Coined in his famous study of California agriculture, Carey McWilliams’s memorable phrase “farm fascism” refers to the agribusiness coupling of public and private police violence with aggressive efforts to use the media to control public opinion. Visual technologies were an important component of these corporate efforts to control workers and public opinion, and not only because big growers and the local police who supported them often used cameras to observe and harass farm workers.

One index of farm worker exploitation is the fact that they have often been the objects but rarely the subjects of media representation. There is a vast archive of iconic photos and films of farm workers, but there are far fewer well-known examples of visual media produced by them. This is to say that the exploitation of farm workers—their material objectification or commodification as labor power—partly depends on technologies of visual culture, including the agribusiness-dominated relations of looking that have symbolically reproduced farm worker subordination and abjection.

In such contexts, California farm-worker unions have struggled to organize workers and produce their own media—press, photography, and film—in opposition to the agribusiness domination of visual technology. Farm workers have undermined agribusiness representations of workers as mere machines of production by themselves mobilizing media technologies. Appropriations of cameras and other visual technologies by farm worker unions have both a material and symbolic force, making exploitation visible while simultaneously seizing the means of visual reproduction.

The phrase speculative technologies thus has multiple meanings. First, it refers to agribusiness technologies aimed at limiting the risk to investment in an inherently risky industry, dependent on the contingencies of nature and markets and therefore obsessed with labor control. And by implication, the phrase further references farm worker engagements with technology, especially visual technology. Indeed, the adjective "speculative" is etymologically related to terms suggesting technologically mediated forms of looking or observation such as watchtowers, scientific lenses, mirrors, magnifying glasses and telescopes. Finally, I mean “speculative” to suggest some of the meanings associated with the term in literary and film criticism, where, among other things, it describes creative works of imaginative world building, for both agribusiness and farm workers have appropriated visual technologies to imagine competing visions of alternative social orders.

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