Algorithmic food justice: Co-designing more-than-human blockchain futures for the food commons

Abstract

The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The frst 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 afordances 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 reconfguring more-than-human values and reconfguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.