Category: thoughts

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quote thoughts

politics, systematic organization of hatreds

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?

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quote thoughts

A.I Slop

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.

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thoughts

Slow down the engines

In an article titled “A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse” here https://davidgraeber.org/articles/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse/ David Graeber makes a case for slowing down. Quote here:

At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of produc- tivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seven- ties, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of cli- mate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

This was written in 2013, now in 2026 this sounds really like a strange thing to say to people. With new phones coming out every year, the artificial intelligence race and even the new usage of renewable energy as an alternative. The other day after another recent collapse of a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I was thinking will we ever get out of the need for minerals that run these technologies. Even when you talk of renewable energy technology like solar panels or hybrid cars they still use minerals from the earth. The energy is renewable but the minerals are not. Apart from the pressure put on earth, the enormous pressure on the labour is dehumanizing. Kenyans are forming organizations to fight the human conditions that the data labellers are facing when training machine learning (or AI as many people call them) systems.

Sometimes it feels like the only progress we have are the shiny devices we get yearly. The human condition is not getting better. Yes, you can argue that even the shiny devices are making life worse. Maybe we really need to slow down.

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quote thoughts

Thinking is Hard Work

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?

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thoughts

Cheating

High school was interesting for me, not because I was the fun or cool kid but because of the different people I was able to school with. My schoolmates were from very diverse backgrounds and this was very crucial to my education. I say education and not schooling because as we might know those are two different things.

Recently, I have been thinking about cheating. Schools have a not so good way of dividing students of the same class into different streams. They somehow put the “smartest” one together then there is the stream that seems to have the not so smart students, the ones who have the most fun. I say fun because we seemed like the most united ones and we took P.E (physical education) time very seriously. Unlike the other students who would use this time to go the library, we would go play. Yes, we took the “all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl” saying seriously.

You might notice the smartest is quotes because passing the exams is not about knowledge of a subject but your ability to cram and write all that on a piece of paper. Ask a student about the topic and they don’t remember after the exam. This need for cramming made my life later in University a bit difficult. The clustering of students based on their performance is a problem that I hadn’t thought of while in high school. The problem is that some students thought they were less capable than others. This might lead to a lack of confidence in one’s ability to learn new things or maybe think they are not the smart type. This really affects one in life. There are times I find someone comparing themselves to others. Where one’s life is at is compared to the other or who is driving the best car. The comparison has been beaten into us. You find that some would refuse to collaborate on projects because of this competitiveness.

Interestingly, I would hear rumours of how even these smartest students would get access to exams before we all got them during the exam time a.k.a cheating. At the time I would hear stories of how teachers would actually buy the exams on behalf of their students. I always wondered, if they were so smart why would they need to cheat and why would the teachers be willing participants.

As I navigate life it’s become clear why this was the case. When you are told that a set of exams at the end of your four years in high school will determine where you end up in life you might be tempted to cheat. We were told how important the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (K.C.S.E) exam was. The results would determine the university you get to go, your career prospects and ultimately how life turns out. For teachers, their students’ performance was tied to promotions or demotions (might be in the form of teaching the not so smart students), getting fired and maybe their salaries or bonuses. If these things depended on your students’ performance then you might be incentivised to help. Then again, exam cheating is a huge business. The other incentive for the teachers might be that the students were customers.

According to a Daily Nation article 70 teachers were arrested in 2024 for compromising the integrity of the exams. What happens if we design an education system where a single set of exam does not determine one’s “future”. Future is in quotes because one comes to realise that that was not entirely true. I am not saying that getting A grade and going to prestigious university does not set one to success. It really depends on your interpretation of “making it” in life.

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thoughts

want and want to want

While on transit with friends, one asked me a question. He asked “Have I become an alcoholic?” It was a curious question which deserves a little background. We were tired and he had had a few cans of beer for this question to come up. Here we were, seated waiting for our means to get back home to roll in and he asks this question.

The first thing that came to mind was whether he is asking for permission to drink more or he has really seen an issue (self diagnose). I almost said “Bro, get some more if you want to” plus maybe add that “you don’t need anyone’s permission to drink”. Instead I said “If you are asking that question then maybe you have a problem and its for you to really gauge if you are drinking too much but I figure you are just feeling that because we are just about to get on a long ride back home and you want to pass time”. Long story short, he didn’t get more beers.

Why did this come up while I was on my morning walk? Clearly, it’s because I listen to podcasts on my 1.5 hours walks. I was listening to the 25th episode of No Stupid Questions podcast (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-hedonism-better-than-self-control-nsq-ep-25/) in which Angela Duckworth mentions Harry Frankfurt and his philosophy around freedom of will. Simple put the “want and want to want”. She makes a reference to ice cream which can be replaced with beer for our case. May be? Here are her words based on the episode’s transcript

But I think the real issue is this: What do you want, and what do you want to want? As the great philosopher Harry Frankfurt said, “The heart of free will is to line up your wants — you want an ice cream cone — and your want to wants. If you want the ice cream cone and you want to want the ice cream cone, eat the goddamn ice cream cone. If you want the ice cream cone and you don’t want to want the ice cream cone, that’s a different story.”

