For an excellent example of how the attention whoring and clickbaiting we whine about is making the web a crappier place, look no further than this Reddit post from today, which had the headline “He didn’t have a car, so he built his own from scratch”. Well, actually we’re going to look a LOT further, so bear with us. The Reddit post links to an Imgur GIF that has the same title. Not surprisingly, the comments on Reddit are rife with jokes belittling Africans, and peppered with some ignorant “good guy” attempts at setting things straight, suggesting, for instance, that “lots of people in Nigeria can afford cars and this guy has a cool hobby”.
While that commenter probably feels like a good person for suggesting “African Guy” probably is not in fact some ignorant primitive with a bone in his nose living in a grass hut, it almost exacerbates the problem, by reinforcing the Average American White Male Internet User’s ignorant condescension, which in this case basically consists of “I don’t know what language this guy is speaking or what country he’s in, but it must be a crappy one, and this must be the only way he can own a car”.
We bothered to dig a little deeper, and it turns out African Guy has a name. It’s Baila Ndiaye, he’s from Senegal, and he currently lives in France. He not only built this car, but he also plans to build an airplane. That France24 piece includes some words from Ndiaye himself, including the observation that “In Africa, we need more machines in order to develop. That leaves us two solutions: either buy them and get into debt, or build them ourselves with materials that we already have.”
Ndiaye might be able to think a little differently, if today’s web weren’t built on an “Upworthy-like” model of honing content for shareability by stripping it of its original meaning and giving it a more clickable headline to generate site traffic and ad revenue. In this case, doing so deprives Ndiaye of any credit for his cool accomplishments, and reduces him to African Guy Who Doesn’t Have a Car. Imagine how differently this could play out if instead, someone had said “hey, look at what this amazing dude is doing, let’s start a kickstarter or something to give him a boost!”
Hmmm. More on that soon. Maybe we’ll drop him a line on Facebook and ask if he’s interested.
Here’s a YouTube Clip With Better Resolution
Here’s the Crappy GIF on Imgur
