Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the future of Big Data in international development, and its place in the informational reorganisation of global capitalism. The "digital revolution in agriculture" portends novel forms of dispossession and immaterial labour that retool capitalist value for the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Big Data seems to hold out Big Promises for the global food system. The term, and the technocratic apparatus it denotes, are increasingly wielded in millenarian style by acolytes of both international development and global agribusiness. In the face of looming environmental crises and a swelling global population, the "digital revolution" is pitched as a technical solution for global hunger, promising greater harvests and greater returns. In this paper, we interrogate some of the implications of these imagined futures, the digitised mode of agricultural production they underwrite, and the reconfigurations of power, value, and immaterial labour that unfold from it. We argue that they articulate the realms of international development and smallholder agriculture in the Global South with an ongoing digital reorganisation of global capitalism, integrating farmers into global markets and informational value chains and profoundly transforming human-environment relations and knowledges in the process. We locate this reorganisation within a long history of crises and spatio-technical fixes for capital accumulation. The rhetoric of Big Data and its applications within global food systems therefore both reproduce earlier logics of primitive accumulation and colonial biopolitics, and extend them into new configurations of digital imperialism and informational or immaterial labour that, we suggest, express mutations in the nature of capitalist value itself as it is retooled for the Anthropocene era. In this way Big Data portends novel forms of dispossession that are at once material and immaterial.