Silicon Valley has become a model that many countries in the Global South try to emulate with the expectation to solve their economic and social impasses (Irani, 2019). In Brazil, entrepreneurs, financial investors and state sponsors join efforts to create innovation ecosystems, where a multiplicity of businesspeople works with startups, venture capital, high technology and innovation as opportunities to develop and modernise the nation. One of the most salient ecosystems in the country is dedicated to agribusiness, where entrepreneurs develop technologies to digitise industrial farming. These entrepreneurs say the sector is ‘ripe for disruption’, meaning that algorithmic devices can provoke a break in farming, management and logistics. They also expect that many existing farming techniques and agricultural products will not survive the digital transformations and that new business models will replace existing firms and corporations.

But the project of creating a rural version of the Silicon Valley encounters many obstacles. Entrepreneurs create sensors to monitor cows, algorithms to read satellite images and indicate problems in the crops, drones that take accurate pictures of plants, and farm management applications. Yet, they struggle to scale their businesses up, because even if large scale farms are mechanised, Internet access is limited across rural Brazil, making digitisation a hard process. Moreover, the costs of producing and implementing new digital technologies are very high for startups, who end up producing simplified applications. Having to address these hindrances to implement their projects, entrepreneurs call themselves missionaries that open new frontiers with their so-called disruptive technologies.

The businesses and the trajectories of these entrepreneurs can shed light on how contemporary forms of accumulation based on digitisation and financial investments emerge in semi-peripheral contexts. Although the infrastructural conditions to the adoption of digital technologies in rural areas is an obstacle to startups, the early stage businesses count on these same conditions to thrive. As one entrepreneur puts it, the most successful startups are the ones that conquer costumers first – not the ones that develop the most refined digital devices or more precise algorithms. In a global market where Brazilian entrepreneurs develop technologies that usually cannot compete with Global North startups, their businesses require an undigitised audience, so they succeed in scale. Like a catechetic endeavour, the entrepreneurs’ venture consists in reciting lessons from Silicon Valley to an unexperienced audience to convince them to become users. At the same time, the promise of scaling fast finds barriers, given the infrastructural conditions to such scaling.

If capital reproduces itself by destroying its frontiers and appropriating them into its own logic, the expansion of frontiers in the semi-periphery of the global economy deserves special attention. The Brazilian economy, like other (semi-)peripheral ones, is historically dependent on the export of agricultural commodities, which created conditions for imperialism and unevenness (Grandin, 2010; Svampa, 2013). The missionaries of disruption build on and replicate this long trajectory of economic subordination by transforming industrial agriculture into a frontier for digital businesses and data extraction. Digital technologies don’t generate local autonomy, they reinforce the exports of agricultural commodities and imports of technology. But now, there is one more layer: data extraction. The conversion of farmers into tech users is a mechanism of inserting agribusiness into new forms of accumulation.

But if such conversion finds so many frictions to take place, to what extent can we think of a digital version of accumulation by dispossession? In the Global North, there is a debate on digitising and making people legible to digital platforms as a new form of accumulation by dispossession (Ritzer, 2015; Srnicek, 2017). In Brazil, however, disruption is uncertain. While Brazilian entrepreneurs evoke Schumpeter to celebrate the creative destruction they perpetrate in agribusiness, they also evoke Darwin to question the likelihood of their own survival in a sector that presents so many obstacles.

It is not that the expansion of digitisation in agribusiness finds political resistance. Neither is the case that Brazilian industrial farming is exterior or anterior to capitalist dynamics. Instead, the ethnographic case of Brazilian entrepreneurs who develop machine learning, artificial intelligence and smart farming invites us to think about the (uneven) combination of different forms of destructive creation. The missionaries of disruption can help us to question the dimensions and dynamics of capitalism, in the sense that they show us that, on the one hand, capital creates its own mechanisms of reproduction and expansion. But at the same time, such potential to destroy and incorporate frontiers doesn’t run smooth where disruption is uncertain.

References

Cite As

About the author(s)