As I mentioned earlier, Gibson and Stephenson got it wrong: The place where all the technology will be churning in the decades to come will not be Asia. China and India are already sort of established and old hat now. Indonesia, Southeast Asia and Malaysia (Or whatever succeeds them, if they break up.) may generate a flurry of interest for a number of years but essentially it’s a story that we’ve already heard for 20 years already.
So where is it really going to end up? Where is that gritty mix of chrome and squalor, future and past, repression and anarchy that makes up the idea of cyberpunk most obvious? Africa. The post-industrial world can’t send their old computers out there fast enough. Already African software companies are beginning to sprout. Obviously they face all kinds of problems, lack of electricity and clean drinking water to start with, but whoever said industrialization was a painless process?