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Short abstract

Based on ethnography, a scenario-building workshop and anticipatory interviews with tech professionals in Lagos, this paper argues that “alternativity” is situated and relational: what counts as an alternative future depends on where imagination is located and which exclusions it seeks to redress.

Long abstract

STS scholars call for “alternative futures” to counter a diagnosed “crisis of imagination,” tied to sustainability, degrowth, and justice. But what does “alternative” mean when viewed from places where exclusion from technological inclusion isn’t abstract, but a lived condition? What happens to “alternativity” when futures are imagined from Lagos’ tech ecosystem?

This paper draws on the ethnographic LAGOSTECH project (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01). It presents findings from a participatory scenario-building workshop and anticipatory interviews conducted in Lagos in 2025/2026. The methodology combines the STEEP framework, scenario planning from the Institute for the Future (USA), and an updated Robert Textor’s Ethnographic Futures Interview. Through fictional characters in Lagos 2035, participants crafted optimistic and pessimistic narratives around drivers such as AI adoption, government policy, infrastructure, and entrepreneurial development.

A productive tension runs through the findings. The futures participants desired — industrialization, productive capacity, infrastructure, global participation in AI — map onto what STS often labels “hegemonic.” From Lagos, though, these aspirations feel genuinely alternative; colonial legacies, structural adjustment, and global asymmetries have long foreclosed them. Yet participants didn’t embrace these visions uncritically — they negotiated them, questioning who controls AI and whether growth risks reproducing old dependencies. Pessimistic scenarios feared not technological excess but exclusion: remaining consumers rather than becoming producers of innovation.

This paper contributes to the panel’s agenda with a core argument: “alternativity” is irreducibly situated. Unpacking alternative futures demands attention not just to what people imagine but to the structural position from which they imagine — and the negotiations they engage in.