Digital extractivism and farming platforms: The next systemic transformation in agriculture?
Roy W. Cobby
King’s College London
Data and oil
Sy Taffel
Massey University
Indistinguishable from magic? Extractivism, the infrastructural metasystem, and the obfuscation of consequences
Paul Graham Raven
Lund University
SECure: A Social and Environmental Certificate for AI Systems
Abhishek Gupta and Camylle Lanteigne
Microsoft / Montreal AI Ethics Institute
Growing the Permaculture movement online and on the ground
sky croeser and Jaigris Hodson
Curtin University / Royal Roads
Comments 20
Author
Tēnā koutou, hello and welcome to the Technology and Infrastructure panel!
My name is Lisa, and I’m the chair for this panel. I’m a media studies PhD student writing from the mana whenua of the Rangitāne o Manawatū – the indigenous lands of Rangitāne people of the Manawatū, in Aotearoa – New Zealand (and I have ‘met’ most of you via the conference email!).
I want to thank you all for a fascinating and timely set of panels that have explored the harmful impact of extractivist information systems from agriculture and academia to AI. Our first panel, by Roy W. Cobby, explores the effects of the platform economy on agriculture, coming to the preliminary conclusion that it will concentrate power further within value chains, exclude farmers from benefitting from their lands, and intensify resource extraction. Next up, Sy Taffel asks what a context of de-growth might mean for platform/digital/information economies. Both Sy and Paul Graham Raven (in his wonderfully engaging presentation!) point to the key role logics of obscurification play. In the fourth presentation, Abhishek Gupta and Camylle Lanteigne introduce SECure, an environmental and social certification process that offers a framework for making the inherently socially and environmental extractive process of machine learning less harmful. Finally, sky croeser and Jaigris Hodson think about how we might resist the inherently extractive nature of academia using the principles of permaculture, by nurturing and tending to seeds of alternate ways of being planted by those before us.
To kick us off, I’d like to pose a very basic question to Roy! I was hoping you might speak a little more about your PhD project?
Hi Lisa!
Thanks a lot for your introduction and your question!
My PhD project, currently at the end of its first year, has had some iterations but is mostly focusing now on the impact that digital agriculture will potentially have on altering bargaining power/value distribution across global food production networks. Originally, I was interested in themes of sovereignty and global inequality, and since global agricultural value chains are one of the most concentrated economic networks, my supervisor suggested examining this overlap of market concentration and marketisation across farm/the digital.
I am currently re-designing methodologies, since for obvious reasons it is not likely that I will be able to travel to India where the government is making digitalisation a key strategy for rural inclusion. Rather, I think I will try and fill the gap in the literature (very relevant to extraction) on the precise nature of digital value chains and its relationship to other production and commercial networks. One of my key problems is falling into the trap of technological determinism (some of you might have found the presentation quite gloomy!); which I am currently trying to avoid by exploring alternatives to the agribusiness model of digital farming. I am also quite unsure about the role I want to grant to international development institutions (World Bank, etc.) and foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Gates) on the project: they were very important in the deployment of the Green Revolution half a century ago; but I am concerned this will distract me from the key point of power/value distribution across the chain.
Thanks a lot for your time and great presentations!
Roy
Just a quick note here to say thanks, Lisa — not just for chairing this panel, but also for being a helpful and understanding correspondent regarding the conference as a whole, even to participants who (mentioning no names) were very late getting their submission in.
Also apologies for coming late to the engagement here. I only moved to Sweden four months ago, just before You Know What turned the world upside down, and this week I’ve been moving to a new apartment while trying to juggle all sorts of other stuff… so I have plenty of explanations for my tardiness, but no real excuses. It’s been an honour and a privilege to see my work side by side with all of yours; thanks so much, everyone.
Paul, I really enjoyed your presentation, thank you, to echo Lisa it was wonderfully engaging. I wondered what kind of tactics you think might be useful in the process of demystifying infrastructure, particularly when so much contemporary consumption is fuelled by the logic of convenience as a mode of ‘user friendly’ infrastructural and systemic ignorance?
Thanks for the kind words!
To the matter of tactics: I tend to abjure any claim to making tactical suggestions, partly because I’m not sure that’s my place as a theorist (which is, as I see it, a strategic mode of thinking), and partly because I think tactics, to follow de Certeau, are best left to those situated in the specific theatre of action where the tactics are to be applied.
