Two winters ago I sat in a server room in Nairobi watching a recommendation engine serve ancestral Yoruba proverbs beside sales copy. It parsed my grandmother's oral tradition with the same flattening logic it applied to product reviews. I realized then that our most powerful information architecture has no concept of what matters.
The Rituals We Coded Out
Every African knowledge system I grew up around had built-in protocols for context. The griot did not recite the same epic at a funeral and a birth. Timing, tone, and narrative selection were structural choices. They encoded meaning where modern systems often see only engagement.