How We Survive the Machine

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a “frenemy” driven by capitalism, neoliberal extraction, and automated logics of historical classification. We must recognize these systems as repetitions of the old logics of classifications and control. By using “prismatic reason”—a method of Black thought that holds contradiction, memory, and feeling alongside logic—communities can move from being raw material for extraction to strategic shapers of the datasphere. Survival and thrival in this machine economy depend on structural participation, narrative warfare, and the reclamation of story-as-data to bend the arc of technology toward care and accountability.