How Eldrid Jordan's new book challenges Silicon Valley's dominance

A technology platform can be and is a perfect stage of the Tower of Babel. One of human beings seeking to establish who and why God exists. But before achieving proportions of godly wrath and destruction, the story of David against Goliath of our times mitigates such an eventuality.

Poverty can be history because information technology has removed substantial barriers of access that increase the effort price to access. By removing friction between a many-to-many access, the effort price, a characteristic of physical goods has been wiped out. That we now can access literature in electronic Encyclopaedias that would have circulated amongst a few elites when these were paper, is but an example of how liberating technology and, in particular, internet technology with its ubiquitous reach can be.

Access to the modern technology can enhance democracy by opening gates of participation in public life by ordinary citizens. The encyclopaedia has now been challenged by the Sub-Grade A slate that existed up to the seventies in parts of the world. The iPad has taken on this archaic shape as though the slate is saying to the Encyclopaedia “I always knew I contain an infinite number of pages than the words in your entire twenty four volumes.”  But we have in this information era experienced a David vs Goliath of a different type. This is our David. A South African David who has directed his arsenal of rationality to the Silicon Valley. He has shown the essence of information technology as an institution whose power is etched in non-rivalry and naturally anti-monopoly. He puts a rational posture and practice of why technology is an instrument for gregarious existence and harmony.

The title is unapologetic. The content comes in spurts of scud missiles. The book is as potent as the cluster bombs. Surprisingly, it is not vengeful. One who had to pay a price so heavy when Goliath squashed his livelihood to smithereens, rose from the hole like the heart of the twin. In the fairytale of Masilo and Masilonyane, Masilo had buried Masilonyane’s heart after he murdered and burnt his body to ashes. The heart rose from the hole turned itself into a bird and perched on Masilo’s shoulder asking Masilo the difficult question of where Masilonyane is. At the launch of his audaciously explicit title “The Silicon Empire vs Social Impact: The David & Goliath Battle, Eldrid Jordan, our modern day Masilonyane confronts the Silicon Valley Empire and asks the question of where art thou victory. 

You see the Big Tech, especially the Silicon Valley demigods have shown their thirst for anticompetitive behaviour, greed and unrestrained arrogance. Some have advocated for fines as deterrents. But Eldrid in his title says no – fines do not work. Big tech has demonstrated again and again without fail that fines are not a deterrent sanction. This is because they can recover the quantum of fines in seconds. The appearance of these tech giants before amongst others, senators in the United States suggests that the advancements in humanity are not without existential danger. They showed their blood thirsty instincts and the great lengths they would get to, to suck like Dracula the last drop of blood from its victims. They gunned for Eldrid Jordan and were possibly very happy when they learnt that he huddled back to his mother’s house wife, children and all. But Jordan and wife Nathali is of a different stock and breed – the so called anti-fragile. They rose.

At the worst of moments when Covid-19 struck, it was not only a tragedy for a businessman whom Meta wiped off the surface of the earth with his GovChat invention but Meta were determined to deprive society of access to instruments and tools that have the potential for far greater social impact at the moment of the world’s greatest need. The journey of Eldrid Jordan, a Professor of Practice at University of Johannesburg, and a founder of MIXIT, GovChat and co-founder of Suppple with Goitse Konopi, launched his book at the University of Johannesburg on Friday the 28th of August. 

Eldrid Jordan is now on steroids, taking the book to the Silicon Valley itself and discuss the Ubuntu philosophy as one poised to change the world. He changed the world at the height of the pandemic in South Africa.

Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL

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