The Tragedy of Ethiopia's Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Tragedy of Ethiopia's Internet

motherboard.vice.com

70 pointszeristor23 comments

Posting this from Addis. I have internet. The Ethiopians I know all have smartphones and internet. Viber is similarly popular to text messaging. I am very confused about this article. Lots of things are restrictive here but the article is super overblown. Maybe only 3.7% with wired internet? I'd believe that, everyone uses mobile here.

Same experience here, also from AA. Most of the countryside has also good 3G. Some websites are unreachable though. I am not inclined to comment on the political situation.

I find Vice is super interesting until they do a story on the place you're from and you realize they have zero idea what they're talking about and the entire article is nonsense.

I've stopped reading anything they put out.

This is the same reason I stopped reading The Economist. Great witty writing, until they write about my country and get lots of things wrong. I have to assume it's the same with their articles about industries and places I am not familiar with.

My browser history over the past few months is riddled with 20-minute bursts of trying to find the wikipedia page for a certain cognitive fallacy that is related to what you and your parent comment are talking about.

The gist of it is that we tend to trust the authority of the media, up until a point where the the media incorrectly or disingenuously reports on something that we are an expert on. This theory disagrees with what you and your parent comment are saying and instead contends that as soon as they switch to another story, we continue to trust their authority on other topics without any kind of diminished reputation.

I feel like I'm going crazy, but I am almost certain this page exists and my google-fu is continually failing me.

How about this: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

Yes! That's it! Thank you!

I'm amazed that this is actually not an established theory, as I believed it to be. It explains why this doesn't have a wikipedia article, because it's really just the musing of some guy.

http://english.stackexchange.com/posts/244277/revisions

I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 Expanded Universe (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine Time, I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed.

Thing is, it's just not going to be acknowledged by large groups of people; for example Wikipedians won't like it because it totally undercuts what what they base verifiability on.

What's your country if you don't mind me asking?

News in general about Ethiopia is confusing from a distance. When I visited people seemed happy with the government and you could see concrete (literally) signs of progress everywhere. Lots of new roads, the new railroad, tons of new schools, the new light rail in Addis, etc. When you read Ethiopian news sites the diaspora is clearly extremely unhappy with the government. Maybe it's just a case where the country has clear winners & losers and your experience of the place has a lot to do with which side you fall on.

if you research enough / know enough / meet enough ethiopians to really form an opinion, you will know that the article is a lot more close to the truth!

I've lived in Addis for the past 10+ years. The article is spot on. You say everyone here (i.e. Addis) has internet access. Well, Addis' population is ~3.4 million-- just about 3.7% of the country. And if you moved outside the capital, you'd quickly realize how rare internet access is.

I read the article in its entirety, there are some mistakes here and there (the language is "Amharic" not "Aramic") but for the most part I found it accurate. Most certainly not "super overblown".

Just as a counter datapoint, my experience in Ethiopia was very different. I was sometimes three hours from the nearest paved road and yet I would have full cellular signal, and often even 2G or 3G connectivity.

I had no issues browsing the web, using my VPN, or doing anything else. I was with a group of about 40 people, and we had about 10 or 15 local Ethiopians in our group. None would be considered privileged or rich, and they also all had regular Internet access either on their phones or at Internet cafes. Their nearest real city was Mekele up in the North. Almost all of them folks in our group had Facebook.

Even at the top of the Gheralta mountains we had strong signal. It was actually mind-blowing how much cellular coverage we had in the country.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100191249027242&se...

https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/2...

https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/4...

I've never been there, but many stories I've read have mentioned good cell signals in the middle of nowhere, Africa.

If only we could have this in the US.

I don't get this bit: "...Security experts told me that there is no evidence Ginbot 7 has ever undertaken terrorist activity, and the organization is not on the US State Department’s list of terror organizations.

Ginbot 7 is largely a collection of exiled Ethiopians who operate outside the borders of the country they wish to change. According to an ESAT report, Ginbot 7 has attacked government soldiers, which Zeleke confirmed to me."

Surely attacking government soldiers qualifies as a terrorist activity?

> Surely attacking government soldiers qualifies as a terrorist activity?

Depends on how friendly the government is to the US.

No, it counts as military activity. Attacking civilians with the intent to scare the populace at large counts as terrorist activity.

While there is no single definition of terrorism, attacking civilians instead of soldiers is a common theme among the most popular definitions.

This really depends on the spin the government in place puts on it.

This is from Addis, the capital. Its a very common experience that not only the Internet but electric power too is intermittent, sometimes for days. People use mobile data carefully, because its expensive. Also, sites are filtered based on political content. There is no commerce or whatsoever business activity using the Internet due to restrictions and/or service reliability issues.

I used to be in Addis a while back (happy to see so many people in the comments posting from A.A)

Decent internet can be tough to find outside the capital and the local telco generally reacts to service interruptions with "meh, they'll just have to deal with it" e-commerce is starting to pick up slightly but definitely has a ways to go.

The surveillance is real. I know people who are not politically active have their phones tapped, would get their new text messages read (couldn't open their inbox and would see the counts of new messages go up and down randomly) to the point where they were physically surveilled in broad daylight with plainclothes and uniformed people tailing them and entering their home (they eventually left)

There's also blame to go around for the Diaspora as well. Often times some will believe they know best just because they were educated in the West and have the false confidence to think that only their perspective is correct and will voice it adamantly (to the point where I've seen "evidence" that was clearly fabricated). Theres very little compromise when it comes to political perspectives which squashes meaningful discussions before they ever happen and exacerbates things further.

Access to the internet just isn't as high a priority there as keeping everyone on the same page when it comes to developmental priorities. There's certainly some positive signs when it comes to the speed at which things have changed in the last 10 yrs but it's important to recognize diminishing returns when you see them. I wonder if a state-led development model like Ethiopia's will be equipped at all to spot that when it happens and adapt quickly enough.

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