But I think we can talk about the nature of those theatres. Most of them are, of course, the everyday lived realities of billions of people doing what they have to do with whatever they can find that will help them in that aim. But I’ve long been a fellow traveller of critical and speculative design, and as such I think there’s a lot of potential in the making of things (materially or otherwise) to open up the matter of mystification: to shamelessly use my own terminology, the best way to intervene in the interface layer is to intervene in interfaces themselves.
But I’m also, in the increasingly rare spare moments of my life, a science fiction writer — and so I also think there’s a lot of potential in storytelling. There’s a barrier, too, namely our lack of a narratology, at least in the Western canon, which is capable of describing systemic causality without the assignment of blame and the naming of heroes. But here again Haraway, through her extension of the work of the late (and much missed) Ursula Le Guin, has more lessons for us, I think.
Roy, thanks for sharing a wonderful presentation with us. Are there less frightening and destructive models of digitised agriculture than the ones you foreground? I’m thinking of projects I’m aware of like Open Source Ecology https://www.opensourceecology.org/ – or are things like this just a way for a tiny and privileged minority of hacker/geeks to avoid the issues you describe?
Hi Sy,
Thanks a lot for your question! Indeed, on a recent draft a commenter suggested that I was too focused on the negative implications of digital agriculture. Of course, my research is a work-in-progress and, since I began by analysing the platforms and projects offered by key agribusiness companies, it is only natural that my first outline will be a bit pessimistic.
Now, I am trying to include alternatives which hopefully will also inform the project. I had not heard about the one you are sharing, so I am adding it to the list; I am also interested on the example on permaculture provided by sky and Jaigris.
Like many things, the more evidence I start gathering the more balanced the final project will be. That said, some of the conceptions of digital agriculture espoused by market leaders like MonsantoBayer do not sound very promising for the prospects of smallholders worldwide. We’ll see!
Hi Roy,
This was such an interesting presentation! I did my own PhD research partly looking at the opposition to GM crops in India, which also required looking at movements *for* continued use of local crop biodiversity, building food sovereignty. Many of the farmers who I spoke to there were interested in permaculture and Masanobu Fukuoka’s ideas, as well as in preserving traditional agricultural systems from India. For a while I did a little work with Digital Green, a project that was producing videos sustainable agriculture, and sharing them between village farmers. I wonder if efforts like that might be one version of the alternative to the platform version of digital agriculture (although I didn’t get the chance to look at it in great detail, and Microsoft’s involvement did make me a little nervous…).
One thing that struck me about your presentation is the ways in which digital agriculture platforms further remove knowledge and control from farmers in a way that seems to intensify existing trends. In India, Green Revolution technology already disrupted many forms of community knowledge by making seed saving impractical (as the seeds from hybrids revert to parent types), and shifting from complex intercropping systems to monocultures. GM crops intensify that further, with most of the development privatised and the requirement to manage them carefully (for example, with specific applications of pesticide/herbicide), as well as the inability to legally save seeds. (I wrote more about this in my book, which I note that someone has put up on Library Genesis…http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=6B71A3DE87C7EEB836FB2E8E2F6D75C8) Digital agricultural platforms seem like a whole new scale of problem, from the extraction of farm data to be ‘processed’ and turned into product recommendations through to tractors that can’t be repaired because of software restrictions…
I’m very curious to hear more about your research on how smallholders (and other farmers) are managing to navigate these new systems (or build alternatives to them). I’ve just finished reading Call of the Reed Warbler, about regenerative agriculture, and it really struck me how complex the knowledge systems involved are. And how challenging it might be to shift established practices, even when they’re having devastating effects on both the environment and farmers.
Hi, I am Abhishek Gupta (https://atg-abhishek.github.io), Founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (https://montrealethics.ai) and a Machine Learning Engineer at Microsoft where I serve on the Responsible AI Board. Along with my co-author Camylle Lanteigne and Sara Kingsley, we are happy to present today our work SECure which is an environmental and social framework with a certificate for evaluating the impacts that AI systems have on our world. We are looking forward to questions and are excited by the other presentations in this panel!
Hi everyone! I’m Camylle — I currently work with the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. I’ve recently completed a Bachelor’s in Philosophy, where my Honours thesis focused on the Rights of Nature and anticapitalism. My main interests lie in the areas of AI ethics and policy as well as environmental ethics and policy, and the intersections between these.
I’ll start with a first question/comment, and post more as I get to watch each presentation.
