Recursive Apocalypse

This article posits that the recursive algorithm of apocalypse, including fascism, can be understood as part of the continuous logic of recursive colonialism. Recursive colonialism explains the relationship between Western European colonialism, the bio-economic model of extraction and computational technology at the core of racial capitalism and its current intensification through the massive planetary deployment of artificial intelligence systems. The concept of recursive colonialism suggests that planetary computation is a reconfiguring pattern of the global colonial projects of expropriation-appropriation in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from thinkers of the Black radical tradition, this article posits that the recursivity of knowledge structures must be understood on a global political scale in relation to how these structures reproduce and subtend regimes of colonial and racial capitalism. Finally, this article proffers directions for technologies of political resistance through cosmocomputation.