So since I'm in North Carolina right now, let me explain the way corporate farming (which this is about) works here. The district I'm in (NC-7) is one of the biggest hog producing areas on the country. But it's not a case of small family farms raising hogs they sell to WalMart
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Instead, the hogs belong to a giant corporation, which parcels them out to subcontractors (formerly known as farmers) for fattening. They have to comply with all kinds of cost-saving guidelines, including disposing of hog shit in giant pools of the kind that are spilling over now
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If they don't comply with the mandates, they simply get fewer or no pigs to raise next time around. The financial squeeze is very effective at bringing farmers into line with corporate goals without ever overtly telling them what to do.
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These lagoons of pig shit are now overflowing because of heavy flooding—the kind of extreme weather event we're going to see more of as the climate changes. And they don't exist because North Carolina farmers don't care about the environment; they exist because of Big Ag
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As a tech person, the word 'blockchaing' is triggering, but the real story here is IBM and WalMart moving more surveillance and monitoring further down the food supply chain, to squeeze more out of farmers at the expense of everyone but them
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Note that the pattern—pushing tasks out to contractors who are pitted against each other and find themselves locked in a downward spiral of earnings, in a way that creates terrible externalities for the rest of us—is just as true for Amazon or Uber as it is for hog farming
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IBM is clever enough to wave "blockchain" as a red flag to distract from a project that is about value extraction and the further dismantling of rural America. This is a small illustration of how tech stories are rarely about tech at all, but about the concentration of power

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I never thought I could hate a term more than "big data" but here we are
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finally a blockchain solving a real problem
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Points at
@Pinboard’s legs: those are blochain nowThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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