Of Bloatware and Spreadsheets: Nairobi, Chinese Phones, and the Limits of Data Coloniality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article charts the recent history of affordable Chinese phones in Nairobi, a city heralded by many as one of Africa’s digital capitals. Here, cheap handsets manufactured in China are the material commodities that facilitate an increasingly competitive datafication of urban life. From crypto-wallets to distributed logistic platforms, Chinese phones are the enablers of new, datafied economies that seek to transform and incorporate so-called “frontier markets”—informal economies that have thus far escaped the circuits of digital capital. Yet the story of low-cost phones also reveals how these frontiers are sites of trials, negotiations, glitches, agency, and adaptations. In fact, it was urban data about Nairobi that shaped the making of these now ubiquitous devices. Combining oral history and an ethnography of the experts that punctuate the value chains of affordable cell phones, this article ultimately challenges some of the widespread assumptions about (China’s) data coloniality in Africa.