Discoverability and D igital Colonialism

1. Discoverability and Digital Colonialism Firoze Manji Acknowledgement: research assistance by ThoughtWorks ™

2. Elements of disccoverability • Technical • Producer / author determined • Political bias / digital colonialism • Infrastructural

3. Historical context • Mobilisations in 1950s • Rise of independence movements • Social contract • Achievements • Reversals • Privatization of the commons • Concentration and centralisation of capital

4. Set the context for • Microtechnological revolution • Bio-technological revolution • Nano-technological revolution • Effective re-appropriation of destiny of African people (landgrabs, economic control, resource extration, ‘repatriation’ of profits, tax evasion etc

5. Don’t Africans produce knowledge?

6. Lack of content from Africa? • Economic Commission for Africa survey conducted in 1999 : Africa generates only around 0.4 percent (1:250) of global content. • Excluding South Africa, the rest of Africa generates a mere 0.02 percent (1:5000)! • http://213.55.79.31/adf/adf99/codipap3.htm

7. Articles in Wikipedia • The whole continent of Africa contains only about 2.6% of the world’s geo-tagged Wikipedia articles despite having 14% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s land. • http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/#the-geographically-uneven-coverage-of-wikipedia

8. Geographically reference article in Wikipedia

9. Geotagged article in English on Wikipedia

10. Educator vs Native • Academic and scientific discourse tends to be from a paternalistic / uninformed / and completely ‘educator v. native’. (http://aidnography.blogspot.in/2012/11/olpc-in-ethiopia-thin-line-between.html) • For no other continent is there so much written about it by outsiders

11. Spatial Solipsism • “This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions. It also strongly underrepresents regions such as the Middle East and North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. In the global context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these digital absences are likely to have very material effects and consequences.” • http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/02/there-are-more-wikipedia-articles-about-one-part-world-rest-it-combined/8486/ • (Solipsism = belief in self as only reality – polite term for eurocentrism)

12. Access and bias • Internet allows those with time and money and easy access to the internet to control large proportion of discourse

13. Cultural homogenization • Since it is cheaper to send a data package from the North to the South than vice versa, and since access is greater in the North (Africa 13%, or 3% excluding the big ones), there is structural built in dominance of information coming from the North.

14. Google and silences on Africa

15. Languages • Africa has more than 800 languages spoken amongst its various ethnic groups. However, the Internet is an ‘English’ based medium which affects the usability and content creation thereon. A vast majority of programs, applications and services continue to be provided in English thereby denying access to large swathes of the population and exacerbating the digital divide. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/2031

16. What language? Not ours!

17. Languages

18. Google search by language

19. Academic Knowledge and Publishers

20. Location of academic knowledge

21. User generated content on Google

22. News travels

23. Infrastructure

24. Internet backbones

25. Internet penetration

26. Penetration

28. Top Level Domains • Africa has more countries than any other continent, but only 10 of the ccTLDs have functional registries within the African countries they belong to.

32. Most cloud services and data storage sites are outside Africa

33. Data Centres in Africa

34. Colocation of Data Centres

35. Physical location of data centers around the world

36. Google’s data centers, 2008

37. Microsoft Azure Data Centers

38. Population size: no of developers

39. Lack of employment opportunity in ICT sector

40. Software import / lack of production of software • Nigeria imports 90% of all software used in the country. The local production of software is reduced to add-ons or extensions creation for mainstream packaged software.

41. Patent applications filed in Africa • Only around 10% of applications for the registration of intellectual property (IP) rights in Africa are made by African citizens or residents. • “Both anecdotal accounts by African IP agents and WIPO statistics on IP activity in Africa show that more than 90% of applications for registration of IP rights in Africa are by foreign IP applicants”http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2013/digital-colonialism

42. Arm-twisting • Microsoft has apparently attempted to arm-twist African governments on policy issues repeatedly – for instance by threatening to withdraw funding to Kenyan government programs in view of its support of free software (OOXML), by hiring government officials and their relatives as in Namibia and Nigeria. • Lobbying with governments to ensure use of Microsoft products including by tying governments into long term licensing agreements. • Also see South Africa’s clamp down on open source in education. • http://www.pcworld.com/article/144898/article.html/https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/https://netzpolitik.org/2009/misconceptions-and-failed-attempts-microsofts-strategy-for-africa/http://www.webaddict.co.za/2013/10/09/south-africa-education-department-bans-open-source-software/http://techrights.org/2009/05/12/south-african-schools-windows/ and http://techrights.org/2009/05/10/lobbyists-bribes-vs-free-sw/

43. Thank you Firoze Manji fmanji@mac.com firoze.manji@codesria.org

44. Thinking about the future Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. Frantz Fanon

45. Thinking about the future If you don't change direction, you will end up exactly where you are heading. Lao Tzu

46. Thinking about the future If you don’t know where you are going, any direction will do. Anon

47. Thinking about the future The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason to hope.  Teillardde Chardin

48. The challenge of thinking about the future • Thinking outside the boxRecognizing that we are in a box, we are imprisoned by our past. • Cognitive hindsight bias Our capacity to imagine the future is limited by our knowledge of the present / past.

49. The task • Imagine you are meeting 20 years from now. Discuss what you achieved and how you got there. • Imagine you are able to see your own funeral. What would you like people to say about what you achieved or made happen.