On Saturday 17 October, more than half a million people demonstrated across France in a movement that began in secondary schools in working-class neighbourhoods in northern Paris. In New Delhi, a youth-led movement continues to protest against a revision of electoral registers that has removed some 130 million names — a figure whose interpretation remains disputed — and on Monday 19 October a court extended the detention of two of its leaders. That same Monday, in Madrid, nine trade union and tenants’ organisations formally registered a call for a general strike on 11 November over housing and wages.
These conflicts have distinct histories, and none is about artificial intelligence. We consider them together because each contests a different element of what a political community guarantees its members: public services, participation, or access to housing and wages. This question runs through the book we are reading this week, El contrato socIAl, in which Jean MARTIAL considers what institutions might be needed if automated systems produced an increasing share of wealth. The author reviewed an earlier version of our reading of his essay and confirmed that it faithfully represented his positions. The interpretation of the protests and their relationship to the book is the sole responsibility of AIthropology Lab.
Jean MARTIAL and a framework of rights beyond wages
Artificial intelligence has once again placed work at the centre of a debate that reaches far beyond it. If automated systems came to produce a growing proportion of goods and services, how would incomes be distributed, who would hold rights over that capital, and what institutions would guarantee a dignified life? In El contrato socIAl. ¿De quién será el mundo si la IA hace el trabajo? (The SocIAl Contract: Who Will Own the World If AI Does the Work?), self-published in Spanish on 8 October 2026 [1], Jean MARTIAL develops a response grounded in political philosophy and economics. His proposal does not assume that employment will disappear. It explores the consequences of a hypothesis and asks which reforms would remain defensible even if that transformation never fully materialised.
MARTIAL is the co-founder and chief executive of Slash Digital Lab, a digital development and artificial intelligence company founded in Bogotá in 2022, and works between Colombia and France [2]. His approach begins with professional experience in technology but extends to questions that run through collective life. Dignity, inheritance, property, justice and the ability to make decisions about infrastructures on which we depend cannot be reduced to technical parameters.
The book proposes a contract organised into eighteen articles. Its first component is a universal foundation guaranteed without tests of productivity or deservingness. It is defined in terms of capabilities — being able to live in decent housing, eat, receive healthcare and learn — with its core provided in kind. This is accompanied by a universal productive dividend financed by returns on common capital, as well as an individual citizen’s capital allocation made from birth.
The distinction between these instruments matters. A benefit may depend on a political decision that can be revised. MARTIAL’s dividend is intended to recognise a right of co-ownership over part of the wealth generated by automated systems, with its amount determined by a published formula that ordinary legislation could not suspend. The proposal retains markets and private property while questioning whether the circumstances of birth should determine a person’s material opportunities indefinitely. His mechanism of patrimonial half-life seeks to limit the persistence of inherited advantages across generations, without treating every inheritance as an illegitimate privilege.
Another element of the contract protects freedom against forms of paternalistic control that may accompany automation. The author defends the right to refuse the optimisation of one’s own life and distinguishes between applying a rule and making it. Under his scheme, different AI systems could perform narrowly defined tasks in applying the law, always subject to democratically established rules, oversight and avenues for challenge. The practical implementation of this proposal is open to debate, and it places political legitimacy above technical capability.
Collective knowledge, property and anthropology
For AIthropology Lab, one of the essay’s most stimulating contributions is the concept of civilisational capital. Technological innovation rests on languages, institutions, research, practices and knowledge accumulated over generations. No company or individual independently creates all the conditions necessary to develop an AI model. The book illustrates this with AlphaFold, which learned from the Protein Data Bank, an open archive built over half a century largely through publicly funded research. Contemporary production draws substantially on cultural and scientific resources created collectively.
This insight connects with an anthropological tradition concerned with the interdependence of societies and the historical circulation of knowledge. In Race and History, a text prepared for UNESCO in 1952, Claude Lévi-Strauss linked the cumulative character of civilisations to exchanges between cultures [3]. MARTIAL acknowledges that his book does not cite Lévi-Strauss and that its disciplinary grounding lies more in political philosophy and law than in anthropology. Nevertheless, he considers that Race and History helps address the weakest point in the concept of civilisational capital. From this reading, he develops an idea that goes beyond the book: a right to remain different, through which languages, knowledge and data could enter a common pool without the communities that produce them losing control.
This is a clear point of convergence with AIthropology Lab’s editorial project. AI changes the distribution of resources, but also the conditions of authorship, relationships of dependence, recognition of labour and forms of participation. Analysing it as a social phenomenon requires asking who supplies the data, who sustains the infrastructures, who retains decision-making power and how the benefits are shared. MARTIAL’s contract provides an institutional vocabulary for that discussion.
