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comment by low_ho_fosho
low_ho_fosho  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Inside an African MP3 market

Africa is super interesting since it seems a lot of places are essentially skipping the 20th century in terms of technology. No landlines, no centralized power. Straight to smart phones and renewable energy like solar panels. Since these technologies don't really require lots of government infrastructure, they'll become more widespread as the cost to produce them plummets, regardless of any political turbulence.





hubsk1  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This reminds me of something Terrence mckenna once said in an interview:

"Well, I think Marshall McLuhan pointed out that any technology put in place is extremely difficult to dislodge, and that is our problem. We went for the automobile so completely that it will now be a major effort at cultural restructuring to leave it behind. The Chinese have no such problem. I think it was Freeman Dyson, or perhaps Gerrard O'Neill, who said, "No technology should be put in place that has a foreseeable obsolescence." This was his argument against nuclear power. And I think that's an excellent point. We should not commit ourselves to any course of action whose end state can be foreseen. This is why we have to commit ourselves to this kind of conscious, open-system, non-equilibrium future that futurists like Jantsch, and West Churchman and others have so eloquently described in their work."

I think Africa can make a giant leap, by skipping some obsolete technologies the rest of the world is heavily invested in.

wasoxygen  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In Uganda, 37% of people aged 15 and up have used a cell phone for financial transactions in the past 90 days.

In Tanzania the number is 41%.

I saw Apple Pay at the local Trader Joe's for the first time yesterday.