By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Here is what I have learnt this December: social media and various app companies are leaning into the fact that we know that they know that we know that they are tracking our every action.

As a result, at least four of them have been so kind as to tell me what I have done this year. I suspect that there are people out there for whom these statistical reviews are a joy to read, but I am not one of them. It is like receiving an audio file of Sting’s I’ll be Watching You from your favourite tools and services.

That said, the unwelcome briefs have helped me move further into this 21st century, more comfortably informed about how uncomfortable I plan to be.

The tech is here to stay, it is a feature of life, and I might as well get used to it.

Read: Google to overhaul ad tracking system on Android devices

For many of us, 2023 might well be embodied in that phrase: “I might as well get used to it”. The future is here, and it is mundane, sinister, comfortable in terms of material wealth and despondent.

We rarely talk about globalisation anymore because it is just part of reality now. Struggling through the Dar es Salaam summer for the past month, I have been loath to make the usual jokes about being visited by the Wrath of Ra.

The entire world is remarking on unusual temperatures, not just my corner of things. And we are resigned to it, fresh out of COP28 having sold carbon credits and pretending it wasn’t a stupendously bizarre decision to have it hosted in a part of the world that is directly tied to promotion of fossil fuel usage. Might as well get used to it.

There is a fair amount of difficult truth that bears stating out loud. Covid-19 is evolving alongside us, having found a lovely host population in humans. It seems we will be together for a long time, as we will with climate change. And, of course, conflict: People dying senselessly as we indulge our hate and hatefulness.

Atop the mounds of bodies and drowning coastal cities, broken economies and impoverished families, the tyranny of capitalism marches on, still trying to claim moral authority as the best and only way to organise ourselves productively.

I was hoping for something else, to be honest. 2021 — A Space Odyssey might have had murderous AI but humanity was in space for real rather than trying to play bootlegged tracks on Alexa while their government and Google listened in, watching. I even gave it two years and instead of awesome fashion or alien contact we got… ChatGPT and more anxiety for the future of humanity.

Read: AKINYEMI: Role relevance in the face of AI revolution

But is that all we got?

The other thing I learned this year, quite begrudgingly, is the power of challenges to invigorate. The distress that the world is expressing over the war in Gaza means we are not hopelessly cynical, yet. There are mad dreamers out there who want to bring wooly mammoths back using biotech to try and deal with the climate crisis.

More and more, I find myself listening to optimists, even those who think that the EAC should be growing at the current fast pace, without rolling my eyes. Well, just a bit. If 2023 was about getting oriented to the new realities, it may be setting the way for a 2024 full of potential.

Safe passage into the next solar year and, as always, thank you for reading.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; Email [email protected]