For much of the twentieth century, powerful corporate interests have promoted forms of agribusiness futurism, a set of material and symbolic practices devoted to technological progress as a means of solving labor problems. Agribusiness futurism projects a corporate utopia in which technology forecloses labor conflict and where new machines and biotechnical research eliminate some workers while enabling the expanded exploitation of others. Agribusiness futurism fetishizes new technology in an effort to eliminate the resistance of living workers and subordinate them to the dead machinery of production. While optimistically framed in terms of progress and new tomorrows, agribusiness futurism presupposes a barely disavowed sadism directed at workers newly disciplined through technology, a quality critically foregrounded in farm-worker-union media, and more broadly, in science fiction that reflects on California agribusiness. Agribusiness futurism articulates high-tech capitalism to white masculinity and heterosexuality, linking agricultural technology to the future of patriarchal white family life. Finally, agribusiness futurism and its discontents have powerfully shaped culture and politics in California, the United States, and the world.

Begin this path: Agribusiness Futurism

1. Automation
2. The Century of Progress
3. Streamlining Labor
4. Farm Worker Bots
5. Progressive Exploitation
6. The Aerial Gaze of Agribusiness
7. Killing Machines
8. Pesticide Weapons
9. Cold War Design
10. The Short-Handled Hoe
11. Space Colonies

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