What It’s Worth

Bride Price was an app that launched in Nigeria—created by the agency Anakle—where you’d input measurements about women (leg length, facial symmetry, weight) and get back a number. A price. The creator defended it as honoring tradition, which is what you say when you want to scale something ugly and keep your conscience clean.

Bride price is real in Nigeria and elsewhere, a practice with history and weight. But something happens when you automate it. You’re not preserving a tradition at that point—you’re turning it into a product. The negotiation, whatever humanity might’ve survived in the old practice, gets flattened into input fields and an algorithm. It becomes mechanical. Impersonal in a way that’s worse than the personal injustice it came from.

The backlash was immediate. The response was predictable—cultural preservation, tradition, that’s just how things are. And it’s true that every culture finds ways to justify the reduction of people to their utility or their bodies. But there’s something specifically hollow about digitizing something that was already wrong, about making it scalable and algorithmic. You don’t have to reckon with anything when an app is doing the thinking for you.

I’m not going to pretend I’m the one to decide what’s authentic to Nigerian culture or not. But turning something ugly into code, into something frictionless and automated—that feels like its own corruption.