Glitching the Future
Techno-Disruption by Other Means
Introduction.
Out of Joburg’s perplexingly primordial cyber-daze—where ancestral log drums brutally muffle outbound airwaves and data smog willfully seduces alien algorithms—emerges the fiercest clarity.
We write this not to mimic the blueprint of a “smart city,” but cos we are street-wise, pulsing with unprejudiced predictions of a whole other logic. Our Jozi is a techno-organism operated through hustlers, hijackers, hackers, paras, pickpockets and protestors, con-artists, coders and code-switchers.
Cellphone towers and savvy syndicates. E-wallets and spaza shops. Quantums and conductors. Imjondolo notilili. A phone isn’t just a device; it’s a lifeline that could cost you your life. A mobile currency. SIM cards spark shadow economies.
Clouds of data hover above us. What we see and what we do not see. Memes evolve into dialects, and TikTok trends splice between potholes.
Johannesburg is the tech backwater where errors become new languages. A signal becomes an omen. Blackouts become alchemic frameworks not brewed in sanitised labs, but in the messy systemic abyss.
The Future.
Western modernism has selfishly and stubbornly framed time as linear, placing Europe as 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 announced, “At this point we leave Africa... it has no movement or development to exhibit.”
Such narratives manifest most palpably in fields like technology and the arts. Early 20th-century European Futurism—notably Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909)—intensified a racialised paradigm, glorifying mechanisation, speed, and a masculinist, militaristic future. By the late 1900s, more progressive approaches like Speculative Design, developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art, used fictional scenarios to actively design futures. But Western ideas of progress and innovation remained persistently lopsided.
In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the Global South as relegated to a racialised “waiting room of history,” where modernity is framed as a future achievement rather than a lived reality. Afrofuturism, absurdly propelled in the 1970s by figures like Sun Ra, is a term officially coined by Mark Dery in Black to the Future (1994) to argue that, as Greg Tate argued in BLACK TO THE FUTURISM (1990), “what may appear as chaos or error in Black culture is actually a vital creative force.”
With Necropolitics (2003), Achille Mbembe expanded, “The camp...has ceased to scandalise. Better still, the camp is not just our present. It is our future: our solution for ‘keeping away what disturbs.’” Nnedi Okorafor went on to coin "Africanfuturism" in 2019 to describe a sci-fi subgenre rooted in African culture, history, and mythology, distinct from Afrofuturism’s focus on the Black diaspora and the West. Glitching the Future further affirms indigenous knowledge systems such as ukubhula that embody cyclical, relational, and non-extractive conceptions of temporality.
The Technology.
As we turn to the question of technology—central to any vision of the future—we recognise it not merely as tools and techniques, but as byproducts of underlying worldviews that can marginalise bodies, cultures, and knowledges as other—casting Western, heteronormative, masculine paradigms as the default. As Heidegger mused in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), modern technology “enframes” reality, reducing all beings to resources for control. A glance at tech stats (reality[?]) and it’s clear who is being othered and/or controlled.
Richard Coyne’s Technoromanticism (1999) critiques 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 scathing critique invites reflection on tech’s vision of the unreal, where 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 on this liberty, advocating that we should start by going beyond viewing Africa as a passive recipient of technology, recognising 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.
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 2019 article Digital colonialism is threatening the Global South exposes Big Tech as a new and willing imperial force, dominating 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 through racialised labour and environmental harm, sustaining AI, crypto, and machine learning, yet replicating colonial inequality. On 15 May 2025, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok spread the false “white genocide” conspiracy about South Africa for 17 hours, explicitly exposing the dangers of techno-racism.
But against the weight of Big Tech, African innovation provocatively persists—improvised and informal—hypothesising tech futures shaped by culture, not capital. Aubrey Shabani, from Bushbuckridge, and Themba Vilakazi, from KwaMashu, are two inventors who independently developed practical exosuits, prosthetics, and vehicles made from discarded electronics and scrap material. From eyadini, such blatantly disobedient resourcefulness embodies a situated knowledge that disrupts the notion that African technologies cannot thrive without Western aid.
This is the spontaneous protest that clashes with the West’s toxic drive for so-called “progress”, in which destruction advances through technology—from bows to nukes—to drones and cyber attacks, blurring the line between civilian and combatant. Palmer Luckey, a proud Trump supporter, is the founder of Anduril, which builds autonomous weapons already used in the Ukraine war. In a 2025 60 Minutes interview, he haughtily called for America to become the “world gun store,” illustrating Silicon Valley’s increasing role in the militarisation of the world.
AI weapons, biometric and border surveillance frequently reinforce racialised power and entrench elite control. Yet, when these technologies fail marginalised communities, responsibility is skillfully deflected, and the tools are portrayed as benevolent, obscuring their problematic roots. While Big Tech’s destructive practices are normalised and regulation lags, dominant narratives still manage to draw a line between selectively “good” and “bad” tech uses—again downplaying how ethics, power, and exploitation are hardwired into design.
Cybercrime is the broad term for “bad” activities conducted using computers or the internet. Hacking is the act of exploiting vulnerabilities in systems, but it can be done maliciously to steal or damage data, or “ethically” to test security. Scamming involves tricking people through deception, often to steal money or personal information. In a crime-ridden metropolis, uneven tech access and low cybersecurity awareness can blur the lines between experimentation and cybercrime, complicating how we define these threats amid shifting contexts and demographics.
The local hacking scene is an 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, told the story of early South African hackers—mostly from white suburban and small-town areas—often driven by boredom, curiosity, limited internet access, and a growing passion for programming. Influenced by Western counterparts, figures like Kriek Jooste (“Koki”) honed technical skills to develop “exploits” that exposed system flaws.
