Mbembe offers a careful chronological exploration that traces the unique challenges of modernity to their roots in colonialism. Rather than providing freedom and collective security from harm, the social contract is a form of enforced security against a mythologized evil, or the Other. In the modern era, what Mbembe calls the “Dark Enlightenment” (a period marked by dooming predictions about the future of the planet and social order) accelerates the fear that informs the mythology of democracy. Mbembe asserts that the contemporary age is a “time of planetary entanglement” (93), a term he uses to describe the complex webs of connections that drive 21st-century capitalism and technology. Mbembe proposes that the danger of this nihilistic approach to social criticism is that it guarantees and affirms the continued oppression of marginalized groups.

The author returns to his argument of racism as a technology and examines Martin Heidegger’s definition of the term “technology” in the Western philosophical tradition. In Heidegger’s definition for instrumentum, technology is both an action and a way of thinking. Humans gain freedom when they oppose the technologies that rule their lives.