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The future is not a blank slate – it’s a contested terrain, and we find ourselves caught in the crossfire. Mainstream philosophy has long framed time as linear, placing Europe at the pinnacle of progress. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Immanuel Kant declared, “Among the Negroes is to be found none who has accomplished anything in art or science... So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man.” In Lectures on The Philosophy of History (1830), Georg W.F. Hegel added, “At this point we leave Africa... it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Early 20th-century European Futurism – notably Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) – intensified a racialised paradigm, glorifying speed, mechanisation, and a masculinist, militaristic, fascist future. Yet critics like Walter Benjamin, particularly in his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), warned of fascism’s crude aestheticisation of politics and its tendency to glorify a problematic past.
These critiques persist beyond the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism (1995) identifies the traits of fascist ideology as fundamentally rooted in nostalgia. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) describes the Global South as having been relegated to a racialised “waiting room of history,” where modernity is framed as a future achievement rather than a lived reality. Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) distinguishes between “restorative nostalgia,” which aims to rebuild a lost home, and “reflective nostalgia,” which dwells in longing without seeking return. Popularising the phrase “nostalgia is a fascist impulse,” Mark Fisher, writing in Capitalist Realism (2009) and on his blog k-punk (active from 2003 until he passed in 2017), argues that neoliberals’ fixation on the aesthetics of the past suppresses the imagination of new futures.
Although the term was coined by Mark Dery in Black to the Future (1994), Afrofuturism was shaped by pioneers like Sun Ra, who blended cosmic myth and futurism in Black culture. In Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1990) and BLACK TO THE FUTURISM (1990), Greg Tate argues that what seems like chaos, a shortcoming, or error in Black culture is actually an electric creative force.
African Time connects past, present, and future. John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) says ancestors actively shape the present. Fast forward to 2019, and Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism to define a sci-fi sub-genre distinct from Afrofuturism’s diasporic focus. A focused engagement with local cultural practices like ukubhula – a divinatory ritual mirroring predictive technologies – offers promising pathways to innovate STEM fields by integrating Indigenous knowledge systems with contemporary culture’s visions for the future.
As we turn to the question of technology – central to any vision of the future – we recognise it as involving not merely tools and techniques, but also byproducts of underlying worldviews that can marginalise bodies, cultures, and knowledges as other – casting Western, patriarchal paradigms as the default. As Heidegger mused in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), modern technology ‘enframes’ reality, reducing all beings to resources for control. Glance at tech stats (reality[?]) and it’s clear who is being othered and/or controlled.
Richard Coyne’s Technoromanticism (1999) exposes the idealised myths shaping technological mediation, illustrating how Western ideals like romanticism, holism, transcendence, and enlightenment – exemplified by Marshall McLuhan’s utopian vision of cyberspace – and digital technology’s ongoing desire to recover the ‘real’, are orchestrated. Coyne’s careful critique invites reflection on tech’s vision of the unreal. Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (2008) laid bare the systemic erasure of Black lives, which renders them unreal or invisible.
In What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? (2017), Clapperton Mavhunga adds insight, advocating that we should start by going beyond viewing Africa as a passive recipient of technology and recognise it as a site of inventive, philosophically rich knowledge production. Mavhunga foregrounds African systems of meaning-making like the ethos of ‘fixing,’ the use of everyday materials, and the transformation of local environments into infrastructure as valid and vital expressions of science and innovation.
Yuk Hui’s Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics (2018) argues for rethinking cosmopolitics in the Anthropocene by recognising multiple culturally embedded technologies (‘cosmotechnics’) that challenge universalist modernity and call for politics grounded in diverse cosmologies. Hui draws on Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) to explore alternative technological imaginaries and non-Western temporalities, using these to challenge Western universalism and to promote pluralistic understandings of technology and cosmology.
Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018) exposes how contemporary tech infrastructures sexualise “Black girls” while sanitising whiteness, not by accident, but by design – rooted in commercial imperatives and hegemonic desire. In her book, Race After Technology (2019), Ruha Benjamin critiques tech systems that perpetuate racial bias and discrimination. But tech activists like Timrit Gebru’s firing from Google after critiquing large-scale AI systems proves the tech industry’s resistance to ethical scrutiny, especially when led by Black women.
Michael Kwet’s “Digital colonialism is threatening the Global South” (2019) exposes Big Tech as a new and willing imperial force, dominating the world through proprietary software, centralised clouds, and data extraction. Silicon Valley’s “Move fast, break things” mantra relies on exploitation. African minerals – coltan, cobalt, lithium – often mined using racialised labour, causing environmental harm, sustain modern technology, yet replicate old inequalities.
Techno-Fascism: It's Bigger Than Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – intriguingly, both originating in South Africa – have become key figures of Techno-Fascism. Co-founders of PayPal, they went on to own tech empires: Musk with Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink; Thiel with Palantir and Founders Fund. Their ventures increasingly merge private innovation with state power and promote ideologies that favour techno-authoritarianism and are anti-democratic.
