Enshittification of Agritech
State of Agritech - 5th December 2024
1/ Enshittification of Agritech
Or what happens when the "Impact" sector loses its moorings with ethics (courtesy Nikhit Agrawal’s dense academic paper) and what can be done about it?
2/ 2024 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle
How does the 2024 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle look at the moment? Plus! What has changed from the 2023 and 2022 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle?
3/ Reflections from Digital Food Labs’ French Foodtech Landscape
4/ Inside India’s Ambitious Experiment with Unique Farmers’ ID
1/ Enshittification of Agritech
"Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since,
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.7
As an independent agritech analyst and agritech consultant who makes a living writing blogs and advising clients on agricultural technologies in smallholding contexts, I should be the last person to talk about enshittification of agritech.
I mean, why wash dirty linen in public?
I should rather talk giddishly about AI (which I have but not in the way you might expect), rave about the fourth agricultural revolution (which I have, but not for the reasons you might expect) and indulge you in a fantasy of techno-imagination. And yet here I am, indulging in this seemingly masochistic task, thanks to my upbringing.
As a rooted matter of fact, I belong to the Internet Romantics Generation. Having fallen in love with technology during my heady twenties (Clue Train Manifesto anyone?), my relationship with technology could be characterised as thermostatic.
A thermostat ensures the stability of the room’s temperature by introducing heat in response to too much cold or vice versa. That’s pretty much my job as an agritech analyst. I dampen hype, inject (un)common sense in a room of irrational infatuation about technology, and pitch for technological solutions in another room afflicted with the Tech curse (Think of Punjab - Did Punjab get screwed because Agriculture was so successful in its halcyon days?)
And so when Nikhit Agrawal shared his paper that questioned the ethics of agritech solutions in smallholding contexts, I was thrilled.
I’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. I had to expend effort to look beyond the veneer of academic prose.
Nikhit’s paper asks a fundamental question encapsulated in a timeless Talebian insight that deserves to be hung as a poster in the boardroom of every impact sector-donor-philanthropy firm.
You can't be serious about advising change when you have a technology to sell. You either give advice, or you sell technology. It's unethical to think you can do both.
It’s funny how Agency Problems chase me wherever I go.
Many moons ago, in my previous life, I received brickbats when I spoke about agency problems in Gartner and the technology consulting world where conslutting is the order of the day - keeping up the night with strange bed partners such as Sales teams, System Integrators, IT Analysts, Tech Vendors and Designers.
I officially switched careers from pure-play technology consulting to agritech in 2017. Lo behold. I now see rampant agency problems in the way the Impact sector organizes itself and gets its work done.
Even if you can argue that India lacks an unbiased functioning extension services ecosystem, How can one single player from the sector advise change AND implement agritech solutions in the community?
Why is nobody seeing a conflict of interest in providing epistemic power to the players of the Impact sector in shaping how we think about impact at multiple levels?