The Empty Chair: Raise Your Hand If...

Raise Your Hand if you know who STEVE JOBS is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who Jim Puckett or Basel Action Network is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who TERRY GOU is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Simon Lin is.

Keep your hand up if you know Dr. Graham Mytton is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Prince Nico Mbarga is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Awal Muhamed, Yaro Muhammed, or Razak of Savelugu is. 

Keep your hand up if you've ever been to Savelugu.

Now unless you are author Adam Minter... my guess is your arms are back to your side. You'll need both of them when I conclude this talk.

The technology for "touch-screen" information feedback - sending data via touching a display device - was originally developed for cathode ray tube CRTs in Germany in (I think) the 1960s (based on my interview with Allen Liu, retired CEO of Net Peripheral, in 2016).  That patent was either abandoned or purchased by the Taiwanese engineers - graduates from University of Taiwan in Taipei - decades later. These tinkerers* applied to very small handheld touchscreen devices.  The "patent claims" by Apple and Samsung over smartphone touchscreen technology went nowhere 15 years ago (if anyone remembers those court cases, keep your hand raised) because neither invented it. Taiwan was the Cyrano of electronics invention, rising from "contract manufacturing" to schematic design wizards.  Terry Gou is the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, which manufactures most iPhones. Simon Lin is the Taiwanese CEO of Wistron and Acer.

Author, Author!

The seat next to me is empty, because those of you who lowered your hands might think I'm an expert. But everything I'm telling you today is either public data, available from World Bank and IMF loans for electric grid and hydroelectric projects which provide electricity to more than 90% of people in the world.  And if you had not interviewed fake experts like Jim Puckett of BAN, or Sasha Rainbow (Placebo MTV documentary director), or photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and other "poverty porn purveyors" who got their information from Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane - that the center of capital city Accra was a remote fishing village in the 1990s... etc.

For twenty years, what I have learned by listening to the Tech Sector, listening to importers, listening to the founders of great OEMs, was derided by a lot of idiot white people who were given the privilege to sit before conferences in that chair.  People from Greenpeace, from European institutions, people like Interpol's Cornelius... people who probably meant well, but who were completely responsible for the false arrest, denigration, defamation, discrimination, and imprisonment of Tech Sector workers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, an African who may well have become the "next: Steve Jobs, the "next" Terry Gou, or the "Next" Simon Lin. (Keep your hand raised if you remember Steve Jobs second company, "NEXT").

The person in this empty chair defied EU laws on export of flip phones, smuggled in suitcases, and unlike the CRT TVs exported by Joe Benson, were too small for INTERPOL's (cringeworthy) "Project Eden" to catch.  The person in this chair allowed a critical mass of users in Africa to own a secondhand flip phone, which is why there are 170,000 mobile phone towers in Africa. The person in this chair is responsible for the investment in internet cables which connect democracy lovers in the mideast, Africa, South America, and Asia.

Another person never invited to speak from this empty chair is a friend of Dr. Graham Mytton - keep your hand raised if you know Dr. Graham Mytton, BBC Africa technician who set up TV and radio stations in Africa from the 1960s and retired 20 years ago. Dr. Mytton wrote the 1983 "Bestseller" Masscommunications In Africa. I interviewed Dr. Mytton by email a decade ago (he's deaf), who described the pulse of used CRT television imports to Africa enabled by Nigeria's "Nollywood" and VHS piracy - leapfrogging TV per household.

Look up "televisions per household" by country for 1999.  And then tell me about the "remote fishing village where 500 sea containers per month were being dumped".  Because it wasn't remote, it wasn't a fishing village, and the number of sea containers arriving there is not 500 per month. It is zero ever.

The cataclysmic evidence Environmentalist Incompetence is something we must learn from. We must not only focus on "First World Problems"... we must follow the Primum Non Nocere - first do no harm - and take a Hypocritic oath not to impose "First World Solutions" - like the shredders of CRT glass who abandoned thousands of tons of friable lead in piles across the developed world and arrested tinkerers and repairpeople for the sole crime of being black, brown, or yellow.  The best and brightest minds of the Emerging Markets believe in The Circular Economy - but like Galileo and Copernicus, they know it doesn't revolve around us.

I'm going to rehearse this and make a youtube video. The blog is not enough.

If your hands are not up in the air, I'd like to end this talk with a standing ovation.  Not for my sorry excuse of expertise... I'm nothing more than the little boy in a Hans Christian Anderson or Brothers Grimm story, who noticed the Emporer Jim Puckett was wearing no clothes.  Please put your hands together for the people who deserved to testify and tell their #OwnStories in their #OwnVoices.  Give your belated applause to the Empty Chair.

* raise your hand if you've read Yuzo Takahashi's "History of Japan: a Network of Tinkerers"? Japanese electronics manufacturers first subcontracted CRT display assembly to Taiwan in the late 1970s as they developed "JIT" management theory.

The blogging has aged. It's sometimes more beautiful to send a tweet. And I think Andy Warhol was off by about 14 minutes.