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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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My anecdata consists of two things that happened within the last month or so:

  1. An African man posting on Reddit about not eating pizza for the first time. I know that reddit has plenty of other spaces that I don't interact with, but from time to time there would be spikes/spurts from random communities into /r/all or I suppose my bubble. Like how /r/ScriptedAsianGifs can be thought of to signal the dominance of Douyin and inevitably TikTok. This isn't an African community per se, just a person from Africa that got attention, but it's enough for me to start thinking that Africa as a whole is coming online.
  2. A HN thread on the article "Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa". The article is very optimistic, the thread less so, but the general vibe I get is that at the very least this is a major development that not many are paying attention to with regards to macroeconomics (similar to how the fertility crisis is not paid a lot of attention by the masses and only recently gotten into the zeitgeist).

Maybe it's all bullshit just trying to tie a pattern to small data points, but I am inferring a positive upward trend with regards to Africa.