inevitable outcomes of international interactions. Grounded in the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of the individual, they transferred their view of domestic politics to the international realm and argued that conflict and wars were largely a result of ‘bad’ institutions, such as autocratic regimes, and that by democratizing regimes, facilitating international commerce and encouraging international institutions, international cooperation would ensue. In this view, states are not destined to predation borne of anarchy, the persistent pursuit of power, and the security dilemma, as realists maintain. Instead, the spread of democracy, liberal international trade policies, and international law should allow states to overcome the security dilemma and cooperate with each other. Foreign policy is assumed to reflect domestic policy such that states that are peaceful domestically (for example, democracies) are more likely to be peaceful abroad and those that are more violent domestically (for example, autocracies) are more likely to be violent abroad.

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, “Fear the Child: Racial and Sexual Regulation along the US–Mexico Border”, International Studies Review (2021) 23, 2021,

Meanwhile, the global rise of the figure of the terrorist is not only about material realities of the Global War on Terror nor accurate descriptions of political violence. Instead, it has functioned as an ideological determination intended to insulate settler colonies from critiques of violence while condemning anti-colonial action taken against colonizers as morally evil. Lisa Stampnitzky (2013) has carefully documented the transformation whereby terrorism has become a self-evident identity—an immoral act that can only be committed by an immoral person. The roots of this view are evident in two historic conferences on terrorism organized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the behest of the Jonathan Institute, a think tank named after his brother who died in a raid in Entebbe, Uganda. Bringing together Israeli and US political and military leaders, Netanyahu’s father described the archetypal terrorist as “a new breed of man which takes humanity back to prehistoric times, to the times when morality was not yet born. Divested of any moral principle, he ... is also a cunning, consummate liar, and therefore much more dangerous than the Nazis, who used to proclaim their aims openly. In fact, he is the perfect nihilist.” C. Heike Schotten describes this positioning of the terrorist as “premoral and precivilization, thus in effect prehuman, calling to mind the prehistoric members of [Thomas] Hobbes’ timeless state of nature” (Schotten 2018, 136). The social category of terrorist evolved to be what Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai called “both a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected ... Counterterrorism is a form of racial, civilizational knowledge, but now also an academic discipline that is quite explicitly tied to the exercise of state power” (Puar and Rai 2002, 122). Thus, the terrorist is inescapably tied to contemporary IR definitions of security, nation, and civilization. Taken together, the term terror anchor baby is a racist, sexualized dog whistle. It cannot approximate the fullness of the lives of women who risk their lives to cross militarized borders for material, familial, and political reasons. The reality of these women’s lives is much more than the pathologies that Riddle and Gohmert would believe.

Inderjeet Parmar, “The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?”, International Affairs 94, 2018,

The United States has a record of exporting economists and transplanting economic thinking and ideas to transform states, although China is a qualitatively different ‘project’ when set against the activities of the ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile and the so-called ‘Beautiful Berkeley Boys’ in Indonesia.106 The latter were both relatively weak, dependent states compared to China.107 However, the key point here is the willingness of Chinese party elites to invite American (and other foreign) ideas and methods, duly adapted. China sought transformative ideas, training and strategies, and has transformed its economy as a result; and it was dependence on the global market and the US-rules based system that enabled that transformation.108

Robert Knox PhD, “Race, Racialization, and Rivalry in the International Legal Order”, Chapter 10 in Race and Racism in International Relations, Routledge, Pages 186-189, 2015

While arguing that this basic logic is what gives rise to the general phenomenon of racism, Fanon was also keen to understand the way in which specific material configurations gave rise to distinctive forms of racism. For Fanon, if racism was part of a broader system of imperialist exploitation, then changes in this system would also result in changing forms of racism (1967, 32). In his account, with the development of more complex forms of capitalist exploitation, racism moved from a crude, biological determinism, to a more subtle form of cultural racism, since the exploitation of which racism is an articulation becomes increasingly covert:

Polly Pallister-Wilkins, “Saving the souls of white folk: Humanitarianism as white supremacy”, Security Dialogue, 26 October 2021,

There is a growing body of work charting how humanitarian sentiments and knowledge produced about humanitarian-ameliorative interventions became part of everyday colonial government (see Lester and Dussart, 2014). Travelling between colonial spaces – from plantation economies to white settler colonies – protecting the enslaved, newly emancipated and Indigenous communities from various forms of colonial violence, these sentiments manifested in different forms across British colonial space, while ensuring the continuation of British superiority. Ameliorative practices appeased metropolitan abolitionists while guaranteeing the continued profitability of slave economies through ameliorating the worst excesses of violence. Ameliorative polices were overseen by a ‘Protector’, usually a member of the slave-owning class, and were also intended to prepare enslaved people for a freedom yet to come by encouraging civilization through Christianization. As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart (2014: 56) suggest, ‘through their instructive relationship with slave owners, the British government hoped, they would redeem cruel and aberrant British colonial societies at the same time that they reformed the benighted subjectivities of enslaved people’. Meanwhile others, such as Seymour Drescher (2004), are even more explicit that amelioration was not about liberation for enslaved people, but following the Haitian Revolution, about more-effective ordering and regulation within an environment of revolutionary upheaval threatening white supremacy.

