As the Boeing 737 rumbled down Runway 23 at Julius Nyerere International Airport and reached VR, I knew I was about to take off – away from the stillness of Dar es Salaam and back into the noise of the world.
But part of me stayed behind in that silence – in a city where connection was cut, voices were muted, and the most human instinct of all, to reach out, was momentarily impossible.
During the five days I was there, Tanzania had been under an internet blackout amid election-related violence. The country felt suspended between calm and fear.
When the signal vanished in Tanzania, the world grew quieter. But it wasn’t the kind of silence that heals — it was the kind that holds its breath
From the hotel, the city looked like a ghost town: stores shuttered, streets empty, the air thick with a kind of waiting. The usual soundtrack of traffic, vendors, and laughter had vanished — replaced by the distant wail of sirens, the rumble of military trucks ferrying soldiers across town, and the cautious footsteps of a few brave citizens venturing out.
Yet within that stillness I noticed something we rarely hear above the digital hum – unhurried conversations, eye contact that lingers, the small choreography of people taking care of each other.
It was humbling. I had a safe bed, good coffee, and the ability to leave. Most didn’t. For small shop owners, street workers, and families waiting for news, the silence wasn’t relief; it was risk.
For me, disconnection was an inconvenience. For millions, it was survival suspended.
It reminded me that disconnection, when chosen, can be medicine. When imposed, it becomes a form of theft – of agency, livelihood, and voice.
The Privilege of Disconnection
In many circles, “unplugging” has become a curated virtue: retreats with locked phones, apps that ration attention, weekends pledged to analog life. We speak about it as if silence were a commodity one could purchase.
But silence behaves differently when someone else holds the switch.
When the network dies on command, the consequences don’t arrive as headlines — they arrive as quiet interruptions. The same blackout that gave me long hours to reflect also meant businesses couldn’t take mobile payments, families couldn’t message across town, and hotel staff whispered updates they couldn’t confirm. Conversations that once moved through screens now traveled by word of mouth. News, reassurance, even love had to take the long way around.
It forced a question we should be asking ourselves: who is allowed to treat connectivity as a lifestyle choice, and who must live with it as a lifeline? Our global conversation about “digital well-being” can sound aspirational until it meets the reality of people whose day-to-day survival is mediated by a signal.
Disconnection by choice can be a spiritual practice. Disconnection by force is social control.
The Politics of Silence
Every era refines the tools of control. Once, it was borders and blockades. Then, broadcast licenses and printing presses. Now, it is bandwidth.
An internet blackout doesn’t look like a siren; it looks like a loading wheel. It isn’t loud; it’s total. It doesn’t announce itself; it simply makes the world smaller, one disabled protocol at a time. In an instant, a nation can fall out of the room where decisions are made and stories are told. Not erased – excluded.
We often speculate about an AI future that might silence us; but this experience reminded me — humans are still perfectly capable of doing that on their own. What made the blackout most unsettling wasn’t only the order itself – it was how quickly a society adapts to it. Cash reappears. Rumor replaces reporting. People invent workarounds with courage and ingenuity. Life bends, because it must. But that bending leaves a residue: the recognition that silence can be imposed again.
This is the civic paradox of our time: the same systems that knit us together at scale can be pinched at a single choke point. We’ve built extraordinary networks; we’ve also centralized extraordinary levers. Resilience is no longer a luxury; it’s a democratic design requirement.
The Human Algorithm
I spend much of my time with students, asking what it means to be human in the age of AI. The question can sound abstract – until the lights flicker. When screens went dark in Dar, something ordinary and beautiful took its place: people talked. Not performatively, not for an audience – just as neighbors. They asked if anyone needed cash until the banks reopened. They shared power banks, food, directions. Someone told a joke that landed, not because it was clever, but because everyone needed to exhale at the same time.
In a week without Wi-Fi, I saw what AI still can’t replicate — the way strangers look after each other when the world stops scrolling.
AI can model preference, predict sentiment, and mirror tone. It can’t feel hunger or fear or relief. It doesn’t know the warmth of a stranger’s hand steadying you in a crowded lobby or the way a city exhales when curfew lifts. Presence is not a dataset. Empathy is not latency.
