Comment by nexthash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nexthash | Hacker News Reader

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This is so detached from reality I don't even know where to start... A Grammy-nominated singer comes out of nowhere, and decides he will go to an African country to make a futuristic revolutionary city out of nothing powered by... crypto? I seriously can't believe this story has actual traction on here, this is peak crypto, head-in-the-clouds futurism, utopia mentality, and of course complete absurdity. Do people have no sense anymore?

The only philanthropy stories I am interested in are the ones where dedicated people of character start from the ground, consider the needs of actual human beings, and work with their representative governments to bring change. Not this technology-will-fix-everything glitzy renders cryptocurrency-upgrades-society hubristic bullshit. People give that crap way too much airtime. Plus, the singer involved seems to have a sketchy history, which makes his intent here even more dubious (probably not doing this out of the kindness of his heart...)

Akon has been an active entrepreneur in Africa for a while now. He runs a solar company that provides electricity and jobs to Africans who would otherwise just be dependent on charitable giving. This project involving Akoin started in 2018 and he's been working closely with Senegal leadership to make it a success.

On the other hand, have you seen Will.i.am's smart watch? It's... Horrible https://youtu.be/5BRbMatqN3c

It seems building "smart cities" is a trend now... Saudi Arabia started one, Elon Musk wants to build something like that on Mars, and there's all these ideas of floating cities being passed around. I don't know much about Akon's entrepreneurial record but "smart futuristic city powered by a blockchain in Africa" seems like a huge and mostly imaginary leap from "local solar company". You'd be hard-pressed to come up with the cash to build this in America, so doing it in Africa feels like an unrealistic utopian dream disguising a ploy for money.

Smart cities have been a thing for a while, like in China or South Korea.

At least for Songdo in South Korea, it turns out that employers have no interest in rolling the dice on a brand new city with no proven track record, and residents don‘t really want to move to a place with no jobs. Plus cities designed from scratch in ivory towers tend to be very poor places to live nicely.

> The only philanthropy stories I am interested in are the ones where dedicated people of character start from the ground, consider the needs of actual human beings, and work with their representative governments to bring change.

And asses the impact! So many projects that meet even this excellent definition of philanthropy still fail to have a tangible positive and verifiable output.

The play pump comes to mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout_PlayPump

The "out of nowhere" is a bit unfair, since Akon is Senegalese-American and has spent a significant amount of time as a child in Senegal - his father is from Senegal, not sure about his mother:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akon#Early_life

He (and his mother) have been doing philanthrophic work in Senegal for over 10+ years.

All the other things you say make sense of course, but he's not some random person coming to Senegal.

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