Achille Mbembe: The Revolution will be Digitized ( week 1)

In this read, Achille points out the various comparison of
colonization in terms of structural racism, as well as, colonization of technology
in the fundamentals of human life and reasoning. While the entire read was comprehensive
in terms of the history of Africa, colonization, re-defining reason and even
planetary citizenship, what stood out the most to me was the ‘the technological
escalation that has led to the emergence of computational capitalism.’

I agreed with Achille Mbembe as he said that we are not in
an era of machinery, but algorithm. Machinery, ever since the industrial revolution,
has instrumented as a tool to better the day to day activities of human existence.
The only difference that he highlights is that while it started off serving as
a helping hand, the reasoning behind the machinery and technology has gone way beyond
a human’s ability to function within its neurological strictures. The definition
of knowledge is reduced and limited to numbers, programming, data and
surveillance.

I see this as while we do use computation as a source of
information, we also tend to get carried away by accommodating it as a way of
life. Colonization, more metaphorically, is extracting the humanness from the humanity
and feeding it with the established knowledge of computers and datasets, which
may be true, but may not accomplish the intimation and sensitivity of a human
mind to this information.