CfA: Decrypting Artificial Intelligence: Genealogies, Geopolitics, Metaphysics

by Admin | 8 Mar 2026

Book Series: Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global, published by Bloomsbury (London).

Introduction and Premises

“Nature loves to hide,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. Strangely enough, the same is true of Artificial Intelligence, except that it hides in plain sight, in obscene ideological discourse that makes no secret of its violence. It is precisely for this reason that AI, this synthetic intelligence that is spreading and permeating all aspects of individual and collective life, must be analysed with new tools. If AI tends to occupy all our attention and work time, our private and public time, our time for thinking, caring for ourselves, and shopping, how can we deoccupy our “existential territories”, to borrow Félix Guattari’s expression? In other words, this collective work seeks to develop a new politics of liberation that does not become technophobic: there is no human world without technics and technology, without semiotic mediation, which does not mean that a given technology such as AI constitutes a destiny. If technics is co-constitutive of the human, this does not amount to accepting any and every technology, such as neoliberal AI. Decrypting AI therefore means first analyzing it in terms of its technological singularity, in terms of what it actually produces in psychological, political, geopolitical, and existential terms: no politics of liberation will be possible without forging new concepts and new political-strategic analyses commensurate with the changes underway.

But this immanent analysis of AI would be meaningless without a solid perspective that gives the concept of desoccupation its decolonial, or rather non-colonial, dimension. Occupation finds its primary form in the coloniality of knowledge, power, affects, and subjectivity, which reveals the hidden material dimension at play in the production of synthetic intelligence: there would be no AI without land grabs in the Global South, without private police forces serving financial interests, without armed intervention as recently seen in Venezuela, without associated ecological disasters, and without the squandering of water resources. What the current violence of AI promoters clearly shows is that all territories and energy sources are now being colonized to feed the new Moloch: opening data centers, forcing electric companies to promote the growth of new communication technologies, etc. This confirms what Achille Mbembe calls the “becoming-black” of the world. Far from being limited to a Western phenomenon, this becoming is being implemented by all countries, the North American and Chinese empires, as well as the colonial forces in ruins (such as France), which are reconfiguring their lands in order to accelerate the establishment of artificial societies. Artificial society signals the end of biopolitics: it is no longer a question of caring for populations, but of containing and replacing them. Drawing on the teachings of anti-colonial, decolonial, and counter-colonial studies, non-colonialism is the perspective that extends to all societies the critical analysis of coloniality associated with the development of AI.

The volume we want to compile cannot therefore be satisfied with vague and misleading concepts such as the “Noocene” (technological fetishism divorced from geopolitical and ecological realities), nor with superficial reflections on the ethics of AI that seek to sideline the political issues we want to explore. The idea of decolonization has indeed been mobilized in the discourse on AI ethics to reflect on how ethical principles could guide the development and application of these technologies. It is in the field of ethics that discussions on AI governance, as well as calls for its decolonization, have found a privileged place. But it is difficult to see how radical decolonial thinking could fit into normative ethics. This volume does not seek to reduce ambition to some technical adjustment of machine learning systems or the mitigation of algorithmic biases. Decrypting the multiple regimes of contemporary AI neocolonialism requires grasping AI as an apparatus of encrypted power, a dispositif whose political efficacy depends precisely on rendering its operations opaque, its infrastructures naturalized, and its decisions formally undecidable. In this sense, AI does not merely govern through calculation, but through encryption, producing forms of subjectivation and desubjectivation that displace responsibility while intensifying control.

Such encryption reorganizes sovereignty by enabling new modalities of land grabbing in the Global South – most notably through the territorial capture implied by mega data centers installed in so-called “empty” or “available” spaces – and by instituting zones of technical exception that escape democratic scrutiny in United States, France and in all countries that develop artificial societies. Only a genealogical and archaeological analysis can expose the historical conditions through which this encrypted regime of power emerges, while simultaneously allowing us to delineate the shifting frontiers of human–machine servitude under cognitive capitalism. This, in turn, demands a renewed critique of technics and technology, as well as a rigorous interrogation of the ontology and metaphysics of AI at stake: what it means for machines to “think,” how finitude, world, and meaning are reconfigured, and how power today operates by making itself structurally illegible.

We invite you to submit abstracts addressing these and many other questions concerning AI, non-colonial thought, and the theory of encryption of power which will be published in a collective volume.

Topics of the Project:

We invite abstract submissions for chapters that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes as they relate to Artificial Intelligence and the Theory of Encryption of Power (TEP):

– Encryption of power and algorithmic opacity as conditions of governability

– Artificial intelligence as a dispositif of technical exception

– Colonial genealogies of computation and cybernetics

– Material archaeology of AI: data, energy, territory, and infrastructure

– Data centers and new forms of land grabbing in the Global South

– Algorithmic sovereignty and the displacement of political decision-making

– Subjectivation and desubjectivation under algorithmic regimes

– Cognitive labor, attention extraction, and human-machine servitude

– Governance by numbers, models, and prediction

– Ontology of AI: calculation, thinking, and the simulation of meaning

– Metaphysics of AI: finitude, world, and sense

– Cosmotechnics and the possibilities for technodiversity

– Resistance, profanation, and the deactivation of algorithmic apparatuses

– Possibilities of forms-of-life not capturable by AI

– disoccupy AI

If you have a strong proposal that addresses these themes and aligns with the core principles of the series, we look forward to receiving your abstract. Send it to all editor’s emails.

Introductory writings to the theory of encryption of power (follow hyperlinks):

Decrypting Justice: From Epistemic Violence to Immanent Democracy (Bloomsbury 2025)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/decrypting-justice-9781666961164

Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/decolonizing-democracy-9781783487059

Decrypting Political Theology: Genealogy, Tendencies, Antagonisms

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/decrypting-political-theology-9781666978650

Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power (CLT 2025)

The Theory of Encryption of Power: Itinerary of an idea

https://periodicos.pucminas.br/Direito/article/download/23688/16902/86840

Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power

Notice Abstract Requirements:

Abstracts should be a maximum of 800 words and include the author’s affiliation, email, a brief biography (150 words), and clearly state which thematic topic the contribution addresses, or if the author(s) is interested in proposing a new thematic axis. The abstracts will be evaluated by the book editors who will decide whether to commission a complete article. Once accepted, the chapter manuscript will be submitted to blind peer review. The book as a whole will also be submitted for approval by the publisher and blind peer review.