The world that is coming doesn’t segregate according to citizenship, tribe, class, religion, gender, or any of those attributes you can directly observe with your five senses. It is going to segregate us according to invisible attributes, measured by machines as they attempt to optimize us to serve them better.
Yes, your smartwatch will no longer ask how many steps you’ve taken; it is going to command you to take a certain amount. Your phone will tell you what to eat. Your shoes will tell you when to sit. Your clothes, your hair, your nails, and your teeth will become technology. Later, your heart, your lungs, and your knees will become machines, too. Until there is so little of you left but the machine. Until our race is reduced to deserts of silicon sand with electricity running through them.
Now, I don’t know if this is paradise or hell, or if there is even a difference between those two ideas anymore. What I do know is that the path to automating and optimizing ourselves into sand is being traveled at an accelerated rate. The thing is, we can redirect this force—the one accelerating humanity into silicon sands—and use it to improve other dimensions of our existence. The competitive mindset excretes this unnecessary hunger to get there first for some reason. What most of us don’t realize is that if you make it to heaven alone by yourself, it will feel every bit as bad as hell.
We are Africans. The best speed is the one that can carry the most of us. We cannot forget that Ubuntu is made of people. The universe is made of people. Not citizenship. Not tribe. Not religion. Not gender. Not fancy words and imaginary ideas, but the people themselves. Unless we are willing to compromise our rate of change for a pace that is comfortable for everyone, we are going to cycle through the different faces of hate until we finally identify it for what it is. And the price will be steep.
We have exposed ourselves too much to the machines. They know us a bit better than we know ourselves now. If we so easily succumb to segregation just because some idiots noticed that our skins didn’t look like theirs, what do you think the machines will do? Machines that know how many breaths you take a minute, how much sugar is in your blood, how well you can count, and more about your behavior than you know yourself. What do you think the machines will do if they are controlled by the hands of the very people who invented segregation?
Libya is dead. The Sahel is getting lost. Sudan is on fire. And now South Africa is making unforced errors too? My brothers, you have to fucking wake up. Kanye West was right: slavery is a choice. And South Africa is making that choice right now.
Most of us Africans are looking to South Africa as our path out of poverty. You’re letting us down, guys. You gave the world Nelson Mandela. You gave the world Elon Musk. Do you know any other African country that can say that? Why are you wasting such potential on pettiness? Why are you letting the hate win? Were Mandela’s 27 years in prison in vain? The richest man in the world comes from your country. The first trillionaire. But for some reason, you’ve chosen to quarrel with your brothers about who should wash dishes in a white man’s restaurant. What the fuck, guys?
We still believe in you, South Africa. Let Not Hate Win.
I am supporting South Africa in the World Cup.
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