so someone in africa built a calculator app for bride price

so someone in africa built a calculator app for bride price and somehow it ended up on japanese television. the app is called the lobola calculator and it was created by zimbabwean developer courage nyoni. and lobola for anyone unfamiliar is a long standing cultural practice in many southern african communities. where marriage involves negotiations between families often including a bride price. and while the name differs this concept is common in many other african communities. it is a deeply cultural process shaped by tradition, family dynamics and communities. and that's exactly what makes it difficult to explain to people who have never encountered it before. what courage nyoni did was take that complexity and try to translate it into something people could engage with more directly. he said he did not want it to be just a random number generator that spits out figures with nothing behind it. so instead he sought out elders in the community and worked closely with them to help shape how the algorithm actually thinks. the app takes a set of factors that typically considered in lobola discussions and uses them to generate a rough estimate. so you get asked a mix of questions like your education level and where you're from which are kind of expected. but then it goes into stuff like what you eat for breakfast and whether your weekends involve church or clubbing. so i guess if you're busy buying casa amigos every weekend it's going to charge you more. and all of that so both the serious stuff and the casual ones gets fed into the algorithm that's waiting in the answer and adjusting the lobola figure behind the scenes. and what's really interesting is how people have responded to it because it hasn't just stayed within the communities where lobola is already understood. the app has spread internationally with users outside africa downloading it out of curiosity and trying to make sense of a cultural system they've never experienced directly. that global curiosity is part of what led it to be featured on japanese television. however there has been some criticism that reduces something as nuanced and historically grounded as lobola into an algorithm risks flattening it. thus turning lived tradition into something that feels too measurable and too simplified. but i don't think the point is that the app replaces the tradition or defines it because it clearly doesn't. what it does instead is expose people to it, especially younger generations or outsiders who might never engage with it in any meaningful way otherwise. and just taking a step back here i feel like it forces us to ask questions about how culture survives in a digital world. and whether translation through technology necessarily means loss or whether it can also mean preservation in a different form. and just in general as well i feel like cultural tech is one of the most difficult things to build for. like in trying to find where you're going to get the data from, trying to actually speak with people in the communities to understand how these customs and traditions have been treated for a very long time. because we are the elders of tomorrow like look at the people around you, look at your friends. do they feel like people that can really represent your culture? like think about it. would you say this person can really reflect what yoruba, what you know, igbo traditions are supposed to look like and feel like? have they actually sat with the elders? have they actually learned these things? and we need to think about how we can adapt our customs and traditions to the way people are living right now because the generation of tomorrow like they're online, they're on the internet. those are the only ways you'll be able to pick their interest in learning about these things. and we can see that with this lobola app like people are now curious to want to know more. even people that are not part of that culture they want to know more about it. so as much as we want to keep customs and traditions the way they've always been we need to adapt it for tomorrow because we are the elders of tomorrow. these people are not going to be alive 20, 30, 50 years from now. and looking at myself as well i cannot confidently say that i can be a good elder of tomorrow because what do i know? like let's be honest, what do we actually know? and beyond bride price even or even marriage in general because that still has more customs besides the bride price. think about death, think about the birth of a child, think about other things that happen within our communities like do we know these things? i cannot confidently tell you that i know these things like i really do not know it. anyway i want to know your thoughts. do you think this is an example of culture being reduced into numbers or whether it's actually an example of culture being made visible in a way it hasn't before?