Uprooting Silicon Prairie

Abstract

The American Midwest is undergoing a major renovation. A landscape known for facilitating the farming and distribution of crops and animal products is transforming to enable the proliferation of digital platforms, retrofitting infrastructure like buildings, mines, factories and fields in the service of producing hardware and software that create a platform for other actors to conduct their own business. A new economic framework called the Silicon Prairie has declared Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska as a mecca of data production. While there has been increased scholarship on the effects of the platform economy in urban areas, drawing mostly from the study of gig work, smart cities and governance optimisation, there is a noticeable gap in researching how the infrastructure of platform capitalism materialises within rural environments and smaller urban settlements. This essay presents three speculative design interventions in a project called Digital Permaculture.