Sino-african cosmotechnics along the Digital Silk Road in Nairobi
After a few months of hearings, on August 13 2018 the US Congress approved the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), a 164-page bill designed to overhaul national security protocols concerning foreign direct investments in key sectors of the economy. “Modernization”, as a wry blog post from a large US law firm noted, was in fact “a euphemism for addressing concerns about Chinese investments” in technology companies. Not only did the Act introduce a mandate for the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) to produce a biannual report on any transactions made by entities of the People’s Republic of China, it also expanded the government’s oversight with a much broader definition of “critical technologies”.
The repercussions of FIRRMA became immediately clear when the CFIUS terminated MoneyGram’s takeover by Ma Yun’s Alibaba (through its subsidiary Ant Financials), and forced the sale of gay-dating app Grindr, which had been acquired by Chinese billionaire Zhou Yahui a couple of years earlier. Both takeovers had raised concerns — often tainted by unsavoury sinophobic discourses — around US users’ financial and health data becoming available to private Chinese players with ties to Beijing. However, the media was also quick to report that both Ma and Zhou had been for some time scoping for alternative avenues of investment in Africa, where the promise of new frontiers of technological profit seemed at hand. Ma had undertaken a series of much-publicized African travels, almost in the traditional fashion of Chinese state leaders, and had launched a few initiatives designed to foster African startups through investment-readiness programs and competitions. Zhou, on the other hand, had bought Norwegian company Opera, with plans to expand its suite of software services specifically designed for the African market, including a data-efficient mobile browser, a chat service, a dedicated news platform, and a number of microlending wallets powered by mobile money. Meanwhile, by 2019 Shenzhen-based Transsion and Huawei had become, respectively, the most important providers of smartphones and connectivity hardware in Africa.
These examples are cases in point of the increasing anxieties over technological sovereignty, of the bifurcation of US-China Internet spheres, and of the flight of Chinese capital to friendlier investment environments, namely countries that have joined the infrastructural program of the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. All these are important geopolitical facets of the future of global technology. However, the presence of Chinese corporations in Africa also raises a number of questions around the different meanings of technology that are mobilized in an increasingly sinocentric continent. Writing about Chinese construction and mining companies in the Zambian copperbelt, sociologist Ching Kwan-Lee has argued that only by recognizing different “varieties of capital” one can fully fathom the diverse regimes of labour, accumulation and management that are engendered by the presence of Global China in Africa. Can the same be said about “varieties of technology” — that is, the competing technological imaginations that exist at the frictional interfaces between Chinese companies, African tech startups and Silicon Valley-imported cultures of innovation?
This is perhaps the main point of departure for my research project, which seeks to chart the impact of private Chinese technocapital in Nairobi, a city that in the last few years has emerged as one of Africa’s leading tech hubs, and also as a landing pad for important Chinese players, including CGTN, StarTimes, Transsion, Tencent, Alibaba, Opera, UnionPay, Huawei and others. Kenya was also one of the first African countries to join the Belt and Road Initiative, as attested by a growing number of infrastructure projects funded, built and sometimes run by Chinese state-owned enterprises. Yet, as Tim Winter’s book aptly demonstrates, the economic ties of the new silk roads are just but a part of a much broader geocultural platform for writing new, non-Eurocentric histories of the present, in which Global China is imagined as a benevolent provider of technological connectivity.
If, for the Belt and Road Initiative, technocultural imaginaries are as important as financial strings, then, the matter of technological difference cannot be left unaddressed. In fact, according to the thesis captured by Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, there is no single, anthropologically universal technology, but multiple ontologies, epistemologies and moral cosmologies of technics exist and have always existed in the world. He writes:
There is a general misconception that all technics are equal, that all skills and artificial products coming from all cultures can be reduced to one thing called technology. And indeed it is almost impossible to deny that technics can be understood as the extension of the body or the exteriorization of memory. Yet they may not be perceived or reflected upon in the same way in different cultures.
Techno-diversity does not imply, however, falling into the trap of cultural relativism or, worse, orientalism. For sinologist Francois Jullien, for example, addressing the irreducible exteriority of Chinese thought allows the reciprocal “unthought-of” in different systems of knowledge to become viable objects of analysis: exteriority, in other words, might be a reflexive antidote to the incapacity of European sciences to engage alternative universalities. The question, therefore, is not what is Chinese about Chinese technology, but what is technology beyond the universalizing categories of Western technics?’
Such a line of inquiry does not need to limit itself to Chinese conceptions of technology or infrastructure, and how they are transported along the new silk roads. For some time, contemporary African thinkers have been challenging us to consider emerging African philosophies of technics on equal footing as their western counterparts (Clapperton Mavhunga, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Felwine Sarr and others). For Achille Mbebme, this is not so much a decolonial effort as it is a call for engaging a constellation of technological thinking that is very much alive in reshaping knowledge in and of Africa. In fact, these epistemic “reorganizations” — what legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos would perhaps call “post-abyssal thinking” — have less to do with unearthing a precolonial philosophical archive, and more with how new forms of techno-humanism are emerging, in Africa and elsewhere, in these catastrophic — in the sense of change-ridden — times.
What does all of this mean, in practice, for studying Chinese-funded African startups, or Chinese tech companies creating new markets in the continent? What kind of urban economies shape and are shaped by technological diversity in a city like Nairobi? What mechanical recursions and vitalist contingencies — to use again two categories of Yuk Hui’s imaginative work — bring recent pasts and near futures into the technical configurations of the urban present in Africa? These are the questions that — still very much unanswered — guide the beginning of my research. As an economic geographer and urban researcher, I am obviously interested in the transactional materiality of these technological shifts, and in the ways in which a city like Nairobi becomes more than the background, but a foil against which to comprehend the transformations provoked by Chinese technocapital. Yet, I am also convinced that, as I wrote above, this is only possible by recognizing, and therefore researching, how these different configurations are not just the expression of a single technology but emerge as a result of multiple cosmotechnics.
How to do it practically? I am listing here a few examples that inspire me. This is a still incomplete list of both ontological and epistemic “reorganizations” that I plan to expand and retrofit as I forge ahead in this intellectual project. The list is, by design, messy and promiscuously undisciplined. I will keep pilfering ideas around to rewire some of the circuits that inevitably orient my current research questions.
- A different perspective on the relationship between technical failure and technological success, as narrated in Thomas S. Mullaney’s “The Chinese Typewriter”
- Incompleteness as an inherent feature of technology, as in Prince Guma’s challenge to teleological understandings of infrastructure (even when the latter are recognized to be diverse and heterogeneous)
- Digital-analog coevolution, and the idea of bypassing technologies as pointed out by Hallam Stevens in this commentary about the Chinese registers of digital infrastructure
- Shanzhai (山寨) as a form of technological carefulness, as portrayed in Ziaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm
- The under-contruction-ness of the meanings of China in Kenya, as Wangui Kimari has written
- The displacements of technological promise as experimental acts of prototyping happening beyond the Western canon of Silicon Valley practices of innovation, as in Silvia Lindtner’s Prototype Nation
- The idea of a uniquely Chinese form of experimental urbanism, as explained by Juan Du in her beautiful book on Shenzhen’s histories
More to come….
Reading is always a work in progress…
