Why Much of Poor Black Africa Is Already in the Future

The Stranger: "Indeed, Beijing in the early '80s, when bicycles dominated its streets, was, in this sense, more in the future than it is now, when cars clog its streets and hog valuable space. China is going backward in so many ways. Progress has become a mixed bag. Black Africa must see and expand the future that already exists in many parts of its underdevelopment (I call this horizontal progress—as opposed to 20th-century vertical progress). The fact that 60 percent of trips in Addis Ababa are made on foot (6 percent in cars) is so 2015 and beyond; whereas the fact that just below 50 percent of commuters in Seattle are solo drivers is, though impressive for an American city, still so 1950s—a period, by the way, that madly imagined space travel in sterile, metal-clean spaces, whereas we now see correctly that travel into deep space will have to be muddy and with our messmates (life is not a thing but a system of things)."