Can a minimal thing create excess? This is the provocation left to the committed reader by “Rusties,” an Africanfuturist narrative by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu about oxidized, solar-powered, AI traffic cops, and outraged humans. We might hurry to point out the counterintuitive slant of the question, but British Australian writer Sara Ahmed offers some caution. In “Happy Objects,” from the field-shaping The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed advises that small objects can induce outsized feelings. A thing can accrue excessive sentimental value depending on the affects that are attached to it, such that “judgment of a thing” is often “a matter of how we are affected by that thing.”1 In essence, our feelings can be externalized on objects as they circulate through social spaces, becoming one with the object. With the right contact, a minimal thing can reproduce material or affective excess in no specific order.
In an age of aesthetic excess and surplus data, material practices from African communities offer accounts of encounters between humans and objects steeped in a minimalist ethic of reuse. This ethic requires maximizing the smallest available amounts—the minima—of a material, utilizing a practice of what Cajetan Iheka calls “infinite resourcefulness” in a world of “finite resources.”2 Iheka might have leaned on the “poor theory” of Kenyan anti-colonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as a condition of optimizing potentials inherent in the scarce, the simple, and the minimum when he refers to these improvisatory materialisms as “imperfect media.” However, the idea of humans flipping shortage into sustainable innovation to stymie the likelihood of economic collapse or species extinction might well be Africanfuturist. It is not for nothing that Pamela Sunstrum and Nnedi Okorafor, two major exponents who disagree on the extent of site-specificness, define Africanfuturism as rooted in African material cosmologies for innovative transformation of the future.3
But resourcefulness often requires restraint. Efficient use of resources relies on scrupulous management of one’s affective draw from or to them. If Africanfuturism’s emphasis on cultivating a future inaccessible to a neoliberal enterprise of rapacious predation suggests anything, it is that improvisatory materialism requires an ethic in which emotional and material assets are circumspectly managed. Such an ethic resonates through an Africanfuturist literary imaginary that critiques material dreams of the future sans affective discipline. In this imaginary, especially as Nnedi and Kahiu narrate, minimalist sites of human-object encounter can fail as they cultivate emotional immoderation.
On the surface, “Rusties” presents this encounter in terms of a social crisis between African technophobes and a series of good-turned-rogue robotic traffic units amplifying economic output. Named rusties for being solar-powered with oxidized, ungalvanized steel exteriors, these AI embody the materiality of finite resources and the affects of infinite resourcefulness as one would expect of any futures-inclined narrative. But the necessity of minimizing affect in practices of reuse becomes clear upon realizing that tarnished steel or, better, minimal aesthetics can command extravagant reactions. For instance, the people described rusties as magical, grand, and efficient—adjectives that register awe and elation: “Machines. That’s what they were. That’s what most saw them as; that’s why it was easy to obey them . . . And they gave us good service.”
In postcolonial environments, Brian Larkin stresses that technologies are “more than just [granular] transmitters of content.”4 They cultivate sensory responsiveness by generating wonder as well as terror. It might be clear that the practice of simplicity and reuse behind rusties is a striking response to media theory’s most pertinent question: Can ugly, simple, or salvage media be powerful and generative in a time of Big Tech, excessive carbon footprints, and resource depletion? What’s not clear is the role of affective excess trafficking through the improvisatory materialities of rusties. What this excess reminds us of is that technology’s representational power is not limited to aesthetic grandeur in its strictest sense but also established through practical functions. The corroded but efficient forms of Nnedi and Kahiu’s AI allow for the kind of phenomenal experience where wonderment becomes obsession based on utility. We are prompted toward the kind of political and subjectivizing work that ugly utilitarian things do. Not only do they refuse aesthetic nimiety or streamline overstimulated sensibilities, but they also cause fixation, a form of excess. The public’s extreme elation at rusties’ competence demonstrates this.
The paranoia and terror that trail the story’s algorithmic takeover present the contact between humans and improvisatory technologies as a conjunction of material and affective economies. The takeover starts first as perennial dysphoria in the face of declining employment. Unease ramps up as clandestine campaigns against automated technologies. Vandalism of rusties’ motherboards for gold, copper, and silver by the Anti-AI underground group (Kazi Bure) follows in familiar fashion. This link between salvage and vandalism is not slippage. It is a bold Africanfuturist critique of the costly clash of minimalist materialism and affective overload. Rusties retaliate to this retributive vandalism by shutting down the economy. In panic, humans began to destroy their devices. If “contact zones” between humans and objects are sites where affects accumulate, as Ahmed and Cajetan differently intimate to us, it is also where new (and sometimes untenable) material practices emerge. In Magana’s (the protagonist) voice: “All around me, I saw it now—the market was busy with people who’d left their smart homes, where everything was wired to networks that the Rusties could access. People were crushing their phones and tablets on the ground like bugs . . . fear and restlessness were in the air.”
Excessive fear leads to more waste as humans destroy technologies on impulse, leaving wreckage and pollution born out of outrage. The collaborative argument of Okorafor and Kahiu is that minimal technical forms (or material minima in general) can drive environmental degradation via the hyperbolic sentiments they accrue. Sustainable practices require complementary material and affective orientations, for it only amounts to presumptuousness to think minimalist inventiveness can thrive in the company of affective intemperance. In other words, minimalist material improvisations—which I prefer to call rusty ethics for their emphasis on optimizing the smallest possible amount of potential as futurist communal ethos—cannot be taken as sustainability tout court. The story’s excessive technophilia, dysphoria, and eventual ecological degradation prove one thing: sustainable futures require not just (Western) predictive environmentalism to cultivate restraint in how resources are used, but also (postcolonial) counter-futures in the attachments they form. Otherwise, we must skip toward the future apprehensive of the possibilities that improvisatory minimalism maximizes.
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Endnotes
- Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), 208.
- Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2022), 222–23. Iheka defines imperfect media as “artifacts that make judicious use of limited resources and thereby lead us in the direction of more sustainable media” (225).
- Pamela P. Sunstrum, “Afro-mythology and African Futurism: The Politics of Imagining and Methodologies for Contemporary Creative Research Practices,” Paradoxa, no. 25 (2013); 113–129; Nnedi Okorafor, “Africanfuturism Defined,” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog (October 19, 2019), https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.
- Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008), 20.
Damilare Bello