The material dimension makes the argument particularly timely. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres consumed around 415 TWh in 2024, approximately 1.5% of global electricity, and in its central scenario demand could reach roughly 945 TWh by 2030, just under 3% [4]. The book incorporates ecological limits into its vision of abundance and distinguishes goods that can be multiplied from resources and places that remain scarce. Water in a drought-stricken catchment is one example. MARTIAL recalls that, during a drought in 2023, Uruguay secured changes to Google’s data-centre project near Montevideo, reducing its scale and switching to air cooling; in 2024, a Chilean court required the same company to review its Santiago project because of the effects on an aquifer. This distinction prevents us from confusing automation with an absence of environmental costs.
Three questions that could broaden the contract
The first concerns scale. Civilisational capital invokes a shared history that crosses borders, while much of the essay’s proposed distribution takes place within individual states. In a written interview conducted by Martín González Senosiain for AIthropology Lab, MARTIAL acknowledges that he has not yet developed a global institution capable of correcting this asymmetry, and suggests agreements between countries that would channel a share of AI rents into a fund. The Global South also offers experiences of its own. MARTIAL cites the Brazilian municipality of Maricá, which distributes an income in mumbucas, its social currency, funded by oil royalties. Following a review of the register, the municipality reported in May 2026 that the programme supported more than 70,000 residents [5]. This opens up discussion of transnational rights and forms of governance that would include societies contributing to the digital economy without concentrating ownership of its infrastructures.
The second concerns care work. The book warns that, if paid care becomes more expensive, some of it could move back into households and fall on the same women who already perform it. MARTIAL’s response incorporates care into the universal foundation, provided in kind, so that its cost becomes a collective expense. The dividend is also paid to individuals rather than households, reducing the economic dependence created by unpaid care. In the interview, MARTIAL acknowledges that the contract creates conditions for independence without, in itself, changing the social norms that allocate care work, and proposes public indicators to warn if care is shifting back into the home. In 2018, the International Labour Organization estimated that women performed 76.2% of all unpaid care hours worldwide [6]. This inequality calls for the structural inclusion of feminist economics, which has placed the sustainability of life at the centre of economic analysis. The Argentinian economist Corina Rodríguez Enríquez has examined how the social organisation of care reproduces inequality [7], while Amaia Pérez Orozco has described the structural conflict between capital accumulation and sustaining life [8].
The third invites closer attention to cultural diversity. Communal property regimes, legal pluralism and situated understandings of wellbeing offer experiences that do not always fit a model centred on state citizenship. MARTIAL draws on Elinor Ostrom’s insight that each resource should be governed according to its particular characteristics, and from this derives a structure of several independently governed funds. In the interview, he acknowledges that the intermediate scale of communities, territories and user groups barely features in the book, nor does the legal pluralism of Indigenous peoples within a single state. Incorporating these experiences could enrich the design of shared institutions without turning one particular historical trajectory into a universal template.
A book written with the tools it examines
The essay also includes an important methodological disclosure. In the note ‘How this book was made’, MARTIAL explains that the thesis, the contract’s proposals, the plan and the initial references are his, while AI models drafted the book’s sentences on the basis of those decisions. An earlier text generated with GPT-5 Pro contributed the four ways of replacing wages discussed in Chapter 12, and the writing was carried out using Claude Code and models from the Claude family. The Spanish edition was also translated from the French original with AI assistance. The author notes that the models were trained on texts dominated by English and Western sources, and accepts responsibility for the published result. This transparency adds another layer to the debate about the social contract. Authorship, intellectual labour and shared knowledge are also changing through the very process of writing about artificial intelligence.
Paris, New Delhi and Madrid: the contract on the streets
MARTIAL’s book considers institutions for a society in which wages might lose their central role in distribution. The protests of recent weeks show that the link between employment, income and material security is already under considerable strain, even without automation having displaced work on a massive scale. None of these protests confirms the book’s hypothesis. Each reveals a particular provision of the social contract that is already being contested.
