Algorithmic Food Justice: Co-Designing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food Commons

The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

• Publication date

  2021-01-31

• Fields of study

  Business, Computer Science, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1145/3411764.3445655
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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