The Bar has Always Been Moving. Are you?

Today's Wizardry Is Tomorrow's Bare Minimum And Africa is running out of time to not care. There is a story — the kind that gets passed around in African classrooms — about a colonial-era quack doctor who sold bottled cures to rural crowds. His secret weapon wasn't the concoction. It was the label. Printed paper. English words. A logo, if you could call it that. The author who told this story noted, with quiet humor, that in that era, if you could print your claims , you were generally considered truthful. Literacy was new. The printed word carried the full weight of authority. The bottle didn't need to work. The label just needed to exist. I think about that story every time I watch a new technology go from miracle to minimum . The Ladder We Keep Forgetting We're Climbing Every generation has its wizardry. Every generation eventually forgets it was ever wizardry at all. In the early 2000s across much of Africa, having an email address made you someone. Not just anyone — someone . A Ya