The Round-Up 016: Who Turned Off The WiFi
There is a hilarious scene from SONY's new animated feature film, The Mitchells Vs The Machines when the villain, PAL, a sentient smartphone turned off the WiFi, and almost instantaneously, chaos ensued. Buildings were on fire, cars crashed in the streets, men, women and children were caught in a desperate frenzy to reconnect their devices. Though an exaggerated depiction of how dependent humans have become on the internet for everyday life, earlier today art imitated life. Fastly, a cloud computing provider for the British government, The Guardian, New York Times, Twitter, Amazon and Reddit and a host of other news sites, experienced a service breakage. The downtime began around 11:OOAM (U.K Time), lasting for around an hour, before Fastly troubleshot the issue and declared the error over, saying “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” in a status update.
But by that time, word had gotten around. Social media had fun poking at the network failure, with the hashtag, “Internet Outage”, some sections of the internet even speculated a cyberattack may have been the cause. Cloud computing outages are not so uncommon, and they usually don't last very long before providers get things up and running again. Still, moments like these in the history of the modern internet reflect an existentialist worldview on the intricate ecosystems that hold up our virtual communities. Think about it; behind the internet, humanity's most fascinating invention ever is really just a bunch of people, computer chips and simple processes. Speaking on the internet outage, Stephen Gilderdale, senior director at Dell Technologies told BBC, “Far from being a cause of concern, it shows the resilience of the network that it can recover so quickly”. Makes you think, doesn't it? That, unless you work in tech, most people never think about what happens behind the scenes—especially with new technology—until things don't work. That's the magic of efficient systems in motion. In today's world where everything is a startup or shiny new product, downtimes like Fastly's, tell us why the scientific method is ever more important. Because to state the obvious, that's a world where WiFi works, and you know how that goes.
Here are 3 stories you need this week
Apple users will soon be able to share whatever they're watching or listening to, with friends via FaceTime. Shareplay, an upcoming Apple feature, will allow people on the same call to stream content in sync, while staying on the call. The feature won't be exclusive to Apple Music and Apple TV alone, as developers will also be able to integrate other content streaming services. The Verge reports that HBO Max, Disney Plus, Hulu, TikTok and a host of other streamers are already on board.
Netflix is however curiously absent from the list of streamers that will possibly integrate Apple's Shareplay API. During last year's pandemic, the streaming giant launched a Netflix Party, a Google Chrome extension that allows users to watch shows at the same time remotely. Netflix Party came with a chatbox feature, where users can share reactions as the movie plays. It was a sort of innovative idea to get past the social isolation of the lockdowns at the time. Apple's video-calling advantage with FaceTime—an already popular product—builds on the Netflix Party concept in a good way. Perhaps Netflix will come on board Shareplay down the road.
Last Friday, the Nigerian government (ironically), announced via the Twitter account of the country's Ministry of Information and Culture, that “microblogging website, Twitter” had been banned indefinitely. This came after the social media platform rightfully took down a tweet threatening military violence against separatist Igbos from the south-eastern region of the country. Nigeria joins the list of politically tense nations like Iran, Egypt, China where Twitter has been fully or partially banned. Over the weekend, the president of the country, Muhammadu Buhari, a former military general, whose military regime had a history of repressing press freedoms, surprisingly reversed the initial indefinite duration of the ban, saying the ban is only temporary.
The update was begrudgingly welcome, despite a continued push by known extremist government officials like Minister of Information Lai Mohammed. Another extremist politician Adamu Garba, a small-town entrepreneur, and former presidential aspirant has also taken advantage of the Twitter ban to embark on a weird press tour for Crowwe, another social media app built by his relative. Garba, a small-town politician, rose to popularity last year after he became a viral meme for filing a $1billion lawsuit against Twitter for its role in “aiding” the #EndSARS protests. Twitter plays a huge role in Nigeria's e-Commerce ecosystem that employs a lot of young Nigerians. Speculators hint there's a business and regulatory angle to the ban, because the bad blood between the Nigerian government and Twitter, perhaps began after the latter decided to set up its Nigerian office in Ghana back in April. At the moment, Twitter remains offline in Nigeria temporarily, while regulators on both sides scramble for a resolution.
When you’re as big as Queen Bey, It’s almost expected that every public move or project will be met with some kind of divisive pushback. The reception for her new visual album, Black Is King hasn’t been all the way polarised, but the acceptance hasn’t been universal either.
Back in June, the trailer for Black is King surfaced online, followed by criticism for what many deemed a stereotypical depiction of Africans in huts, with tribal markings, animal skin, and lions. In a series of radically-tilting online reactions, words like ‘homogenisation’, ‘cultural appropriation, ‘cultural syncretism’, and—my favourite—“Wakandafication” were floated around.
In the same vein, African creatives in fashion and Afro-urban culture, whose works were credited in the film, were quick to present an alternate stance, arguing for Beyoncé’s exultation and elevation of African art and consciousness. Both positions are somewhat valid, but their conclusions only raise new conversations around the contextualisation of black identity.
In the last two years, notably, since the release of Marvel’s 2018, superhero film, Black Panther, the re-imagination of Africa in audiovisual literature has largely been inspired by romanticising Afrofuturism. Philosophically, Afrofuturism proselytizes the future of black people, by drawing inspirations from what’s accessible of black history. Often, the emphasised themes are black utopia, divine ancestry and technoculture. Read the full feature here