Information has become the new currency

I bought this external CD drive the other day, at a whopping N25,200 somewhere in Abuja. The CD drive on my Macbook Pro is messing up; rejecting CDs.  But I had a problem using this external cd/dvd drive. I connected to my laptop but nothing happened. My laptop wouldn’t ‘see’ the cd drive. I tried […]

I bought this external CD drive the other day, at a whopping N25,200 somewhere in Abuja. The CD drive on my Macbook Pro is messing up; rejecting CDs.  But I had a problem using this external cd/dvd drive. I connected to my laptop but nothing happened. My laptop wouldn’t ‘see’ the cd drive. I tried a million times; no dice. I was thinking of returning the appliance to the shop in Wuse 2, or how else would I get someone to ‘help’ me, even for a fee.
I ‘googled’ the problem. There is always a tome of questions and answers on just about any problem in the world. These are interactions between real people who have had your kind of problem before, and who managed to solve them; from health issues to technology.  Some of the information I got was not so helpful.  Then I got a better idea. I remembered Youtube? At least I may get someone to describe the solution for me to see.  So I typed in this query: “I CAN’T GET MY APPLE SUPERDRIVE TO WORK”. A number of people had posted different things online.
Then I found the video that explained my kind of problem. The guy, a Chinese American, explained that this was a software issue but I could do-it-myself. I followed the 4 minutes clip assiduously for almost 2 hours before I could get the cd drive to work.
‘Go to your terminal screen’.. he said. Chai! Where is that again? I managed to locate it.
“Type this command; sudo pico /Library/Prefernces/SystemsConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.. Enter. Take Command X. Take Control B. Copy “mbasd=1” and paste.
Here I was typing programming commands. The system warned me several times to be careful with ‘sudo’ commands, else I could lose all my files, and even system files; meaning the laptop may stop working altogether.  Well, I switched off the laptop and on again. Bingo! The cd drive was working.
It is a fact that many jobs will disappear never to be replaced. Even the techies are destroying their own jobs by posting these kinds of videos online. It is called creative destruction.  The space for RELEVANCE is shrinking. And without relevance, no one will pay you to do anything for them. You have to be RELEVANT. NEEDED. IMPORTANT. A PROBLEM-SOLVER, before the world we live in will agree to pay you a token. Some menial jobs will remain, but they will command peanuts. Backwater economies, like those in Africa, may continue to totter along with the old, corrupt, inefficient economic order, only that they, and their people will get sucked to the marrow in no time.
Economics has changed.
The only way out for a world where millions lose their jobs to technology, is that it becomes less and less important to actually go to work. And that it should cost as little as possible to survive, and actually live a fairly okay life. That is my grouse with our telecom providers.  Whereas the rest of the world is now taking INTERNET for granted, and through the internet, the entire world is able to connect to cost-saving measures that reduce how much they need to survive, we here make everything a big deal. And sincerely, no one who is anyone, is thinking for the collective; as in imagining how this new reality will pan out for us, much less taking any action about it. At best what I’ve seen is the same old analogue thinking; privatise, PPP, foreign investors, mining, petroleum. Our elites are very comfortable  milking the people!!
If you don’t know how to manipulate the internet, and technology in general, you’re a learner. Anyone can learn though. If you’re too old, get your children or grandchildren to help. I could have paid someone N10,000 to help ‘fix’ this software issue. That is N10,000 I’d never get back again. I could as well have gone back to where I bought the cd drive to ‘raise hell’. That will be two hours of productivity lost, on both sides, and a lot of noise pollution in the environment.
The future is one where we would actually need to work less. Wake up in the morning. Work out for 3 hours. Get tired. Go home. Bathe. Get on your laptop – or whatever device they use then. Communicate. Stay relevant. Get paid. A few people are already living in that realm – think of bloggers who get paid. Many are living that way already abroad. Here we are still talking of manufacturing ‘whatever it is’ that may become useless to the world even before we are able to complete the factory site – which we would be building with borrowed funds in the first place.
Work is no longer 8 to 5. Accenture UK started a program where staff work from home at least for two days in a week, a long time ago. Manufacturing only makes sense if we intend to produce locally FOR OURSELVES, in order to substitute what we buy from abroad. And only if we are able to protect our economy – an increasingly impossible task these days. Natural resource extraction is a no-no, because we sell natural resources for cheap, and if we are to exist in this post-capitalist, post-modern world, we need our environment to be ship-shape, not polluted and over-exploited. The future is a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) world. Job losses have become the order of the day all over the world. Workers are earning effectively less; having less to do.  I went into a bank branch here yesterday and the staff idleness was shocking.  Yet the staff were so few compared to when I worked in banks.  Unions are being destroyed eslewhere, but here, the union bosses are feeding fat off their poor members. Workers have no say.
I think we ought to look at it this way in order to see the slacks in our system. Luckily our young ones are signing on to this information superhighway. They can do with some government assistance in structuring their thoughts, and restructuring society for better living for all. Alas, many leaders in Africa are still concerned with stealing and stashing cash – in every currency – when, according to Paul Mason, a Guardian UK columnist, even cash may become irrelevant, the day all a man needs in a month, is the equivalent of $20 and access to the internet.
Information is the new capital. And unlike the current system of ‘market’ capitalism, information doesn’t operate under scarcity. Information is nothing if it is not shared, valuable in direct proportion to the number of people who have it. Markets are based on scarcity, which forms the basis for ‘price discovery’. This very structure is undergoing a process of annihilation right now. One would be more comfortable, and prouder, if your people, your country, is also at the cutting edge of information and knowledge, rather than being a consumer nation. Worse than being a consumer of cars, laptops, and even food, is being a mere consumer, not a producer of information and knowledge.
Let it not be written in future history, that in this period of tectonic shifts in global economics, knowledge, information and sociology we had but little to add.