Fear of the box

Starlink and the lesson from apartheid South Africa

On 26 January 1926, a group of scientists and a journalist from The Times climbed the stairs to an upper-floor laboratory in London’s Soho. They had come to witness a demonstration by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird. Across the screen of Baird’s so-called ‘Televisor’ flickered the ghostly image of a ventriloquist dummy and the face of its puppeteer. The picture was, as The Times admitted, ‘faint and often blurred’. All the same, what Baird had demonstrated was undeniable: recognisable images, with shades of light and dark, could be transmitted by television.

Within a generation, televisions were a fixture in homes across Europe and North America. But in South Africa, they would not appear until 1976 – fifty years after Baird’s demonstration.

This delay was not for a lack of technological or financial capacity. It was not, as Rob Krabill tells us, some ‘quirky oversight’, nor was it ‘evidence of an unsophisticated Ludditism’. It was a political choice, driven by a fear that still echoes today: the fear of outside influence.

Which brings us to Starlink.

In a recent Substack post, South African MP Songezo Zibi explained why Elon Musk’s satellite internet service is, for him, a ‘hard no’. His concerns range from Musk’s record of promoting misinformation on X, to the risk of a single individual weaponising critical infrastructure for political purposes. More broadly, Zibi worries about sovereignty – about ceding control of a nation’s information environment to a foreign billionaire with unpredictable loyalties.

These are not trivial concerns. But they are also not new. South African politicians have been making versions of this argument for nearly a century. And the history of what happened last time – when the ‘threat’ was television – should give us pause.