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May 9, 2006

every day we're hustling

Spent a large portion of last weekend back-reading Emeka Okafor's The Timbuktu Chronicles, a technology and entrepreneurship blog focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. (Someone turned me on to Okafor a while ago, but I've forgotten who; apologies to you if you know who you are.) In between lots of optimistic blog-and-tell (apparently the African swimwear manufacturing sector is heating up), Okafor does some neatly programmatic prognosticating about a possible, tech-driven African renaissance, wondering, for example, whether the West's (or at least the Bay Area's) reignited "need to grapple with the tangible tactile 3rd dimension" has application in Africa:

The now almost retro cyber-age had emphasized the importance of all things digital at the expense of those objects we can grasp. The merging of the bit the biological and non-biological atom in the developed world is on track courtesy of robotics and nanotechnology, while in areas south of the Sahara the 'made' atom has barely gotten of the starting block. The uptake of technology in Africa has been symbolized almost completely by cellphones, computers and information -ICT as it commonly labeled. As a result the nerves are beginning to sputter into life, but the equally important muscles and sinews have not even begun to coalesce.

In a Timbuktu Chronicles post "Fundamental, Unsexy and Absent" the non-existence of an industrial mechanical base was highlighted and its pivotal nature emphasized. The boring 'old' industries of Metalworking and various types of Manufacturing and Chemical Engineering have had to bow off the stage in the developed west while the young upstarts of the information age, biotechnology et al bask in the spotlight. This could rightly be considered progress in the industrialized and developed/ing countries, but not where industrialization has experienced a still birth and these industries do not even exist. The ability to communicate effectively does not confer the title of 'developed' on its wearer's head, ICT is to a large degree an enabler and facilitator.

Okafor is bullish on the idea that the post-hobbyist instrumentalities and practices popular among our local DIY types will open up transformative zones of people/entrepreneur driven growth and industrialization. It's a compelling, current, optimistic scenario, and if I have a nano-sized nit to pick it's that "reignited" interest in the atom in the West or no, places like Haiti or portions of sub-Saharan Africa have always already being zones of intense "maker" activity. The atom hacking and hustling required just to keep head above water in some places means that people are constantly surrounded by a nimbus of modification. It's like a literal poor man's version of Madeline Gins and Arakawa's architectural surround, an enveloping "architecture" that exists not to support Gins and Arakawa's (art)project of life-extension but plain old life-continuance, maintenance, life-not-dying-enance and so on.

(This is a random aside, but I had a chance to hear Madeline Gins speak/read last year in LA. She was fascinating but scattered, and when the audience started tiring just a bit of her shtick she disdainfully saluted the crowd and spat "Goodnight, plants!!!" at us before storming off the stage. Completely amazing.)

Okafor name-checks MAKE Magazine and the transit from there to there (and potentially back) could fill the pages of several well-designed magazine special issues. How long, for example until we see a "MAKE: THIRD WORLD" issue? ("MAKE VISITS THE GARAGE LABS OF SUPER TINKERERS FROM TURKMENISTAN TO NIGERIA TO PARAGUAY!!!") How about a February MAKE exclusive: "BLACK MAN HACKS TRAFFIC LIGHT!! USING XBOX SCRAPS!!!" As much as MAKE contemporizes Popular Mechanics and Heathkit (there's also a hint of "In Search of..." thrown in there somewhere, but that could also just be the taste of nutmeg) it also indulges in stealth deployments of "Budweiser Presents A Black History Month Special: Great Black Inventors," MAKE's central "genius in you" storyline implicitly suggesting the existence of "genius in them" angles, "look what I made!" being less than six degrees of separation from "didja know what they made?"

Or is that "didja know what we made?" The communitarian storyline might be the spécialité de maison of middlebrow, corporate-sponsored, African American media but MAKE still a kind of freedom that when applied to US blacks (pun not intended, but noted) takes on science fictional overtones. Even correcting for the distorted ways people talk about Africa it seems a universal black affliction, infecting even Okafor's straightforwardly earnest postings. His hopes for a coming maker golden age seem the stuff of a hacked Cyptonomicon, but then that's likely why he put "The Timbuktu Chronicles" on the header and not "Sub-Saharan African Technology Today."

Posted by ebogjonson in afrofuturism, next levelish, solid state projects, on May 9, 2006 9:02 PM