In classrooms, I tell students that their edge isn’t speed, recall, or optimization – machines will dominate those. Their edge is embodiment: attention that notices, judgment that holds two truths at once, courage that acts when it’s costly, and a conscience that refuses to outsource responsibility. When the network vanished, those capacities didn’t. If anything, they sharpened.
So perhaps future-readiness isn’t firstly technical literacy (though it matters); it is moral literacy – the ability to locate your humanity when the power goes out and to keep it when the power returns.
The Fragility of Progress
Flying out, I kept thinking about last week’s MNT on the Louvre – how quickly we can lose what we assume is permanent. That piece was about complacency; this one is about control. Together, they describe a narrow path we must walk: institutions erode when they refuse to evolve, and societies fracture when evolution is wielded without ethics.
Connectivity has become civilization’s circulatory system. But circulatory systems are only as healthy as their governance – how they are secured, who can shut them, how communities are heard when they do. We talk about innovation as if it were a race; it’s also a compact. Progress is fragile because it relies on trust: trust that the roads will open, the lights will stay on, the stories can be told.
We’re racing to make machines more human while giving up the very things that make us human.
If the last decade taught us anything, it’s this: technology without stewardship becomes control; stewardship without technology becomes stagnation. We need both: systems that are modern and humane, secure and porous, fast and fair.
This isn’t only a national problem; it’s an institutional one. Universities, schools, and civic bodies are the practice fields where we learn to build and hold power responsibly. If their infrastructures remain brittle, their graduates will be brilliant at optimization and poor at obligation. We can – and must – rehearse a different future inside them.
What This Silence Asked of Me (and Us)
I don’t want to romanticize blackouts or sermonize about screens. The world is complex, and sometimes the choices are cruelly constrained. But a forced quiet taught me a few things worth carrying forward – habits for people, practices for institutions, and principles for policymakers.
For people (agency):
- Choose presence on purpose. Make deliberate, daily rituals where no device is allowed to arbitrate your attention: a walk, a class, a family meal. Practice the muscle you’ll need when the choice is not yours.
- Build analog backups. Keep printed contacts, cash for a week, local meeting points. Resilience shouldn’t be a privilege.
- Expand your circle of care. In outages, the smallest circles matter most. Meet your neighbor before you need your neighbor.
For institutions (stewardship):
- Design for failure. Assume interruptions. Create “graceful degradation” for learning, services, and communications: offline modes, SMS fallbacks, asynchronous assessments.
- Teach AI and ethics together. Embed media literacy, algorithmic accountability, and civic responsibility across disciplines. Technical fluency without moral fluency is just acceleration.
- Retool infrastructure as protection. Modernize identity, payments, record-keeping, and comms with redundancies that can’t be shut from a single switch.
For policy (trust):
- Codify connectivity as a public good. Treat reliable access like water and roads; restrict shutdowns to truly extraordinary circumstances with transparent oversight and time-bounded review.
- Diversify the chokepoints. Encourage architectures – mesh, satellite, community networks – that make it harder to silence a nation with a single order.
- Safeguard the storytellers. When the network dims, journalism, education, and civil society become critical infrastructure. Protect them accordingly.
These aren’t luxuries. They are the scaffolding that keeps a society humane under stress.
The Moral of the Silence
Over Ethiopian airspace, as the aircraft descended, and I knew my phone would leap back to life – messages cascading, apps reloading – it struck me how quickly we accept the return of noise as proof that everything is fine. But the deeper question remains: are we fine, or just connected?
The future won’t be decided by the fastest algorithm or the strongest shutdown order. It will be shaped by whether we remember what technology is for: enlarging our humanity, not erasing it; distributing agency, not hoarding it; making room for more voices, not fewer.
Maybe the future won’t be won by those with the fastest signal, but by those who still know how to look up, listen, and feel.
Maybe the work ahead is simpler and harder than we think: to build tools and institutions that keep us human when they work – and help us stay human when they don’t.
As the lights of Addis Ababa came into view, I knew the signal would come back. The question that lingered wasn’t whether the internet would return.
It was whether we would.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
