The beaded African tribesman is a powerful image in the western imagination. It is suggestive of life far removed from the financially motivated modern world. The representation of the Kalahari as isolated is a familiar trope, but is one that does not do justice to the connected world of relations that exists there. To be connected to a network is sometimes seen as a condition of modernity, or even post-modernity. While electronic communications and high-speed travel may have made physical distance less of an obstacle to some transactions, the condition of connectedness may be seen as...