Meghana V. Nayak PhD, Christopher Malone, “American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of Us Hegemony”, International Studies Review Vol. 11 No. 2, June 2009,

We claim that American Orientalism is a style of thought that gets grounding through American Exceptionalism, a particular and specific form of Orientalism intended to produce "America." Exceptionalism, as America's foundational nar- rative, holds that the United States has a unique place in history, differing fundamentally and qualitatively from all other countries; it also emphasizes a "God-given destiny" to guide the rest of the world according to the mainstream US political, social, and economic worldview (Lipset 1996). Orientalism and Exceptionalism share in common the discursive deployment of ontological differ- ence and epistemological claims underlying the American providential mission to provide order to the world, the justifications for conquering and occupying territories, and the racial hierarchy that prioritizes Anglo-Saxons. However, we argue that American Exceptionalism differs from American Orientalism because it is rooted in American political thought about the development and articula- tion of the American nation in contradistinction to Europe. Accordingly, while criti- cal IR analysis of Orientalism can help to critique and understand the positional superiority of Western countries in relation to the Othering of the non-West, both inside and outside of Western borders, it needs to interrogate American Exceptionalism so as to better explain and interpret American "othering" of Europe and the concomitant historical and contemporary clashes within the so- called Western world.5

Fabio Santino Bussmann, Lorena Granja Hernández PhD, “Undemocratic by color: The hidden racial logic and hierarchical structure of US military interventions to promote democracy in Latin America”, CARTA International, 29 March 2022,

Undemocratic by color

Maryam Khalid, “Gendered logic(s) of orientalism: representation, discourse, and intervention in the ‘War on Terror’”, UNSW Sydney, Pages 103-106, 2013

As Neil Smith explains, there is a discernible duality underlying the liberal roots of US political make-up. That is, expressions of imperialism in US foreign policy can be understood as based on the notion that it is the US that best embodies ‘liberal democracy’ (‘American Exceptionalism’), yet this system is ‘universalised’13 (and that given the freedom to choose, any rational person would choose the US liberal model).14 There have of course been ‘contradictory attitudes’ to the US’ ‘proper’ role in international affairs, generally in terms of a dichotomy between isolationism and expansion.15 This points to two expressions of a (liberal) commitment to ‘American’ liberal democracy and economic institutions. For example, although US neoconservatives during the 1990s were not ‘liberal internationalists’, their conception of how to achieve their goals (of ‘containing’ Iraq for example) were predicated on the assumption that the US model of liberal democracy was the only legitimate one (thus pushing for the removal of Hussein through the 1990s and the installation of this specific model of democracy in Iraq).16 And, John Dumbrell argues, neoconservatives (some of who were part of the George W. Bush administration) might be ‘conservative’ in terms of domestic issues, but adhere to a liberal understanding of the centrality of free trade and democracy (for example the democratic peace theory) in their formulations of the US’ role and interests in the international arena.17 While there have been substantial differences in foreign policy choices and methods of implementation at moments in US history, it can be argued that at very basic level, the privileging of US liberal democracy is intrinsically tied to the centrality of in US nationalism and domestic as well as international political identity.18

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Pages 165-167, 2 August 2021,

It should come as no surprise, then, that the modern self-understanding of the West over the past two centuries relies on a conceptualization of a menacing East and that during moments of acute geopolitical crises the “othering” of the East becomes ever more politically salient. In particular, the yellow peril as world-making practice is something that is profoundly embedded in the idea of the West itself, continuously molded to activate forms of self-awareness and autoimmunity. 77 This becomes even more crucial at the beginning of the Cold War and influences a wide range of important thinkers in a wide range of disciplines. Martin Heidegger infamously referred to Russia (alongside America) as the metaphysical other to German-rooted (i.e., European) Being.78 Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1953 but originally from a 1935 lecture, properly reflects a time of existential and political peril during the Cold War. But more evidently, as Emmanuel Faye shows, the very notion of the “Asiatic” for Heidegger in the 1930s is crucial in determining the enemy in the Schmittian sense. For example, in a lecture in Rome in 1936, Heidegger speaks of the “preservation of the European peoples against the Asiatic.”79 Such sentiments, which for Faye pervade Heidegger’s seminars of the 1930s, blend into a general nexus between the Asiatic as the radical other and the explosion of anti-Semitism (see Chapter Five).

