- Cloud Layer to Come: Cloud Feudalism and Its Discontents
Ground zero of robotic labor automation may be in California, but a few hundred miles south and east of Silicon Valley in the San Joaquin Valley, where 1 percent of the US farmland produces 8 percent of its agricultural output, generating at least \$36 billion for the state and over \$100 billion in related economic activity. The area is the engine that makes California the fifth largest supplier of food in the world, and its capital is the crestfallen metropolis of Fresno (population 500,000). Fresno often comes near last in urban quality-of-life polls, and even a quick visit to its dusty and mean avenues confirms the results. Roughly a third of all jobs in the city are tied directly to agriculture, which makes the economy particularly vulnerable to downward wage pressures, as well as to climate change – related drought. The pressures of increased efficiencies against crop losses, toward crop diversity, and speed of delivery make agriculture an important area for applied robotic automation (picking, sorting, transporting, as well as plantby-plant drone observation and diagnosis). These factors together nominate Fresno to enjoy first-mover disadvantage in the evolution of similar urban centers toward broadband-dependent manoralism and serfdom (and evacuation) and its economy toward Cloud feudalism. Detroit is the first case study we have of what automation can do to an insufficiently diversified urban system, dependent on intensive assembly labor (it is certainly not the only one, nor does it represent the inevitable outcome of physical computing as applied to infrastructure-scale manufacturing economies), but Fresno may soon take its place next to it. Future scenarios for Cloud feudal life in Fresno are mostly grim. Most remaining jobs might be related to servicing the automated logistics and warehousing of food packets, not so dissimilar to working in an Amazon warehouse or FedEx routing facility, while the surplus population that has not or cannot exit is largely unemployed and increasingly desperate. <sup>19</sup>
The Cloud is able to treat “ food ” — defined here as culturally and economically desirable modules of proteins, vitamins, and sugars — as parcels or data packets in a deep supply chain that incorporates local climate, soil, nutrients, seed systems, individual plant care, harvesting, sorting, warehousing, packaging, refrigeration, and global product destination optimization, as well as the metagovernance of demand modeling, crop diversification, qualitative and quantitative research, and, one hopes as well, the geogovernance of nutrition and food health (this is to say nothing of multistory hydroponic megastructures growing onions, orchids, and okra in deep midnight). The intelligent industrialization of food is potentially an extremely positive (even crucial) Anthropocenic strategy. If Heidegger self-servingly compared industrial agriculture to “ Auschwitz, ” and today ’ s biofundamentalists sometimes use similar imagery to demonize genetically modified organisms, we may prefer instead to see the design of food platforms as less about preserving the experiential simulation of preindustrial farming and eating ( “ A is for Apple ” ) and more like molecular gastronomy on a landscape scale, inventing amazing new forms from the calculative slurry. In their seams of leisure, craft farms can be left to those with the time to indulge pornographic fantasies of prelapsarian originalism. That is to say, Cloud feudalism is neither desirable nor inevitable, even according to the processes that are trying hard to birth it today. <sup>20</sup>
The Stack to Come
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