In France, the movement began last month in secondary schools in working-class neighbourhoods in northern Paris, with protests over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating buildings, before spreading to other major cities [9]. On 17 October, university students, trade unions and former Yellow Vest protesters joined in. The Interior Ministry counted around 550,000 people across 110 marches, including 110,000 in Paris, while organisers put the figure at 800,000 [10]. The day ended with clashes and hundreds of arrests in several cities [11]. Demands range from schools to wages and public-service funding, against the backdrop of debate over a 2027 budget containing €54 billion in cuts and fiscal measures and a freeze on civil service pay scales [9]. Further demonstrations are scheduled for 24 October, followed by a day of strikes and protests on 5 November [10]. On 22 October, Emmanuel Macron blamed far-left groups for the unrest and announced that demonstrations he deemed illegitimate would be banned in the coming days, while events organised by trade unions and other groups would have to follow alternative routes outside city centres [12] [13]. The provision under dispute is protection — which services the political community guarantees — now joined by controversy over the conditions for exercising the right to demonstrate.
In India, the Cockroach Janta Party is a youth-led movement that emerged this year from discontent over unemployment and exam-paper leaks. According to Reuters, it took its name from remarks by the Chief Justice of India, who called unemployed young people and online activists ‘cockroaches’ [14]. It is now protesting against a revision of electoral registers that has removed around 130 million names, a figure whose interpretation is disputed. The Election Commission says the removed entries include 28 million deceased people, 63 million people who had moved and 30 million who could not be located. It denies favouring any party and points out that anyone excluded by mistake can re-register. Critics maintain that the revision benefits Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party [15]. The movement is calling for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign [14]. Two of its leaders, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, were detained as they entered Jantar Mantar, a protest site in the capital, a day after it was removed from the list of authorised locations; on 19 October, a court extended their detention [15]. The provision at issue here is participation. Partha Chatterjee, emeritus professor of anthropology at Columbia University and honorary professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, which he directed between 1997 and 2007, showed in The Politics of the Governed how much popular politics takes place in relation to the techniques through which the state administers populations [16]. An electoral register is one such technique, and an improper exclusion can prevent someone from voting until it is corrected.
In Madrid, a demonstration called by the Tenants’ Union on 3 October drew 70,000 people according to the Government Delegation and 500,000 according to the organisers, after Congress rejected two housing decrees [17]. On 19 October, the Confederation of Tenants’ Unions, CCOO, UGT, CGT, CNT, the Union of Actors and Actresses, Co.Bas, Intersindical and Solidaridad Obrera formally registered the 11 November general strike with the Ministry of Labour [18]. Their demands include wage increases of 4–7% through collective bargaining, a rise of at least 7% in the minimum wage, shorter working hours, protection for public services and a change of course in housing policy [19]. CCOO and UGT sum up their aim as ‘decent wages for access to decent housing’ [20]. The strike is scheduled for two days before the start of the general election campaign [21]. The Spanish Confederation of Employers’ Organisations (CEOE) has announced that it will challenge the strike as unlawful and electoral in character [22]. The provision under dispute concerns access to resources. The Brazilian urbanist Raquel Rolnik, professor at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing from 2008 to 2014, described in La guerra de los lugares how housing shifted from a social good to a financial asset [23]. The slogan behind the 11 November action captures that transformation: a wage no longer guarantees somewhere to live.
These three scenes resonate with an idea explored by anthropology in southern Africa. In Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson studied the expansion of cash transfers in a region where, in South Africa, more than 30% of the population receives some form of payment. He proposed understanding distribution as a ‘rightful share’, governed by neither the logic of the gift nor that of the market [24]. MARTIAL’s dividend, conceived as a right of co-ownership, belongs to that family of ideas. This week’s protests remind us that such a share is already being contested through a ministry’s budget, an electoral register and the price of rent.
No Kings: protest and automated controls
If access to participation increasingly depends on private infrastructures, it also depends on technical rules that can be applied without direct human intervention. An incident in the United States illustrates this tension. On 17 October, the No Kings coalition organised around 3,000 events across all fifty states and Washington, DC, which, according to the coalition, brought together millions of people to expand access to early voting and defend electoral integrity ahead of the 3 November midterm elections [25]. Reuters described it as No Kings’ third round of protests, directed against several policies of President Donald Trump [26]. During the demonstrations, Instagram suspended the coalition’s account. The page was inaccessible for around ninety minutes, and its administrators did not regain full control until 5.33 pm New York time [25]. Meta initially attributed the block to an unusual volume of posts and comments. On 18 October, its vice-president of communications, Andy Stone, attributed the triggering of the security system to automated queries of profiles, posts and hashtags which, according to the company, came from a Claude-linked tool and reached, in bursts, approximately four times the usual volume. Meta said a subsequent automated review determined that the suspension was a mistake and apologised. It has not publicly identified the tool, who was using it or for what purpose, and its technical logs have not been independently verified [25]. The coalition rejected Meta’s explanation and said its early-voting content was inaccessible on the company’s platforms [26]. Political representatives questioned the timing of the suspension [27].
