Why pipes matter

I gripe too much about Internet speed, but there’s a lesson in my fist-shaking frustration. Jouncing around Nairobi in a minibus is a constant reminder of how much easier it is to build and maintain a mansion than a decent paved road. My not at all cheap apartment has a beautiful wood floor but the electricity labors to power the refrigerator; an RV with my shower’s drizzly water pressure would be recalled. Even with generators and water tanks, basics like power and water depend on a societal capacity that no one person can afford. I find it moving that the infrastructure under Manhattan reaches underground, in places, as far as the Chrysler building is tall. Once a Brit visiting me from London looked up at Midtown and marveled, “the pipes must be massive.” Those pipes, for power and water and telecommunications, don’t exist in Nairobi. Much more than in the rich world, people in Africa depend on what they alone can pay for. That’s one reason they don’t have much.

Even the wealthiest can’t buy everything they need. Go to a mall here and pick up a laptop. It’ll be only as useful as someone else’s ability to provide decent access speed. Are the hotshots pushing the $100, oops I mean $200, laptop aware of this? Have they ever tried to just check their email in Nairobi? What about in one of those villages where they say the Internet will be oh so useful?

On the other hand, technology can be wonderful when it’s unburdened by regulation. Take the lack of enforced copyright law. On the street you can buy a DVD of eight Stallone movies for less than $2. It might even work. I could live without the minibus drivers who mount TVs to their ceilings and blast music videos at incredible volume. Still it must be a matter of pride to annoy their passengers as efficiently as bus drivers anywhere in the world.