Digital Creativity and Urban Entrapment in Kinshasa: Experiments in Solving Precarity

Abstract

I attend to the dialectics between precarity, urban sociality, and digital technology (le numérique) in Kinshasa. Tech engineers, and those aspiring to become one, dream of solvent futures. They share a desire to leave various forms of precarity behind and attempt to produce new urban futures by means of tech skills and digital technologies. Especially the lack of trust in urban others is considered a problem solvable with mobile phone applications and other kinds of software. Kinois tech inventiveness draws on an interpretation of the city as a social space of entrapment. The proposed solutions consist of a strategy that I call “short-cutting” of social relations, a method that involves replacing a human intermediary with a machine. Unfortunately, tech capitalism sets its own traps for Kinshasa’s tech engineers. The very particular forms of precarity from which these ingénieurs want to escape are perpetuated in the digital sphere; would-be digital innovators remain trapped.