ABSTRACTVertical farming, a form of indoor controlled‐environment agriculture, attracted substantial amounts of private and public capital and media praise especially during the five‐year period from 2018 to 2023. Both funding and accolades rest on a number of contradictory value propositions concerning land, labor, and capital. These contradictions emerge, in turn, from the sector's marketing as a technologically revolutionary, data‐driven, postscarcity, postmaterial form of farming with the capability to spark commensurate revolutions in farm labor. To its public funders, whose support is typically reduced taxation and regulation, vertical farming promises high‐tech green‐collar employment in economically distressed areas. To its private funders, the prospect of returns on intellectual property embedded in proprietary data analysis platforms implicitly promises reduced labor spending through automation. Recent bankruptcies among vertical farms in the United States that attracted the largest capital investments have provided new material for retrospective study, including public court dockets and asset auctions. In combination with multimodal media analysis and anonymous interviews, this article proposes that vertical farming's failures reflect its inherent dependence on site‐specific legacies of disinvestment and devaluation. These failures highlight structural tensions and contradictions between mobile, speculative green capital and the constraints of fixed assets, local labor markets, and the demands of an elite consumer base whose expectations are shaped by narratives of sustainability, convenience, and social distinction.

ABSTRACTThe nonprofit human service sector in the United States is much slower than the private sector in adopting new data technologies to track and improve services, evaluate outcomes, and communicate successes. While for‐profit companies sell data warehouses and analytic services to human service organizations, many organizations lack the resources or administrative commitment to develop data cultures and systems required to foment knowledge production and meaningful data use. Furthermore, documented tensions between key stakeholders, such as funders, managers, frontline staff, and service users, highlight important differences between industry and other sectors in the adoption of data systems. This article draws from interviews and focus groups with many stakeholders and human service organizations to highlight multiple, sometimes conflicting folk theories of data labor in human service organizations. The results demonstrate numerous competing theories for the uses of data and the work of laboring with data in human services. Drawing on these results, we propose a novel competing data values framework for reading data laborers' theories of data and data work, with a horizontal axis spanning from that categorization of poverty of data to information abundance. Our findings indicate that folk theories cluster in specific quadrants of the model, in particular, poverty and extractivism.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the unique economic practices of Slab City, California, an off‐grid community that rejects mainstream US values. Despite operating within the broader US economic system, Slab City residents have developed alternative forms of exchange, using cigarettes and cannabis alongside US dollars. The article examines the symbolic meanings associated with these alternative currencies, arguing that their value derives from symbolic gestures of trust and solidarity, reflecting a rejection of surplus value extraction and an embrace of shared economic experience. The analysis dives into Slab City's moral economy, highlighting the community's reliance on collective action for resource provisioning, such as weekly rituals of free meals, communal water tanks, and group efforts in resource acquisition and distribution. Contrasting Slab City's internal economic practices with the exploitative practices of the investor–state nexus in surrounding towns, the article underscores the community's commitment to mutual aid and challenges to capitalist norms. Finally, the article highlights the fluidity of monetary forms and the potential for alternative currencies to emerge within specific social contexts.

ABSTRACTExperiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is addressed to those humans who would reimagine money so that they will recognize the human and technical infrastructures on which it has always depended.

Abstract This article analyzes the politics of scale in global development by focusing on a sanitation program in western Kenya. It follows the daily work of a nongovernmental organization that seeks to provide access to chlorine dispensers to millions of people for the purpose of disinfecting water. By engaging with literatures on development and infrastructure, this article proposes reach as an analytic that jointly attends to the aspirations, labors, and uncertain outcomes embedded in scale work. An ethnography of reach emphasizes the temporality of off‐grid infrastructures to capture the ambivalent relationships between aspirations and results and between standardization and adaptation, as well as the unstable nature of care. This proves useful to theorizing expansion as potentially generative of, rather than only inimical to, the good life—thereby troubling the vision of scale making as replication often used to understand development projects and their consequences.

Abstract Does wage labor contribute to well‐being beyond providing an income? Well‐being can be understood in eudaimonic terms as the happiness derived from a socially valued life or in hedonic terms as the experience of pleasure. The eudaimonic–hedonic divide is replicated in competing progressive visions of the place of work in a good life. Laborist theories stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life. By contrast, for post‐work theories, pleasure is important for well‐being, and work is generally not expected to be pleasurable. Surprisingly, many of the participants in my study of diverse US job seekers described one or more of the jobs they had held as “fun.” Fun connotes enjoyment without deeper meaning, a hedonic rather than eudaimonic account of nonfinancial work rewards. What made a job fun were small work pleasures: enjoyment of the tasks and feeling competent at them, enjoyment of the physical work environment, or enjoyment of social relations on the job. These small pleasures could be found in both standard and nonstandard, precarious jobs. This study indicates the need for a labor politics that improves hedonic well‐being on the job. It also expands an “anthropology of the good” to include ordinary enjoyment.