Moxyland

Extras…

Moxyland was inspired by a DNA remix of many influences, from BoingBoing to Stephen Johnson’s Emergence to Theo Jansen’s incredible evolving mechanical Strandbeests. It riffs off surveillance society and the Great Firewall of China, bird flu and the threat of terrorism, the cult of kawaii, RFID chips in passports, virtual rape and refugee camps in Second Life, and reallife murder over a virtual sword in China.

It developed from 12 years of working as a journalist, from stories I worked on for Colors magazine where I spent many weeks in Cape Town’s townships with photographers Marc Shoul and Pieter Hugo, interviewing electricity cable thieves, paramilitary vigilantes and people dying of the twin pandemic of TB and AIDS and learning how to make smileys or boiled sheep heads.

Of course, it also grew out of the legacy of apartheid: the arbitrary and artificially applied divides between people, the pass system and the insidious Special Branch – a secret police operation to rival the Stasi that infiltrated activist organisations, used wet bag torture to extract ‘confessions’, threw troublemakers out of fifth storey windows or blew them up with letterbombs and plotted chemical warfare and sinister bio-experiments. Don’t let anyone tell you that apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now. Those roots run deep and tangled and we’ll be tripping over them for many generations to come.

But really, the stem cell that developed into Moxyland was Lucky Strike. Or, rather, the hush-hush underground parties British American Tobacco organised for their brands when the South African government outlawed cigarette advertising in 2000.

They seduced hip young things to be brand ambassadors for the price of free cigarettes. They staged provocative theatre at bars and restaurants like a faked strip poker game with models. And they dropped millions on the most outrageous events, from Peter Stuyvesant’s swanky mansion pool parties to Lucky Strike’s private concerts, flying out international rock acts and house DJs for one night only. The height of the debauchery was a million Rand party train with multiple dancefloors and five different bars, snaking through the Cape winelands on its way to a secret destination for a luxury picnic. If you’d missed the ARG-style clues, subtly disguised in a Lucky Strike target with only a phone number stuck up at the back of a bar, you missed out.

I wrote a story on it for The Big Issue and then transmuted it into fiction with a short story called ‘Branded’, about a girl who turns sponsorbaby for a soft drink company with a dubious agenda. It blossomed like a tumour from there, mutating into interesting directions I hadn’t anticipated – and a full-blown novel four years later.

It’s been fascinating to see real-world correlations develop since the novel made its debut in South Africa in 2008. Some of them are strange and wonderful, others are deeply worrying to me. And the best of it is stuff I couldn’t have invented.

In the last year, for example, Portugal has launched wave power generators, cell phone wallets have been rolled out and there’s now proof, after all, that subliminal advertising can work, if paired with some kind of reinforcing reward – which might well include feel-good neural feedback in the future.

South Africa’s national energy provider, Eskom, has announced its intentions to open up its own proprietary university (not, as yet linked to an AIDS orphanage); a Seoul National University team created the first transgenic dogs that glow in the dark thanks to the addition of an anemone gene; and the Pentagon put out a brief for military contractors to develop a ‘multirobot pursuit system’, ie, packs of robots that could ‘search for and detect a non-cooperative human’.

There was a real bio-engineered artwork that caused a controversy in 2008 when it was exhibited and then ‘killed’ at MoMa in New York. ‘Victimless Leather’ was a small living jacket made up of embryonic mouse stem cells, but it grew out of control, clogged up its incubation system and had to be ‘put down’, to the apparent distress of the curator – all of which, purely coincidentally I’m sure, generated a whole lot of headlines.

But the scariest synchronicity with Moxyland was something an electrical engineer friend told me – that a cop buddy had idly asked him over a beer if there was any way to SMS an electric shock to a fleeing suspect’s cell phone, you know, because it’s a pain in the ass to chase them wearing a heavy bulletproof vest. Luckily, my friend says that even for the purposes of bar talk, it’s an impractical idea, especially without buy-in from the cell phone companies and government. Impractical. But not impossible.

The thing is that it’s all possible, especially if we’re willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security. Our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.

Further reading

Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings that exposed some, but not all of the atrocities committed under apartheid.

Jonny Steinberg’s Thin Blue and Andrew Brown’s Street Blues about the harrowing challenges of police work in South Africa.

The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Jaoa Silva – the true story of the four news photographers who risked their lives during apartheid. (Kendra would have loved these guys.)

Fiction

A Dry White Season by André Brink Black Petals by Bryan Rostron