Cyber-Enframing and the Generalization of the « Negro condition »

The presentation was given by Christophe Premat at the North American Sartre Society (NASS) 2026 Conference on October 23, 2026, during the session Authenticity and Freedom in the Algorithmic Age.The presentation explores how artificial intelligence and digital infrastructures reshape the conditions of existential freedom through the concept of cyber-enframing, understood as the computational capture and pre-structuring of human possibilities.Drawing on Achille Mbembe's analysis of the “Negro condition” and Éric Sadin's critique of digital governance, the paper examines how data extraction, algorithmic classification, predictive systems, and resource-intensive infrastructures extend historical mechanisms of objectification and dispossession into contemporary digital capitalism. These processes produce new forms of inequality, territorial exploitation, and computational control.In dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre's existential philosophy, the presentation argues that algorithmic systems do not abolish human freedom but transform the conditions under which it can be exercised. As human actions and trajectories become increasingly anticipated and probabilized, freedom must be reconsidered in relation to statistically preformatted possibilities and unevenly distributed constraints.Particular attention is given to Sartre's concepts of situation and the coefficient of adversity, as well as his literary work Les jeux sont faits. The analysis suggests that the multiplication of predicted or simulated futures does not necessarily expand genuine existential possibilities.Ultimately, the presentation proposes a renewed understanding of situated freedom in a probabilized world, emphasizing the tensions between computational anticipation, material exploitation, historical dispossession, and irreducible human contingency.