Hi, my name is Sara Heitlinger, and I'm presenting on behalf of my co-authors, Lara Houston, Alex, Taylor and Ruth Catlow. This paper is called Algorithmic Food Justice: Co- designing more-than-human blockchain futures for the food commons.
The global industrial food system encloses and extract value from our planet's resources, concentrating benefits in the hands of a few major players. In the process, industrial agriculture is causing mass species loss, degradation of soils, and the disempowerment
of small scale farmers, ultimately threatening food security for all life on Earth. This paper is concerned with the values that are driving these unsustainable social and environmental qualities, and how digital technologies might intensify them,
as well as how they might allow for fairer and more sustainable food systems. We describe a project that takes an algorithmic approach to creating a sustainable food justice system and discuss our process of co-designing blockchain futures with urban agricultural
communities in London, as a way to critically engage with alternative value systems that draw on the commons and more-than-human perspectives, which recognize the interdependencies between humans and non human others within the food chain.
It considers in particular how blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, might offer ways to disrupt the prevailing paradigms and open up possibilities for more sustainable systems of value and governance in the context
of food.
So the project asked, How can we develop a more-than-human value system in order to redistribute value more equally between humans and non-human others.
How might we develop new ways to sustain the food commons, in order to manage resources more equitably.
And how can we ensure that our algorithmic approach is inclusive in order to support participation and access for diverse marginalized citizens.
We ran three workshops with participants that included community growers, organisers artists and technologists, where we critically experimented with algorithmic possibilities for new value systems that embed the interests of non-humans such as seeds, soil
and water, in order to create more sustainable inclusive and just food futures in the city.
In the first workshop, Mapping the Future Farm, we mapped the multispecies stakeholders and resource flows in the city farm now, and 10 years in the future, from the growers expert knowledge. In workshop two, Now London is a City Farm,
we used a gameplay technique called a LARP (live action roleplay) to explore what London would be like if all available spaces were turned over to urban farming.
We used fictional scenarios to explore multispecies relationships, new economies and radical decision making processes for sustaining a citywide food commons.
In workshop three we prototyped new algorithmic systems for a future food commons. We explored how blockchain affordances could help distribute resources more fairly between multispecies members, recognise the contributions and needs of diverse members,
address some of the injustices in the current food systems, and create a more balanced and fair food system.
Participants worked in groups to create new blockchain based organisations (or DAOs), and used paper based syntax cards to determine the governance rules (or smart contracts), of those organisations and their multispecies members.
These organisations allowed for new types of value exchange and governance. In the paper we discuss how the speculative workshop methods created a space in which human exceptionalism and privilege within food systems were challenged, allowing alternative
values and perspectives to surface. In the imaginaries produced in the workshops blockchain provides the mechanisms to facilitate ecological repair and regeneration by incentivising the expansion and increasing the abundance of mutually
beneficial relations.
We also discuss how within the workshops food was reconfigured from a commodity to be exchanged for maximum profit to a more-than-human commons, in which different types of contributions and labours that are invisible within the dominant industrial food complex might be surfaced, acknowledged and rewarded within a community. Thank you