Dirk Kohnert’s How Elon Musk’s expanding footprint is shaping the future of sub-Saharan Africa (2025) describes Musk as a “techno-feudal lord,” leveraging his ventures to exert geopolitical influence. His 2022 takeover of X (formerly Twitter) helped shift the world towards right-wing populism by spreading misinformation and enabling racist content. Musk’s settler-colonial roots – apartheid-era privilege and ties to the white nationalist group, AfriForum – fuel a fusion of Silicon Valley libertarianism, Western nationalism, and colonial nostalgia.
South Africa’s rejection of Musk’s proposed Starlink contract was primarily based on the country’s regulatory framework, specifically its broad-based Black economic empowerment policies, which require foreign telecommunications companies to allocate at least 30% equity to historically disadvantaged South Africans. Musk, the very same South African-born billionaire and the world’s richest person, publicly condemned these requirements as “openly racist”, promoting the popular propaganda of white victimhood.
Why Trump's bullying of South Africa will backfire
On 15 May 2025, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, spread the false ‘white genocide’ conspiracy about South Africa for 17 hours – a glitch that exposed the dangers of techno-racism. Ever since, Musk’s powerful cronies – including American President Donald Trump – have made all kinds of threats in broader attempts to disarm the country. On May 21, 2025, SA President Cyril Ramaphosa met Trump at the White House, and was publicly confronted with the debunked myths of ‘white genocide’, which he calmly refuted, earning global praise for his composure.
After Ramaphosa’s meeting with Trump, South Africa seemed to find a loophole that allows Starlink’s entry. Critics warn that this risks undermining Black economic empowerment aims by favouring foreign interests and enabling Musk to consolidate power, benefiting elites over most South Africans. Following a backlash, the Communications Minister, Solly Malatsi, denied that the eased ownership rules aided Starlink.
Known for boosting right-wing movements in at least 18 countries, Musk backed Trump’s 2024 election campaign and was appointed senior advisor and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump’s victory. But their alliance quickly deteriorated – antics like Musk’s Nazi salute video caused Tesla’s stock to plunge, while Trump’s approval ratings also fell. They clashed over Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: Musk argued it undermined DOGE’s goals, while Trump said that Musk had “lost his mind” because the bill lacked incentives for electric vehicles that would benefit Tesla.
By early June 2025, their feud had gone nuclear, playing out on social media platforms for all to see – Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s contracts, and Musk warned of serious consequences since SpaceX’s Dragon is the US’s only access to the International Space Station. Despite tensions, many expect them to reconcile, as their alliance is mutually beneficial and could thwart their common enemies – which, seemingly, includes South Africa. Musk’s influence shows how tech giants now rival states in power, often mirroring authoritarian regimes.
The ‘move fast and break things’ mantra typifies tech’s pursuit of progress as an inherently violent one. Early colonial ships – often logged as trade vessels – were quickly weaponised, inaugurating a lineage of Western techno-militarism. What began as commerce soon morphed into conquest, a pattern mirrored today as civilian tech is repurposed for surveillance, control, and warfare. Another tech bro and proud Trump lover, Palmer Luckey, is the founder of Anduril, which supplies autonomous weapons that have been used in the Ukraine war. In a 2025 60 Minutes interview, he called for America to become the “world gun store,” offering a view of Silicon Valley’s complicity in the militarisation of the globe.
Coleen M. Carrigan’s article Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros (2024) critiques the toxic ‘Bro code’ culture in tech, which promotes aggression, sexism, and exclusion while stifling diversity and social good. Despite its innovative image, computing continues to marginalise women and non-binary people, especially those of colour, who face higher layoff rates, harassment, and authoritarian leadership. Now, feminist, minority, and labour coalitions are intensifying efforts to expose the industry’s broken promises.
Despite growing awareness of Big Tech’s insatiable data thirst, harm to marginalised communities is obscured, while regulation lags and immense faith is placed in tech bros. The propagandised divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tech conceals how exploitation is built into design. Rather than baiting and burdening marginalised users, we can interpret so-called ‘bad’ practices like piracy as hybrid spaces of tech disruption.
Mbembe’s notion of Africa’s “technological marginality” describes a culture of “making do”. In Joburg, crime becomes a stark expression of that ingenuity, laying bare how innovation emerges under constraint. Cybercrime, which refers to so-called ‘bad’ acts committed online – like hacking – can be malicious or ethical; it is scamming that implicitly relies on deception. In a crime-ridden metropolis with shifting contexts, uneven access, and low cybersecurity awareness, practices like these become harder to define and decode.
The local hacking scene is a hot ecosystem that includes ethical ‘white hats’ who identify and fix vulnerabilities, criminal ‘black hats’, and ambiguous ‘grey hats’. Nic Turner’s 1998 Mail & Guardian article, Hacking in SA, tells the story of early South African hackers – mostly from white suburbs and small towns, driven by boredom, curiosity, and an emerging passion for programming. Influenced by their Western counterparts, figures like Kriek Jooste, ‘Koki’, honed their technical skills to go on ‘exploits’ that exposed system flaws.