[Evgeny, former visiting scholar @ Stanford, PhD History of Science @ Harvard; and Olivier, Media Film and Communication @ U-Otago (Australia), PhD studying Right-Wing Populism @ U-Otago: “Olivier Jutel on Blockchain Imperialism,” published 12-29-21. https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/blockchain-imperialism/]//AD

Their hypocrisy aside, I was quite impressed with the invisible but highly efficient machinery of the US government: there were always funds, grants, tenders, conferences, workshops, pilot projects. The "Internet Freedom" agenda was not just a rhetorical project; it was a massive bureaucratic undertaking. There were, of course, some charlatan types involved; I've written, quite extensively, about both Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, who led some of these efforts.

Brett Scott, “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?,” working paper at United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, pgs. 8-9

There is also a more political critique though. Those that position Bitcoin is a life-raft currency implicitly seem to suggest that it is desirable to “escape to the internet” rather than seek more fundamental solutions to a country’s underlying problems on the ground. Advocating that a vulnerable country adopt Bitcoin is at best likely to be a short-term solution, and at worst just distracts countries from strengthening already fragile institutions. It is one thing to use Bitcoin to provide a counter-power to the powerful cartels of banks in nations like the United States, but in a country like Zimbabwe the real need may be to strengthen the integrity of the banking system, something that can only be achieved by hard, long-term political battles.

What is important for the purposes of this article is that Wiener was able to demonstrate that very simple feedback mechanisms could produce complex emergent results or what ‘appeared’ like intelligence even if the machines were not conscious of that intelligence. What I explore throughout the rest of the section is how even small advances in machine intelligence could produce dramatic changes in what we think of now as human dependent drones. Already AI platforms have the capacity to strategize and win complex games like Go, AI via drones have the capability to target or execute operations on their own, robots can 3D print and construct other robots, that is, a simple form of reproduction. The only thing missing is what in philosophical terms we call will or desire. However, the insight from Wiener is that the difference between rudimentary will and a command code is insignificant in effect if a feedback exists between the machine and the external environment which can shape or direct the now desiring machine. To put it somewhat simply, we do not need human general intelligence for robots to change the world and geopolitics; the world could change overnight if mechanical life emerged or was released into the wild and was as sophisticated, resilient and procreative as the cockroach. We are already experiencing the burgeoning capability of cunning machine. If one considers to the underlying political and economic pressure to move away from human combatants not unlike the globalization of the labor market more broadly, the incentives for innovations continuing are difficult to deny.47 Even before 9/11 combat was becoming too costly in both economic and political terms and therefore required an alternative in order for empires and smaller states to stay afloat in lean times. The globally modeled War on Terrorism brought the crises of military expenditure still lingering after the Cold War to a head. However, the drive to cut costs and political liability has not stopped at the battlefield. Attempts to remove humans further and further from the battlefield follows this inhuman trajectory into the arena of decision-making and contestation.48 The reliance on algorithmic warfare creates the opportunity for increasingly unilateral warmaking. Cunning machines, not machines of reason but machines capable of hunting and trapping, represent the possibility of the command and control developed for nuclear arsenals with the micro-scale to pursue and kill of assassins or special forces.49 This process of automating politics as well as war creates further incentive for the development of increasingly autonomous machines and actually undermines security as it makes the capacity to wage war cheaper and more accessible around the planet. The drive for more autonomous machines is heading toward ‘sustainable warfare’, a kind of weird parallel to sustainable development. Like sustainable development, sustainable warfare really makes warfare endemic rather than providing a real alternative to war making. So war as we know it may be coming to an end but a permeating martial transformation is just getting started. As the transformation in domestic policing, military planning, and combat takes place, the tactical landscape will also mutate, amplifying the corrosive effects on politics. A security complex indifferent to the differences between the war and policing, battlefield and lifeworld will increasingly target Internet exchanges, servers, monitoring, and listening stations, civilian communication and media infrastructure. As populations cease to matter to states, either those attacking or being attacked, infrastructure becomes the whole of the strategic landscape. Also, as the size of autonomous machines shrink, the incentive for hacking or indiscriminate attacks such as electromagnetic pulse attacks will become more desirable as drone to drone or human to drone combat will be prohibitively difficult. After all, how reliably can one expect to track a drone the size of a dragonfly or as low to the ground as a snake? Thus, we face the possibility of a confluence of unaccountable decision-making, even the absence of human decisions at all with the saturation of living spaces with the dissonance of combat, killing and destruction. Rather than simply automating the ‘hunt’ for enemies chosen by political processes, already reliance on things like signature strikes signal a shift to the automation of the political decision of who is and is not an enemy in the first place. This shift from what Human Rights Watch has termed ‘human on the loop’ practices to ‘human out of the loop’ practices pushes the posthuman character of war further into the nightmare zone in which everything is an object to be targeted but never encountered or recognized. An algorithmic cunning replaces enmity and martial judgment in the recognizable terms. Furthermore, in a future with a receding human public and that states are indifferent to moral catastrophe, these changes in machine capability and autonomy as well as the deployment of such machines would not be political events. Switches would be flipped by military planners or software developers along technical rather than ethical or political lines. Lewis Mumford referred to this as the advent of ‘post-historic’ humanity in which a process that ‘began innocently by eliminating fallible human impulses from science will end by eliminating human nature from the whole world of reality. In posthistoric culture life itself is reduced to predictable, mechanically conditioned and controlled motion, with ever incalculable – that is, every creative – element removed’.51 I would add that what emerges in its place is a mechanic creativity allowed to thrive within the constraints of a limited martial logic. If we continue on this trajectory practicality could replace both strategic and moral thinking.52 Further, the fora in which such decisions will be made (if at all) are likely to be constricted as secrecy predominates in an environment charged by a dangerous mix of paranoia and real danger.

