D:FOOD
D:Food Web
The Distributed Past & Future of Agriculture
BY RITHIKHA RAJAMOHAN
In August 2024, a transdisciplinary group of contributors in the public goods funding, technology, farming and food systems spaces gathered in Navarro, California. Our purpose was to develop a vision for the future of agriculture, its supporting technologies and how we might go about resourcing the first steps towards it. While this vision is still coming into focus, it's one we're committed to grounding in the ethos of the commons, recognizing the need for restoring community-ownership in agricultural systems and its supporting technologies. The following site synthesizes and documents the first of three D:Food collaborations taking place to develop a pilot commons funding mechanism. In addition to tool development, these collaborations explore cooperative structures that can govern their use, the ethics of who owns and controls the data used in these technologies, and how to sustain fund open source projects in the long term as public goods. The following documentation is a nascent vision for the agricultural technology commons and exploration of why this model is not only needed, but likely to become the status quo in coming years.
Agriculture is a multi-generational, shared human endeavor and arguably humankind's first major innovation; one that has catalyzed widespread cultural and economic change by fundamentally altering our relationship to land and with each other. However, it has also gradually been forced into a siloed, monopolized and privatized environment. Over the course of human history, we've seen a progression from small hunter-gatherer bands to agricultural villages, city-states, and nation-states. Each shift, spurred by advancements in communication technologies, has expanded the scale of coordination and complexity of our organizational models from tribes, to institutions, markets, and now, networks.
Networks are in many ways a full circle return to the concept of "the commons" and are re-emerging as advancements in distributed technologies allow for the economic coordination and communication required to sustain them at scale. We're seeing the emergence of new information systems and software applications that run on multiple computers or devices connected through a network, working together as a unified system to perform tasks, share resources, and exchange data without relying on a central server or authority for coordination. Framed another way, this new technology is simply a re-implementation of much older cooperative practices in human history — The commons or "commoning". Commoning refers to shared resources, like land and food, and the practice of managing them collectively as public goods. This was important in agrarian societies as land use and management were crucial for survival.
Beginning in the 12th century and peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries however the practice of enclosure, where common lands were privatized and fenced off began. This enclosure of the commons established a pattern that took ahold in Europe, but that was later replicated and likely gave legitimacy to colonial expansion and the development of industrial capitalism across the world. This pattern of enclosure was characterized by privatization of previously shared resources, displacement of people from traditional land and land use practices, and facilitated the concentration of wealth and resources into fewer hands across from Indonesia to Brazil. And now, in the 21st century, we are experiencing a similar enclosure with big tech and corporations; companies whose technology and services our everyday lives rely on for everything from banking to social media and navigating a city, who can freeze accounts at will, shut down services to certain locations, and extract profit unfairly. The loss of the commons has been pivotal in the making of modern day extractive economic and social structures. The good news is that the systems that govern our lives today didn't arise from thin air, they were intentionally designed. This also means we can redesign them again and do it better.
Innovation today currently relies on a handful of well-established funding models: government and academia, though often influenced by political and institutional priorities, fuel policy programs and fundamental research; Corporate R&D departments push technological boundaries forward but are generally restricted to market demand and profitability; venture capital propels startups to rapid growth along with a promise to meet high return/exit expectations. And philanthropic grants, largely exist due to the excesses created from the funding models above. They often support initiatives with value to society but with limited commercial viability or independence from granter priorities that offer no guarantee they are aligned with real ecosystem needs.
The commons model challenges the traditional dichotomy between private and public ownership, offering a third way that promotes collective benefit and long-term sustainability of innovations. The core problems facing agriculture, and likely many other domains, aren't technological ones. Nor are they due to lack of good intentions. What we've seen time and time again is that well-meaning initiatives or technical advancement alone do not guarantee meaningful change. What's required of us is to examine our aims or intentions, but go beyond to examine the underlying protocols of ownership, control, and benefit distribution that we are enmeshed in. In the process of developing this funding mechanism for the ag-tech commons we ask you to not only reconsider and reimagine what these tools and technologies could look like, but the very contexts in which they exist.
We have yet to fully understand what open networks with no central locus of control can do and what kinds of behaviors and affordances can arise from them. Networks are an organizational model focused on the in-between spaces and scaffolding, which if set up correctly, encourage new patterns of behaviors and therefore different sets of outcomes. Commons and networked-based social organizations can be found everywhere, not just in human history, but underground in fungi networks responsible for supporting 92% of all known plant families, neuron communication in the brain, and ant colonies that have evolved to coordinate themselves in extremely effective ways, despite lacking any central decision-making authority. These are all examples of swarm intelligence: complex collective behaviors that emerge solely from simple rules being established and interactions mediated between peers.
What would a modern-day commons look like, and how would one govern an open network? Experiments, both old and new, are well underway and re-emerging: cooperatives, democratically owned and controlled by worker-members, on average see lifespans over twice that of traditional businesses. Open source software, with code freely available for anyone to view, modify, and extend, is now recognized as powering much of the world's digital infrastructure, despite being maintained and developed largely by a community of users themselves. Distributed computing and advancements in cryptography have significantly reduced the need for traditional intermediaries or middlemen in many types of transactions and communications.
This networked, peer-to-peer approach facilitates a shift from merely good intentions to a rigorous examination of how power flows through a system: Who holds ownership? Who maintains control? Who reaps the benefits of success? It's a very different mindset to how we operate and approach problems today. In a networked world, energy needs to be put building the right scaffolding for an ecosystem to thrive in, as opposed to our current approach of correctly designing an end solution. In other words, it's an approach that focuses on defining and designing the best set of affordances and constraints, rather than directly controlling specific outcomes. If before we lived in a world that was biased towards dictating the best moves and choosing the best players for the game, we are now shifting towards a world that asks us to develop the right ruleset. A networked world, a modern-day commons, asks us to trust that in turn this ruleset will enable the right gameplay, regardless of who the players are, and ideally be designed as a positive-sum one.
Our food systems stand at a crossroads, poised to embrace a commons-based future that paradoxically mirrors its distant past. With the affordances that network-based innovations have to offer, the journey from communal farming to industrial agriculture presents an opportunity to come full circle. We expect the design of this pilot mechanism to be the first step towards resourcing an ecosystem committed to developing long term, adaptive technologies built for and governed by the agricultural commons.
Rithikha Rajamohan, civic technologist and founder of V6A Labs. D:Food contributor, synthesis and documentation.
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