Last week I was invited to an investment strategy event hosted by an emerging startup company called VestedWorld, a traditional venture capital fund that seeks to make "transformative impact" on developing countries. Immediately upon entering the room I felt as though I had crossed boundaries into the domain of the vectorial class- where the "third nature" rules, to borrow terms from Mckenzie Wark’s Digital Labor and the Anthropocene. The room was populated by slick suited men, many of whom attended some competitive business school in the U.S and were now looking to diversify their financial portfolios by earning competitive returns and scaling their impact/ownership in the developing economy. Within 5 minutes of being in this space I felt my body quickly searching for the door.
The whole enterprise felt like a grand colonial project, bringing advanced agricultural technology to remote villages in Africa in order to efficiently extract resources to then sell to a mass market competitively. I felt somewhat nauseated when hearing terms like "mission driven” or "service work”, when so clearly a project like this was merely opportunistic. Of course there is what to be said about investing in emerging markets, in order to catalyze a multiplier effect which can boost a thriving economy. However, it was also quite evident that none of these investment partners had any background or training in agriculture or farming and that these skills they claimed to have earned on the job, was driven mostly by their personal entrepreneurial interests. One investor bragged that his farmer earned more in a given year than a lawyer in a neighboring village would in half the time.
Perhaps I reacted so strongly because I had just read Mckenzie’s piece and I’ve been thinking about how external investors might complicate and abstract our relationship with land. With this lens it felt as though this company was invested in bringing technologies of an over-developed world to an underdeveloped one. All while introducing an external, vectoral class, to make manufacturing and agricultural decisions using information systems, and technologies that create this kind of removed third nature that Mckenzie describes.
Being at this investment launch party I realized that I was experiencing the space where the command strategies of the vectoral class were in effect. Here prospective partners, vested Angles sat together, drinking whiskey in a fancy back room- invite only- to accumulate stocks in resources they plan to extract from land they have likely never been to. Turning distant lands into information, and information into control. I left feeling sad and perplexed while thinking about what it might mean to create this 'fourth nature' discourse that Mckenzie describes we need. Will it depend on climate change to bring all the classes to some unified world-view and vision? Fuck.
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