AO: The analyst notes that after Nairobi became famous (by Ushahidi and m-Pesa) as a site of tech knowlege innovation, development agencies and then private sector heavily invested in Nairobi start-ups and co-working spaces. But I would argue that these initiatives partly emerged because Nairobi was already a hub for development and capital. They became mutually reinforced by each other.
AO: high taxes on imported hardware resources make prototyping machines expensive to make.
AO: Coban argues that the Silicon Valley ideology applied in postcolonial contexts replicates postcolonial imaginations. However, I would counter that this again follows an assumption of a “diffusion model” that assumes Silicon Valley ideology is foreign to Nairobi when in fact it is caught up and inbricated in everyday life (not just to the foreigners who fly in and out of Nairobi).
