Hey 👋

Sheriff here,

Quick heads-up: today's story gets a little dystopian. Some might call that alarmist. We'd call it a lens for seeing the present clearly and guessing where it goes next.

But before we dive too deep, I have some news!

It was a vision of heavy control: iron boots, big government, and 24/7 surveillance.

That year, he wrote a book about his vision, and titled it 1984.

Nineteen Eighty-Four imagined a society where the government watched everything, rewrote history at will, and controlled language so tightly that rebellion wasn't unthinkable. 

The book became a cultural landmark, a warning against a government that gets too big. 

"Orwellian" entered the dictionary. Surveillance cameras got nicknamed "Big Brother." 

Entire political movements were built on the fear that society was heading toward that future.

But Orwell's dystopia had a fatal flaw: it required enormous effort.

The Ingsoc, 1984’s ruling party, needed thousands of bureaucrats to rewrite newspaper archives, a secret police to monitor citizens, and many telescreens bolted to walls. 

In the book, controlling a population was expensive, clunky, and labour-intensive.

But in real life, 70 years after 1984 was published, we’ve solved all of these problems.

We have phones that listen to us all the time. Apps that know our likes and wants better than we do. 

And attention spans are hard at work printing money for social media companies.

The ironic part is, we don’t call this tyranny. We call it convenience, safety, and sometimes leisure. 

In many ways, 1984 is already here, and with extras.

Now, with AI taking over the world, the effort required to make 1984 a reality is much, much smaller.

And it’s already happening. There are signs everywhere. 

In today’s edition, I’ll show you some of them, starting with…

Orwell's “Big Brother” needed an all-seeing bureaucracy.

These are thousands of people watching the screens, filing reports, and making arrests.

Surveillance was a full-time job. And full-time jobs cost money.

In the real world, AI has removed the cost.

In 2023, a company called Clearview AI stole 30 billion photos from social media, without anyone's consent.

When the public found out, the company responded to the outrage by offering victims equity.

And the photos? Clearview AI used them to build a facial recognition database now used by 2,400 law enforcement agencies in the US alone. 

Today, “Big Brother” is truly everywhere.

The purpose of these systems is to track crime when they happen.

But thanks to AI, systems can now “detect” crime before they happen.

It’s called predictive policing, and it uses machine learning to flag people as criminal risks before they’ve done anything.

It’s dystopian, yes. But we’re convinced it’s a needed tradeoff in exchange for security.

Privacy is now a myth, and companies like Clearview AI make money violating privacy on behalf of the government.

Despite the huge price the public pays, these systems break.

In Detroit, a facial ID program misidentified suspects roughly 96% of the time and led to wrongful arrests of many Black people.

And in Los Angeles, the police force abandoned its predictive policing system because it couldn’t determine whether the software actually reduced crime.

These systems were created to make safekeeping humans more automatic at scale.

But for the most part, they’ve also scaled up the biases that already exist.

And the consequence of this is…

In Orwell’s novel, an entire government ministry existed to rewrite history. 

Photographs were doctored. The past was whatever the Party said it was, and it changed daily.

That used to sound absurd. Now it sounds like a Tuesday.

In January 2024, an employee at British engineering firm Arup was tricked into wiring $25.6 million to fraudsters after joining a video call with deepfake recreations of his CFO and colleagues. 

Every single person on that call was AI-generated. 

The fraud only came to light when the employee checked in with the actual headquarters.

That's one incident, but the trend is staggering. 

Deepfake files surged from 500,000 in 2023 to 8 million in 2025, a 900% jump. 

And we’re increasingly defenceless against them.

Humans can only spot high-quality video deepfakes 24.5% of the time. 

Voice cloning now needs just three seconds of audio to generate a convincing replica of someone's voice.

Orwell's Ministry of Truth employed thousands of people and still struggled to keep up. 

Today, one person with a laptop can manufacture a plausible alternative version of any event, in any language, in minutes.

The question isn't whether truth can be manipulated. 

It's whether "truth" as a shared concept survives at all. 

AI is increasingly creating the content we read, watch, and believe.

An Ahrefs study of 900,000 new web pages found that 74% already contained AI-generated content.

Europol warns that up to 90% of online content could be synthetically generated by the end of 2026.

When fabricating reality becomes cheaper than documenting it, the economics flip. 

Verifying something becomes expensive, while making up something becomes the default.

We're heading toward a world where the truth is plural, and often fake.

It’s the world Orwell imagined, but bigger, and with wider reach.

And in Africa…

Everything above is the Western version of the story. 

It's the version that gets TED talks, congressional hearings, and thoughtful op-eds in the Atlantic. 

It's also the version with the most guardrails. 

Independent courts. A relatively free press. Data protection laws with actual teeth. Senators who can haul tech CEOs in front of cameras and at least pretend to be angry.

Africa has fewer of those things. So the same trends land differently; faster, harder, and with less pushback.

Let’s start with surveillance. 

Huawei's Safe City programme, which bundles AI-powered facial recognition and predictive policing into a single government package, has been deployed in Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, and a dozen other African capitals. 

And it’s borne fruit.

In 2020, during the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, the government froze the bank accounts of protest organisers and used financial surveillance to choke off donations. 

In Uganda, Huawei-supplied facial recognition cameras were rolled out in the run-up to the 2021 election, and Bobi Wine's campaign alleged that the system was being used to target the opposition. 

In the 2023 Nigerian presidential election, AI-manipulated audio of the leading candidates circulated widely on WhatsApp, in a country where WhatsApp is, for many voters, the primary source of news. 

One clip purported to capture Atiku Abubakar, a presidential candidate, and two allies plotting to rig the election. 

It was fabricated, but it travelled faster than the fact-check. 

Fact-checkers across the continent have documented a sharp rise in AI-generated political content, with almost no native-language detection tools to counter it. 

The economic flip we talked about earlier, where verifying becomes expensive, and fabricating becomes free, hits hardest in places where verification infrastructure was already thin. 

And as more capable surveillance systems are built, the ability of the populace to speak freely, revolt, or protest bad governments will weaken.

But this time, it won’t be in 1984 or an imaginary world of tyranny. It’ll be 2084, right here on the continent.

So, what do you think about this future? Is it merely fiction, or are we living in a version of it already?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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