More recently, 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 shook the nation. Even more riveting, cases like the Africrypt scandal, where a crypto company founded in 2019 by young brothers Ameer and Raees Cajee, promised high returns through proprietary algorithms but collapsed in 2021 when the brothers vanished, allegedly absconding with around R3.6 billion (USD 230 million) of investor funds.
Online scamming is nothing new, dating back to the early 1990s, with simple email cons like the “Nigerian Prince” or “419” exploiting the web’s anonymity. These global scams introduced the figure of the African scammer who emerged from the ashes of colonial legacy and digital exclusion. Resisting the seductive allure of cybercrime lore, we can use such phenomena to explore how African technologists capitalise on systemic gaps in a world that criminalises hustle yet rewards innovation. These gaps are the womb of African technological disruption.
The Glitch.
A glitch is a gap. An imperfection. A black hole. A brief, yet inevitable, unintended digital disruption—like a flicker or freeze—that interrupts normal function and reveals what’s usually hidden within a system. This is our point of departure. Thankfully, there are precedents. In creative and critical practices like glitch art, these errors are not seen as failures but as generative fractures—portals into new ways of seeing, making, and being. Errors become insights—the glitch—a refusal and a form of fugitive resistance that disrupts dominant codes.
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2013), expanded in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), confirms the glitch as a feminist tool, not a malfunction, in a world where power defaults to violence—racist, sexist, 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.” A kind of radical defiance traceable across various Black traditions, like Afropessimism, which questions Western ideas of progress.
While capitalism allows Big Tech to thrive with little oversight, Black culture too is left to its own devices, engaging with tech from the dark—like with the drum, jazz, and hip hop—it repurposes tools of oppression within the gaps. Local genres like amapiano and gqom, born from pirated software, USB swaps, and DIY networks, defy Western copyright norms. Here, “piracy” becomes glitch—operating from hijacked hybridity and murky entanglement. From these cracks emerge global sensations that reshape tech narratives and bridge experiential divides.
Glitching the Future shifts blame for tech harm from marginalised users to systemic flaws, advocating for community-led alternatives. In protest, it builds on Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics and Kodwo Eshun’s Afrofuturist expansions, combining a pluralistic, decolonial framework with radical, speculative implications from African and diasporic contexts. Contributions in this iteration were chosen for their protest against Western techno-universalism, centring African cultural production as a generative function of technological futures.
Aluta Null’s moodboard imagined the future not as arrival, but as ongoing glitch—unresolved, generative, and defiantly unfinished. Through chroma keys, PNG overlays, and digital scaffolds, their aesthetic resisted closure, embracing process as politics. As a Black, AFAB game designer in South Africa’s tech terrain, Null’s glitch praxis disrupted dominant systems of representation and control. Their contribution to our project felt essential—a reminder that radical futures emerge not fully formed, but through error and refusal.
Siyasanga Ngqengqeza, a fourth-year Wits School of Art student, shifted from computer science to art, seeing her coding software’s refusal to support isiXhosa—a core part of her identity. For her, coding in her own language becomes an act of defiance, turning glitches into spaces of creative rupture and decolonial potential. Here, we see the glitch operating in real time, not as failure but as a chance to challenge power and nurture localised, culturally rooted technoscientific knowledge for emancipatory digital futures.
Maneo Mohale’s The Fall can be read as a premonition, not merely of loss or defeat, but of a moment of immense, if missed, potential. The poem caresses the unspoken fragility beneath entrenched power structures. When Mohale says “ …the way the Statue fell…,” they evoke those moments in which no matter where we were. In those moments, falling became the movement’s rhythm, rupture as the site of resistance. And so, from an Afrocentric POV, tech harm reduction methods arise not from design, but as an improvised, embodied refusal.
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. From William Kentridge’s post-apartheid projections to Tracey Rose’s critiques of representation, Minnette Vari’s game aesthetics, and the disruptive net art of the likes of CUSS, Mashabela frames these works as both historical and visionary. Her analysis shows how technology becomes a site of resistance and reimagination, grounding the project in a rich legacy of cultural agency within global tech flows.
Thulile Gamedze’s contribution arrives as a lyrical and visual meditation on digital rebellion. Through drawing and text, they map the glitch as both wound and portal—where African queer youth repurpose collapsing systems into new grammars of life. Their work is a speculative cartography where language falters, lines bleed, and meaning mutates. In their hands, the digital is not a tool but a terrain: haunted, sacred, and alive with ancestral circuitry. Theirs is a cosmotechnics of refusal, where drawing becomes code and disruption becomes care.
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. Focusing on Focalistic’s, President ya Straata (2021), she maps how South African youth inhabit the “outside-outside,” where nightlife becomes resistance. Through Focalistic’s aesthetics, Maledu uncovers a curatorial authorship that makes Amapiano not merely a genre, but a social technology—made by the margins, for the future.
Conclusion.
Moved by cosmic, biomorphic, fractal, and quantum processes active around and within us, and inspired by projects like India’s FreedomBox, SA’s Novar and GirlCode, and artists like Tabita Rezaire and Natalie Paneng, our aesthetic initiative sees the vernacular glitch as a founding method—a sacred refusal turning scarcity into invention. This organic alchemy reroutes opportunity, reframing tech as a form of protest where softer infrastructures lean on natural rhythms. Not looking to fix the future, but in sync with it, making moves with it—glitch by glitch.
Epilogue:
The link is the footnote. Click for transience. Follow to glitch.
