When I was trying to understand the story Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okafor, the idea that I keep coming back to is how we humans always seem to be losing control of our own creations. Okafor illustrates this point incredibly strikingly through her depiction of Zombies, artificial intelligence beings created to protect pipelines that begin to turn on the humans that created them. But I don’t think her point was that we are going to lose control of artificial intelligence, but that we lose control of everything we create. She mentioned earlier in the story that the pipelines running through the town were causing infertility in the women and the men were beginning to pee blood. We create these pipelines preaching ideas of “advancement” and “development,” talking constantly about the wealth and prosperity they will bring, but those are very rarely the true consequences of the people whose lives are actually affected by the pipelines. We see them burst and spill toxic materials into our water sources and our land all the time. We see the terrible impacts that they have on the people who are forced to live and survive the closest to them, and yet we continue to want to believe in the inherent ‘goodness’ of our creations. Especially when those terrible impacts are happening in poor, black communities that always bear the burden of rich, white countries’ “development”.
With her story, Okafor depicts how continuing to live in this arrogance will have disastrous consequences for humankind. If we continue to build and develop and create things without fully considering, or even understanding, the consequences, we will one day be forced to confront them. Some day the damage that our creations inflict on the world will not only happen to the populations that oil companies can easily ignore or sweep under the rug, but they will be forced to reckon with the monsters they have created.