The episode illustrates a concrete way in which automation affects political participation. A security system sets the pace of activity considered normal, and a coordinated mobilisation, with peaks in viewing and sharing, can fall on the suspicious side of that threshold. The question raised in New Delhi — who counts in a register — reappears on another scale, because a growing part of the public space in which protest takes place depends on thresholds set by private companies and enforced by automated systems. For transparency, at AIthropology Lab we use Claude models to check and edit our texts, including this Radar.
ILIA 2026: the territorial dimension of the contract
The asymmetry between countries that MARTIAL acknowledges he has not resolved is quantified in a report presented on 20 October by Chile’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). They unveiled the fourth edition of the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index (ILIA 2026), which assesses the maturity of AI ecosystems in twenty Latin American and Caribbean countries using 126 sub-indicators [28]. Chile leads the ranking for the fourth year running with 71.4 points, followed by Brazil (68.4) and Uruguay (67.0). The most revealing figures here concern concentration. Brazil holds 87.7% of the region’s GPUs and 92% of its processing capacity, while the five countries used for comparison outside the region — Germany, Spain, Estonia, Portugal and Singapore — have on average around 29 times as many GPUs per million people. AI is used by 27.6% of large Latin American firms, 12.8% of medium-sized firms and 6.8% of small firms, compared with 66%, 41% and 24% respectively in those five comparison countries. Eighty-five per cent of the countries have a national AI strategy in force or under preparation, and only Brazil and Colombia have explicitly allocated budgets in their national AI policy instruments [28].
The report also notes that legal uncertainty surrounding text and data mining limits the construction of corpora and the training of models, even where data exist. Its central recommendation is regional cooperation on computing power, talent and data, supported by an energy advantage: Paraguay, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia have a higher share of clean energy than Portugal. ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs warned at the launch that passive adoption of AI could deepen the region’s dependencies [28]. The index measures through infrastructures the question MARTIAL approaches through rights. A region that contributes data, languages and clean energy but controls little of the computing power occupies a vulnerable position in any distribution of civilisational capital. The regional cooperation recommended by ILIA introduces a supranational scale between individual states and the global institution that MARTIAL has yet to develop. Greater computing power alone does not guarantee an equitable share of the benefits.
Who signs the contract?
A contract presupposes parties who recognise one another and terms open to discussion. This week, those terms have been contested in a school on the outskirts of Paris, an Indian electoral register, the price of rent in Madrid, the threshold of a security system and the distribution of GPUs across Latin America. Jean MARTIAL’s proposal provides a framework for considering who would be entitled to what in an increasingly automated economy. The streets and infrastructures remind us that this discussion already has participants, interests and tangible conflicts.
We will follow the French demonstrations on 5 November and the general strike on 11 November, and continue the conversation Jean MARTIAL has proposed with us about care and the governance of community data.
References
[1] MARTIAL, Jean. El contrato socIAl. ¿De quién será el mundo si la IA hace el trabajo? Self-published, 8 October 2026. Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/el-contrato-social/id6820714107
[2] Slash Digital Lab. “Jean MARTIAL”. https://slash-digital.io/team/jean-martial/
[3] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Race et histoire; Race et culture. UNESCO, 1952. UNESDOC. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000127066
[4] International Energy Agency. Energy and AI. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai
[5] Municipality of Maricá. “Prefeitura de Maricá segue com recadastramento do Programa de Renda Básica de Cidadania”. 11 May 2026. https://www.marica.rj.gov.br/noticia/prefeitura-de-marica-segue-com-recadastramento-do-programa-de-renda-basica-de-cidadania/
[6] International Labour Organization. Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. 2018. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-calls-urgent-action-prevent-looming-global-care-crisis
[7] Rodríguez Enríquez, Corina. “Economía feminista y economía del cuidado. Aportes conceptuales para el estudio de la desigualdad”. Nueva Sociedad, 256, 2015. https://nuso.org/articulo/economia-feminista-y-economia-del-cuidado-aportes-conceptuales-para-el-estudio-de-la-desigualdad/
[8] Pérez Orozco, Amaia. Subversión feminista de la economía. Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Traficantes de Sueños, 2014.