I really enjoyed your presentation, Roy, and it sure looks like a fascinating PhD you’re starting! I was wondering if you’ve encountered any information on the impacts of digital agriculture on the labor force in the agricultural sector? Or perhaps you plan on exploring this later on? (I know this is quite a large question — I’m thinking, for instance about how the working conditions of farmers might change (for better or for worse) because of digital agriculture).
Hi Camylle,
Thanks a lot for your question. I am still in my first year of the project and limiting the scope for it; there are so many issues that could be studied! My original intention was to travel to different sites to observe issues of labour and sustainability practices. However, due to current limitations, I am slightly more favourable now to look at bargaining power/value capture across production networks; which is another way of understanding this transformation of rural employment.
All I can say is that certain foundations in the sphere of global development are employing the term “uberisation” of farm labour and assets as a positive term; which is a bit worrying if we take into account the impact of platform economies on urban labour. Again, this is an ongoing discussion so I cannot say anything with certainty.
Hi Roy, thanks for your reply! There are indeed so many issues to be studied, but alas we must hold back from trying to cover everything. I agree that “uberisation” is cause for concern, especially when used in a positive way. It sounds like your pandemic-proof non-travel approach will also yield very interesting results!
Hi, I’m Roy Cobby, currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Thank you all for your presentations and comments, including those on other panels! I’ll briefly comment on all the presentations.
Sy, your presentation was a fantastic overview and reminder of something that is usually forgotten: the very direct ecological impacts of digital extractivism. In fact, on a recent paper on the “locking-in” of unsustainability through digital farming platforms, a reviewer commented that my framework needed to be more inclusive of this problem. That is, that not only are platforms and algorithms designed with a particular vision of agrarian extractivism. What is more, the necessary infrastructure to build digital agriculture relies on the highly polluting global infrastructure of extraction that you described. Thank you for providing those very inspiring pointers.
Paul, of course we are all concerned here with infrastructures and their nature. Seeing them as magic is particularly fitting; as other authors have spoken of the “digital sublime” and the ability for online innovations to disguise the very material extraction of resources and labour that takes place behind their daily maintenance. Speaking on their sociotechnical consequences, I found that very interesting because I’ve lately been thinking about the moment of transition. Have you thought of studying which are the practices through which these infrastructures become “magical”; that is, what are the processes taking place in the moment of transition?
Thanks Abhishek and Camylle for establishing that very clear connection between accessibility and sustainability; which is not necessarily intuitive. You have developed through your presentation the clear potential for localisation to limit harm, using data sovereignty as a framework. I am also very concerned by the importance of catching up with the development of public facilities to increase accessibility and understanding of AI systems.
Finally, Sky and Jaigris your presentation was very relevant to me as I work on the field of digital agriculture and seek to understand alternatives to the Monsanto-led agribusiness model of digital farming. On a recent discussion, my supervisor noted that I was falling too much into the trap of technological determinism; which is something you clearly avoid and navigate. Indeed, using digital platforms to dismantle inequalities is very problematic, but it can also make us think about the way we practice academia. This conference is an example of alternative ways of engaging academic discussions with relatively limited impacts on the environment.
Thanks for the comments, Roy. Funnily enough, my theory of enchantment largely arose out of my intense dissatisfaction with the dominant theories of transition, in particular the MLP, that I discovered during the course of my PhD research — a lot of transition theory involves magical thinking and obfuscation, too. I eventually found my way to social practice theory, in particular the strain developed my the mighty Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster, UK), which makes the point (at least for me) that the processes of mystification themselves are not really generalisable at all , but the *dynamics* of those processes might be *somewhat* generalisable… but that’s a theoretical digression for another time!
To turn the tables back on you: you’re studying an exciting topic at a crucial moment in its development, and finding your way through such a dynamic system is going to be a real challenge and stimulation; I wish you all the very best of luck with your research! I would like to ask if you think there’s any analytical risk (albeit unintended on his part, I think) in Srnicek’s notion of platforms? By making of them an ontological category — and thus aggregating a hugely complicated and constantly changing assemblage of human actors, softwares, IT hardwares, and infrastructures both privately and publicly owned, into a single entity — it can feel like they are being ascribed an agency that erases all the conflict and compromise going on beneath the surface. Following from that point, might exploding that assemblage somewhat (a la Latour) perhaps start you on the path to answering your question regarding which tools and components of the digi-agri system(s) might be of use to independent, local farmers?
