Category: quote

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds

Henry Adams, Education of Henry Adams

Came across this while going through the open Yale University political philosophy first lecture on youtube.

It’s interesting when you look at Kenya’s politics. Moi was removed on the “Yote yawezekana bila Moi” (all is possible without Moi) narrative. The opposition rallied all parties behind this movement and promised a corrupt free regime. After Kibaki’s two terms marked with a post election violence, goldenberg scandal, free education and a mix of bags. We got Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate (now president) who were facing charges at the International Criminal Court. During his campaign, we got the anti-west campaign plus Cambridge Analytica stirring emotions against the other side. By pushing I mean personally attacks against Raila Odinga on the internet.

During Uhuru’s second term we see what was said to be internal issues come out in public with his deputy getting sidelined. What does Ruto do? He starts “anti-establishment” campaign, the hustler narrative pitting the wealthy against the majority. He even used a wheelbarrow as a symbol that work is work. He wins.

As I write this after protests against Ruto’s administration from financial bills that are over taxing the citizens to selling off public parastatals to everything getting worse and expensive. The education system is not working, fires in schools have become an often occurrence. Many cases of femicides and children disappearing and even ending up dead. We now have a Ruto Must Go narrative to galvanize the opposition against him. The other side is not even presenting any policies or a plan to get us out of the hole we are in.

Is the politics a play on people emotions. Raila was know to get people carried away with his vitendawili (riddles). Nothing changes just the players. Is the tyranny of a majority a problem or is also the solidarity needed to getting real change. As many have argued change doesn’t come from changing the person at the top.

One could ask, do people vote for or do they vote against someone?

I was wondering why people enjoyed A.I slop. From time to time, I would come across a mobile phone contact who would post some weird A.I generated video especially of cats talking or babies talking and I would wonder why they don’t find the videos gross and weird. 

Then I came across David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on television, “E Unibus Pluram“, in which he writes:

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Key to me here is this:

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Could this also apply to the current appeal to A.I slop and why it’s got a lot of people generating the slop.

So why does this matter to me? I use artificial intelligence in some form or another on the daily. Thing is when you have spent years working with artists, taught yourself to do sketches, got paid to design posters and even developed an interesting in photography, you cannot help but easily identify how unappealing A.I generated media is. Also you cannot help but worry about how their top notch skills are substituted for slop. For example one of the leading stationery brand in Kenya, Karatasi Brand, is using generative images on the cover of their exercise books and social media. Ketepa Tea another leading company used A.I generated media for their Valentine’s Day campaign and it backfired. Many pointed out how the images of the tea bags in the photos they used didn’t even match their own tea bags and people wondered how they were not even able to notice this. These are brands that can pay for creatives to create content for them and maintain the brand they already have. Or does the marketing department think we won’t notice?

My other problem is that we have a large group of social media content consumers who cannot identify A.I generated content. There is the “aunty” who will always forward messages on WhatsApp only for you to point out that it’s fake. Your pointing out of this will be challenged and you might be called the “know it all”. In discussions around A.I regulation I have seen glimpse of suggestions of policies around watermarking A.I generated content as A.I generated content plus need to train consumers to see and understand this labels. I have seen introduction of these “Made with AI” or “AI info” labels.

According to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spending-ai-generated-sora-videos/), Open AI was spending around $15 million per day to run Sora, their A.I video generating platform. That’s a lot of money to let people generate “silly” videos. Wonder what this says about the industry.

While I was reading Politics Without Guarantees (https://thepointmag.com/politics/politics-without-guarantees/) I came across these words by Stuart Hall on intellectual work.

There is a sense in which one has to stand back, outside of oneself, in order to make the detour through thought, to approach what it is one is trying to think about indirectly, obliquely, in another way, another mode. I think the world is fundamentally resistant to thought, I think it is resistant to “theory.” I do not think it likes to be thought. I do not think it wants to be understood. So, inevitably, thinking is hard work, a kind of labor. It is not something that simply flows naturally from inside oneself. Thus, one of the perplexities about doing intellectual work is that, of course, to be any sort of intellectual is to attempt to raise one’s self-reflexiveness to the highest maximum point of intensity. 

Prof. Wandia makes the case that most people struggle with thinking in her interactions with people in the digital space. One can say that you shouldn’t take all discourse online as the real representation of real thoughts as there has been many cases of paid accounts or bots that are just farming engagement. Though in every day interactions with people you can see how it’s difficult for many to connect dots. This is something that is systematic, we are taught not to think or present different thought. This is very evident through our education system where cramming is encouraged and everything is forgotten after the exam. We see comments like “work smart not hard”. With the so called age of artificial intelligence, we are told we don’t even need to read or research anymore. Just ask ChatGPT.

Should we leave this to the public intellectuals or should we get back to building brain muscles and capacities to think?