In more recent times, local cybercrime has grown more complex amid a fraught regulatory, legal, and political framework. Incidents like the Shadow Kill Hackers’ massive ransomware attacks on Johannesburg in 2019 have been widely reported. There was also the Africrypt scandal, where a crypto company, founded in 2019 by young brothers Ameer and Raees Cajee, promised high returns via proprietary algorithms but collapsed in 2021 when the brothers vanished, allegedly absconding with around R3.6 billion (US$ 230 million) of investor funds.
The hacker, like the hijacker, is a fugitive, opportunistically exploiting the matrix. Just like online scammers, whose exploitation of the anonymity of the web with simple email cons like ‘Nigerian Prince’ and ‘419’ dates back to the 1990s. Such global scams introduced the figure of the African scammer, a global persona who emerged from the throes of digital colonialism. Resisting the allure of cybercrime and its lore, African technologists can draw from the ingenuity and learn to harness systemic gaps – the primordial soup of informal innovation.
A glitch is a gap. A brief digital disruption – an imperfection – that exposes hidden weaknesses. Once defined as nothing but an unexpected malfunction in software, games, or media, glitches in emerging technologies like machine learning and quantum computing are now regarded as generative avenues that offer valuable insights for detecting anomalies or sparking radical outcomes. In this project, Glitching the Future, glitches are just that – generative cracks – catalysts for critical creativity and speculative resistance that enable alternative futures.
Thankfully, there are precedents. Glitch art is a contemporary media practice that transforms digital or analogue errors into aesthetic expression. Influenced by early 20th-century experimentation, it has gained prominence due to its intentionally inducing malfunctions, corrupting data or misusing software, to expose hidden systems. Glitch art techniques include databending (editing file code), datamoshing (removing video keyframes for motion artefacts), and misalignment (opening files in incompatible programs to generate visual distortions).
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2013), expanded as Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), advocates the glitch as a feminist tool, not a malfunction, in a world where power defaults to violence – racist, sexist, and ableist. Rather than aspire to universality, Glitch Feminism proposes radical alternatives, unsettling aesthetic norms and institutional frames. “I write myself into life,” Russell declares, echoing Steve Biko’s “I write what I like.” This kind of radical defiance is traceable across various Black traditions like Afropessimism.
From the context of the Global South, vernacular glitching could be a way of activating systemic disruptions to affect digital and social realities. Factors like load shedding, siphithiphithi at the taxi rank, phone theft, SIM card swapping, network failure, informal settlements and cellphone towers are part and parcel of daily life, which create intimate relationships with error. Instead of shunning the limitations of our locale, we can explore them as ways to transform chaos into a resistance—an improvisational, culturally resonant digital fault line.
Yet glitching in Africa remains a relatively untapped praxis – and that has been the point of departure here. My prior attempts at doing this work were unfunded (but not unfounded!), and thus rather unsuccessful. As a freelancer at ZAM since 2024, I have been afforded a champion in the form of Executive Director Sean Fitzpatrick, whose trust and mentorship enabled the project to grow. For Glitching the Future, I selected contributors who inhabit and have a presence within the orbit of the project and whose calibre I profoundly admire.
Aluta Null’s mood and storyboard imagines the future not as arrival, but as unresolved and unapologetically unfinished. Through chroma keys, PNG overlays, and digital scaffolds, their aesthetic resists closure, opting for process as politics. Maneo Mohale’s The Fall can be read as a premonition, not merely of loss or defeat, but of a moment of immense potential. The imagery—from shadows and empires falling to statues toppled and futures obscured—evokes decolonial moments during which falling became a method for improvised refusal.
Siyasanga Ngqengqeza, a fourth-year Wits art student, turned from computer science to art, presents Impazamo, which explores coding in isiXhosa. Lethabo Motseleng is a young journalist and award-winning podcaster, reports that the youth is repurposing digital tools with everyday ingenuity in Tech – The backbone of creativity in Johannesburg.
Khanya Mashabela’s A Brief History of Video and Net Art in South Africa offers a sharp exploration of how local artists engage digital media. Thulile Gamedze’s On Doom Scrolling and Tripping Balls, compares the sensation of being high with the chaotic flow of TikTok, where endless scrolls mimic hallucinatory thought loops. In Bana ba Straata: Looking at Focalistic as a Milieu of SA Youth Being Outside-Outside, Amogelang Maledu frames Amapiano as decolonial praxis, coded through the legacies of anti apartheid protest culture.
This work is necessarily incomplete. But its importance cannot be overstated. We can’t afford to scroll uncritically. Technology doesn't just mediate the future—it is actively fabulating it. We are part of that process. Glitching the Future is a rare site of speculative repair, smashing against the boundaries between control, error, and creativity. It rejects techno-universalism, positioning African cultural production as a catalyst for inclusive tech futures. We are not seeking to fix the future, we’re way ahead! Subtly moving in sync with it—glitch by glitch.