My next comment question is for Sy! First, what an amazingly riveting video! One of the many important points you made that caught my attention is when you highlight that our current era is “problematically referred to as the Anthropocene”. This resonates with me because it does seems inaccurate and harmful to characterize our current environmental and social situation as being the equal responsibility of all humans, when it’s overwhelmingly the economic elite and more generally the global north. Is this also what you had in mind? Or perhaps you were thinking about other aspects of the so-called “Anthropocene”?
Kia ora Camylle, thanks for your kind words and your question.
Yes, that’s more-or-less what I had in mind in terms of the problems of the Anthropocene. I was really pleased that Jason Moore was on the keynote panel for this conference, as his work on the Anthropocene/Capitalocene along with Bonneuil and Fressoz’s Shock of the Anthropocene present some of the clearest evidence as to why it is wrong in terms of both the present and the past to describe ecological crises as the result of the human species. Blaming subsistence farmers or even the urban working class in the global north for the rapcious overconsumption of the rich is particulary perverse when the effects of ecological crises will predominantly hit those least responsible for causing them the hardest. Equally, making them a species-level problem feeds into deeply racist discourses of overpopulation rather than addressing questions surrounding the fallacy of infinite economic growth on Earth.
There have been struggles against extractivist capitalist/colonialist systems for centuries, and while that can be a rather depressing tale of centuries of resistance largely being crushed, it does at least point beyond the boundaries of capitalist realism.
For me, it also feels like that blurring together of all of this into a ‘human problem’, rather than a problem caused by particular political and economic systems, tends to obscure some of the solutions that might exist. Positioning the current environmental and social devastation as the ‘Anthropocene’ makes it more difficult to see the many systems (political, social, economic, agricultural, etc) that are sustainable, that have long histories, and that still exist and might be nurtured and expanded…
Here are some comments and questions for Paul and for sky and Jaigris:
Paul, I really appreciate your connection between Harraway’s work and the ways in which modern infrastructure shapes us. I’m mostly familiar with disenchantment as it relates to Medieval literature, but it’s thought-provoking to see it applied in the context of technology and modern infrastructure. I don’t have any specific questions for now — thank you for your presentation, it has sparked many thoughts for me!
sky and Jaigris, I love the nuanced approach you took to looking at growing the permaculture movement and academia. As you mentioned the impact of covid-19 on peoples’ behaviours (buying seeds, buying chickens), it sparked a thought about how most of our systems are not properly adapted, or even run against, one being able to engage in permaculture or live in ways that align with the permaculture philosophy. For instance, those who have the privilege of having a yard have to abide by certain laws (eg. municipal laws) that might bar them from having even a few chickens, and also from letting their lawn grow “wild”. Some towns or neighbourhoods may not have collective gardens, and there may be political barriers to this being put in place. I know this is somewhat tangential to the core of your presentation, but laws seemed to me an important element at play when thinking about permaculture and the values it embodies.
I’m very glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the kind words. I will make sure to look up the Medievalist interpretation of disenchantment, as I need to take a longer look at proto-infrastructures during that period in the course of extending this theoretical project; thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks for asking, Camylle! I think that one of the reasons that permaculture is appealing to me is that it’s quite anarchistic in its approach. There’s definitely a recognition that particular laws (as well as social and economic structures) might limit the possibilities for change. But it’s also very much about direct action and finding spaces of possibility within the existing structures (which can then be used to lever open *more* space). So, for example, the people Milkwood and other permaculture activists talk about how to set up gardens in rented spaces (large and small), how people might make use of the urban commons, how to reclaim ‘waste’ through community composting, and so on. At the same time, there’s a focus on building community connections so that people can experience the pleasures of growing food, swapping resources, keeping animals, and other aspects of permaculture…and hopefully create some shifts in what’s legal (or even socially acceptable).
I think there are a lot of possibilities for considering how we might use this approach within academia, and how people are already trying to build different spaces within the cracks of what we have. Academia has a bunch of social, legal, and increasingly technological structures that shape our behaviour and the potential for change. But at the same time we can find spaces within that…we can (sometimes) unionise and support casual/insecure colleagues, we can ‘ungrade’ or find forms of assessment that support different forms of learning, we can refuse competitive productivity, we can refuse to surveil our students, we can publish in open-access spaces using more accessible language, we can change the curriculum so that it’s more diverse, etc. All of these acts are partial, and only sometimes possible, but they do open up new spaces of possibility at times…