My friend had to interrogate his want to want a beer and see if it has become an issue. Heh!

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quote thoughts

Keeping a file

In the book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills emphasizes the importance of keeping a file (a blog, journal of sought) as a way of organizing thoughts, observations, and intellectual development. Here is a quote:

“In such a file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will find your developing ideas, your questions and answers, your personal notes and excerpts from books, your bibliographical items, and outlines of projects.”

He goes on to say:

“By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake.”

This is why I am writing on this blog. To keep an archive of thoughts hence the tag line “not sure how raw these thoughts are”.

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community thoughts

Small Networks: Intentional Communities of Shared Interests

In a previous blog post, I delved into the complexities of decentralization, particularly in the context of setting up and maintaining decentralized social networks.

The passage of time has brought new thoughts to the forefront, igniting a fresh perspective that I’m eager to explore.

I’ve been pondering the concept of smaller, more specialized social networks catering to distinct shared interests. The substantial amount of time invested in crafting content for today’s dominant social platforms comes at a cost – our data is meticulously observed and utilized for targeted advertising, spawning a myriad of issues. This prevailing business model has led tech giants to conduct experiments that manipulate user emotions, as detailed in this article: Link to Forbes article on Facebook’s emotional manipulation.

It’s disconcerting that we’ve become mere data points ripe for experimentation and sale to advertisers. The fundamental flaw lies within the business model of these tech giants, wherein driving ad views reigns supreme, prompting them to resort to various tactics to maximize engagement.

I find myself drawn to the notion of small, interest-centric networks supported by community funding, fostering a deliberate selection process for members and cultivating a culture of responsible conduct. When the focus isn’t fixated on amassing sheer numbers, there’s no incentive for exploitative ‘growth hacking’ strategies or the relentless pursuit of revenue.

This vision evokes the spirit of ‘chamas,’ where like-minded individuals converge to support each other financially, forming tight-knit groups with shared goals and values.

Looking at trying this out soon for a number of small communities.

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thoughts

Necessary Illusions

“Rationality belongs to the cool observer but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith. This naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over-simplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course. It’s not the case as the naive might think that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observers, it’s the essence of democracy.”

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startups technology thoughts

AI & other technologies: Are we on the Receiving End?

In the book Prosperity Paradox, Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Oromo & Karen Dillion bring up an interesting concept of “how to identify high-potential pockets of nonconsumption” with regard to solutions that you might be providing. They state there are four things to look out for: skill, wealth, access and time. This got me thinking about examples where this might have been used.

Facebook is a good example. They realised that a large number of people are not using their platforms because of a number of issues.

  • Lack of internet access – so they came up with platforms like internet.org to get more people connected and accessing their platform with the goal of getting more eyeballs seeing ads, their revenue model
  • Low end devices – sitting in San Francisco, you might not understand the low internet speed or low end devices that your customers are using. Facebook realised that access to Facebook is slow and devices had less storage, memory capacity in emerging markets. To solve the affordability challenge, they launched Facebook Lite. They even acquired a startup that worked on this, story here https://tech.facebook.com/engineering/2020/8/facebook-lite-made-in-tel-aviv/

Google is also an interesting example. At the core of Google’s model is selling ads. To address the lack of ad buyers in new markets they focused on the lack of digital marketing skills. They went on to launch the a campaign to train 1 million people on the African continent. Story here https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-africa/one-million-trained-task-getting-africa-digital-just-beginning/ This is very similar when you look at the Android ecosystem. Google has invested a lot in getting more people skilled to develop apps on the Adroid platform. Developer communities have been a success to drive more apps developed on the Android ecosystem.

There is an interesting discussion around emerging technologies on the African continent. It was blockchain technology a few months ago and now the hype train is on artificial intelligence. The question again is what’s our position around these technologies. There are those who are worried that the technology will be built outside and consumed on the continent. There are a number of challenges that can be looked at in the lens of what the book ‘Prosperity Paradox’ states as the reason for nonconsumption.

  1. Skill – do we have the skills to build using these emerging technologies. To solve this should we focus on building skills to build solutions using the emerging technologies? Will the skill remain or leave for better opportunities away from home?
  2. Wealth – do we have the capital to afford the expensive compute need to build artificial intelligence models? The compute needed is not cheap. Solution could be invest in the startups working on this. We need to remember startup success rates is low, are we willing to burn that money. Should academia focus our research efforts towards this? Is the government going to provide grants to academia to pursue this?
  3. Access – do we have access to data the raw material for artificial intelligence? For voice technology, languages like English have enormous digital ready data for training. Is the solution to build our own datasets? Should we make this datasets open for all of us to use? Will big tech take the data and use their readily available infrastructure to build tools for us to consume?

These are thoughts that have lingered in my head for a while and through my experience through my fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation building voice datasets for the Kiswahili language.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section 🙂