Rachel Adams, “Can Artificial Intelligence Be Decolonized?” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46, no. 1-2, p. 176-178

Yet none of these texts, which constitute some of the leading work in the field, take into account the complex genealogy of intelligence: whose conception of intelligence is modelled within technology or how the idea has been put to work in dividing people between the desired and the undesirable. Nor the history of the human body as machine and commodity borne from slavery and colonialism, such that Achille Mbembe names blackness as the prototype for the assemblage of the human–object of modernity (2017, 2019). Nor the ways in which the knowledges upon which AI is built – statistical enumeration of people and land – were advanced by imperial powers to control and contain colonial populations (Appadurai 1993; Breckenridge 2014; Kalpagam 2000, 2014; Said 1978), and led to the development of cybernetics and eugenics, as well as the idea that, through feedback mechanisms, both human and machine can be corrected and improved. Indeed, for Mbembe we are encountering a third shift in the arrangement of race and blackness in global society: the first being slavery and colonization; the second being the development of writing and text, culminating in the formal processes of decolonization; and the third being the advent, proliferation, and ubiquity of digital technologies which represent the latest phase of high-modernity (2017). Similarly, for Aníbal Quijano, we are reaching a watershed moment in the global coloniality of power, with ‘the manipulation and control of technological resources of communication and of transportation in order to impose the technocratization/instrumentalization of Coloniality/modernity’ (2017, 364), together with ‘the mercantilization of subjectivity and life experiences of individuals’ (2017, 365). AI, too, is in the midst of reconciling three forms of discontent, 1 whose relation to the forms of coloniality and the historical construction of race at work in the world today has yet to be fully understood. First, manifest racial and gender bias within AI technologies (Benjamin 2019; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Keyes 2018; Noble 2018). In June 2020, E. Tendayi Achiume, United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, issued a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council that found ‘emerging digital technologies exacerbate and compound existing inequalities, many of which exist along racial, ethnic and national origin grounds’ (paragraph 4). The second discontent, echoing Quijano’s description of the mercantilization of life, regards the way AI and digital technologies are globally commoditizing human experience (Zuboff 2018). Within this data paradigm, the human is substituted as an assemblage of their data points which are, in turn, taken as a sign of the real (Baudrillard 1994). The third discontent is geopolitical, pertaining to the emergence of an arms race characterized by the ambitions of transatlantic nation states to be ‘global leaders’ (Vladimir Putin, cited in Vincent 2017) in AI innovation (Garvey 2019). 2 This, together with the second discontent, is central to the ideas of ‘data colonialism’ and ‘digital colonialism’ naming, within current AI discourse, the brazen flurry to extract and exploit personal data and data systems (Birhane 2019; Couldry and Mejias 2019; Crawford et al. 2019; Ricaurte 2019; Mhlambi 2020). It relates as well to Ian Hogarth’s critique of ‘AI nationalism’ where new dependencies are being tacitly enforced between low-tech and advanced-tech states and are set to follow the historical divide of Global North/South (2018). Perhaps more critically, the drive to dominate in the production and use of AI is revealing of the project’s hegemonic impulses, and the neo-Darwinian linearity of the evolution of science which will ‘leave behind’ those who do not conform to catching up. In light of these concerns, Mbembe’s provocation to critique the apparatuses of race and blackness in digital technologies, and Quijano’s warning against the hegemony of technocratization which encompasses, at once, the consolidation of modes of commodification of the human-object, becomes ever more urgent.