Neuromancer in Joburg

What happens to Africa after the singularity?

Ask a film studio and you'll get one of two answers. Either the machines win and it's Terminator with better dust, or Africa isn't in the picture at all. Neither sits right with me.

So I've given myself a mission. Picture a post-singularity Africa where people thrive, and make it believable. I'm starting with Johannesburg, because it's home, and because I can't think of a better place to try.

A young man in a patchwork shirt, orange print trousers and robotic leg braces stands in a wide, empty Joburg street. Tower blocks rise behind him into a hazy green sky, with storm clouds piling up on the right.

Why Joburg

Johannesburg is a city that makes things. Fashion, music, code, art, hustle. It's loud and mixed and a bit chaotic, and the creativity comes out of every corner.

Amapiano grew up in Gauteng's townships and now plays in clubs all over the world. The Smarteez crew turned Soweto streetwear into its own language of colour. Braamfontein is full of students, galleries and people building start-ups out of coffee shops. And Fak'ugesi, the digital innovation festival where I gave a talk this month, has been putting African tech and art on the same stage for over a decade.

It's also a city that knows what it's like when the systems fail. We've lived through years of load-shedding (rolling blackouts, for anyone lucky enough not to know the word). People didn't wait for a fix. They put solar panels on their roofs. Whole suburbs did it, one house at a time.

That's the kind of energy I want to build a future from. Gritty, a bit improvised, and stubbornly hopeful.

A woman in a red headwrap and glowing cyan goggles sits on a yellow concrete wall, a mechanical brace on one leg and chunky orange sneakers. Behind her, stacked pastel buildings climb towards an antenna mast, tangled in cables.

Less dome, more Gibson

When most artists picture a hopeful future, they reach for the same moodboard. White Buckminster Fuller domes, clean lawns, people in matching jumpsuits. Or a 1970s paperback cover, all chrome and sunsets. I love that stuff, but it's been done to death, and it never looks like anywhere I've lived.

William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) went the other way. Its future was crowded, dirty and fast. Chiba City, street surgeons, hackers jacked into cyberspace. It felt lived in. That's why it still holds up 40 years later.

What I want is Gibson's texture, moved to a fresh setting and with the ending changed. The cables are still tangled overhead. The streets are still busy. But the people under those cables are doing alright. Better than alright.

Solarpunk is a pretty young idea (the word started showing up online around 2008). It asks what a future looks like if we get energy, ecology and community right. Most solarpunk art I see is very green, very tidy, and very Northern. I think it looks better with a bit of grit on it.

A tall figure in an oversized orange hooded coat and sunglasses stands in a crowded market street, seen from below. Satellite dishes and shacks climb the buildings either side, and a huge stone tower rises in the distance under a pale red moon.

So what does thriving look like?

I'm still working that out. Here's where I've got to so far.

Machines that serve the street

In these pictures the tech isn't owned by some faraway company. It's worn, fixed and hacked by the people using it. A leg brace on a teenager. Goggles on a woman sitting on a wall. If machines get very good at most of the work, the question becomes who owns them. I want a future where the answer is "us".

Style survives

The singularity doesn't put everyone in grey. If anything, people have more time to dress up. Print shirts, wax-print trousers, beads, gold hoops, sneakers you could live in. Joburg fashion has always been about saying who you are out loud, and I don't see that stopping.

The old city stays

Nobody bulldozes the old blocks to make room for glass domes. The new is bolted onto the old. Panels on the roofs, extra floors stacked on top, cables strung between everything. It's messy because people built it themselves.

People have time

This is the big one for me. In my Fak'ugesi talk I argued that machines might make us less useful, but they can't make our lives less worth living. A thriving Joburg is one where people get to hang out on a wall in the sun, watch the street, and enjoy being there. Sensing the moment and enjoying it is what Worldbuild is about anyway.

A woman with a shaved head and a blonde bun, gold hoops and a beaded gold collar looks over her shoulder in a narrow street at sunset. Dozens of power lines sweep between pink and teal buildings.

What about the risks?

I'm a rational optimist, not a naive one. A post-singularity Africa could go very badly. Data and compute could end up owned by a handful of foreign companies. Jobs could vanish faster than anything replaces them. The continent could get treated as a supplier of minerals and cheap labelling work, again.

I'm not ignoring any of that. I just think we've got plenty of pictures of the bad version already. If we want to steer towards the good one, someone has to picture it first, in enough detail that it feels possible.

A man in a loose patchwork robe of red, green and yellow, with beaded necklaces and sunglasses, stands in a crowded alley. Old balconied buildings lean in on both sides, and futuristic towers and domes fill the sky behind.

Where this goes

These are early concept frames. Over the next while I'm going to keep building out this world. More characters, more streets, and eventually a place you can actually walk around in VR. That's what I do, after all.

I want to answer a few questions along the way. What does a taxi rank look like in 2060? Who runs the solar grid in Soweto? What do the machines themselves want, and are they invited to the braai?

A young woman in a headscarf, sunglasses and a stack of beaded necklaces sits on a ledge high above the city, her chunky sneakers dangling. Orange clouds glow behind towers covered in scaffolding and antennas.

Can we even imagine a world where Africa thrives after the singularity? I think so. I think Joburg is already rehearsing it, every time someone wires up a solar panel, fixes a phone on a street corner, or puts on an outfit nobody else would dare to wear.

If you're an artist, writer, coder or musician who wants to dream about this with me, get in touch. I'd love the company.

A bearded man in a green hooded parka and glowing orange goggles types at a cluttered workbench in the dark, surrounded by small, friendly-looking robots, one of them grinning with a lit-up mouth.