[9] Al Jazeera. “Why have France’s school protests become a wider political crisis?”. 18 October 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/18/why-have-frances-school-protests-become-a-wider-political-crisis
[10] Bennett, Alexandra. “France dispatch: mass marches as student protests spread nationwide”. JURIST, October 2026. https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/10/france-dispatch-mass-marches-as-student-protests-spread-nationwide/
[11] Pietromarchi, Virginia. “Tear gas and unrest as hundreds of thousands protest for reforms in France”. Al Jazeera, 17 October 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/17/france-wave-of-nationwide-protests
[12] Reuters. “France’s Macron tightens curbs on protests, blaming hard left for unrest”. 22 October 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-macron-tightens-curbs-protests-blaming-hard-left-unrest-2026-10-22/
[13] Al Jazeera and AP. “Macron blames ‘seditious’ far left for unrest as France bans some protests”. 22 October 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/22/macron-blames-seditious-ultra-left-for-unrest-as-france-bans-protests
[14] Reuters. “Hundreds from India’s Gen Z-led ‘cockroach’ party protest, seek election chief’s resignation”. The Kathmandu Post, 3 October 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/world/2026/10/03/hundreds-from-india-s-gen-z-led-cockroach-party-protest-seek-election-chief-s-resignation
[15] Al Jazeera. “Indian court extends detention of ‘Cockroach’ leaders”. 19 October 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/19/indian-court-extends-detention-of-cockroach-leaders
[16] Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Columbia University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-231-13062-2. https://universityseminars.columbia.edu/books/the-politics-of-the-governed/
[17] El Diario de Madrid. “Manifestación por la vivienda en Madrid. 500.000 asistentes según el Sindicato de Inquilinas y 70.000 según Delegación”. 3 October 2026. https://www.eldiariodemadrid.es/articulo/sociedad/manifestacion-vivienda-madrid-500000-70000-asistentes/20261003184558143246.html
[18] clm24. “Nueve organizaciones sindicales registran la huelga general del 11N”. 19 October 2026. https://www.clm24.es/articulo/economia/huelga-general-vivienda-sindicatos-formalizan-11n/20261019161037484343.html
[19] El Salto. “Sindicatos de inquilinos y laborales registran la huelga del 11 de noviembre por la vivienda y los salarios”. 19 October 2026. https://www.elsaltodiario.com/vivienda/sindicatos-inquilinos-laborales-registran-huelga-del-11-noviembre-vivienda-salarios
[20] El Independiente. “Los sindicatos confirman el 11 de noviembre como el día de la huelga general por la vivienda”. 7 October 2026. https://www.elindependiente.com/economia/2026/10/07/los-sindicatos-confirman-el-11-de-noviembre-como-el-dia-de-la-huelga-general-por-la-vivienda/
[21] Qué!. “La huelga general por la vivienda el 11 de noviembre, la primera en España desde 2012”. 8 October 2026. https://www.que.es/2026/10/08/huelga-general-vivienda-11-noviembre-2/
[22] Artículo 14. “Garamendi confirma que impugnará la huelga general por considerarla ilegal y electoral”. 19 October 2026. https://www.articulo14.es/economia/garamendi-confirma-que-impugnara-la-huelga-general-por-considerarla-ilegal-y-electoral-20261019.html
[23] Rolnik, Raquel. La guerra de los lugares. La colonización de la tierra y la vivienda en la era de las finanzas. Translated by Ana Laura Granero. El Colectivo y LOM ediciones, 2021 (original edition: Guerra dos lugares, Boitempo, 2015). ISBN 978-987-8484-08-2.
[24] Ferguson, James. Give a Man a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Duke University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8223-5886-2. https://www.dukeupress.edu/Give-a-Man-a-Fish/
[25] Mijares Torres, María Paula. “Meta Says Claude AI Tool Triggered No Kings Instagram Suspension”. Bloomberg Law, 18 October 2026. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-says-claude-ai-tool-triggered-no-kings-instagram-suspension
[26] Chiacu, Doina. “Meta apologizes after suspending ‘No Kings’ Instagram account”. Reuters, in The Star, 19 October 2026. https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/19/meta-apologizes-after-suspending-no-kings-instagram-account
[27] Ticong, Liz. “Meta Links No Kings Instagram Suspension to Claude Tool”. eWeek, 20 October 2026. https://www.eweek.com/news/meta-claude-no-kings-instagram-suspension/
[28] CENIA. “ILIA 2026. 4ta edición revela que América Latina y el Caribe se juegan su futuro en IA en la colaboración regional para datos, talento y cómputo”. 20 October 2026. https://cenia.cl/2026/10/20/ilia-2026-4ta-edicion-revela-que-america-latina-y-el-caribe-se-juegan-su-futuro-en-ia-en-la-colaboracion-regional-para-datos-talento-y-computo/