Contribution short abstract:

This paper analyses farming and beekeeping practises taking place in Blade Runner 2049, to sketch a scenario about the future of beekeeping. How synthetic farming, a technofix developed in this film, feedbacks upon our current food production system?

Contribution long abstract:

In Blade Runner 2049 (BR2049), the main characters, K, experiences a weird and eerie encounter when a honeybee peacefully lands on their hand steering them to a fully active apiary of about ten beehives. These bees shouldn’t survive there, not in the middle of a city blasted by nuclear explosions; and ultimately not in the Blade Runner universe which depicts a late capitalist future where high-tech utopia was reached at the cost of the planet earth. For the past two decades, monitoring devices, made possible by accessible low-cost components and the miniaturisation of technology, have infiltrated beehives, transforming them into small technologised sites of data production called Smart Hives – the central element of Precision Beekeeping (PB) which uses digital technology to monitor bees. This digitisation process slowly and sly reshapes beekeepers’ relationships with their bees and the practice of apiculture. Mark Fisher describes SF Capital (science-fiction capital) as the cohesion between speculative stories about the future and capital; capital hijacks information, transforms it into an economic value, and use it as a powerful vector to create feedback loop between a preferred future and its becoming present (Eshun 2003). This paper, therefore, mixes an ethnography about the forthcoming of digital devices in beekeeping with an in-depth analyse of BR2049’s vision of the future of food production. This unveils the biopolitic at play in current beekeeping practices and asks how the future of our relationship with bees will look like.