Hi everyone,
This I’d like to tell you about a metaphor I often find useful, which is monocropping.
(Disclaimer: As an agriculturalist I make an excellent computer scientist, so this metaphor is not exactly based on a detailed understanding of farming practices. Feel free to call me on it if you know more and think I’ve got something wrong).
When it’s not being a metaphor, monocropping is:
… the agricultural practice of growing a single crop year after year on the same land, in the absence of rotation through other crops or growing multiple crops on the same land (polyculture). Corn, soybeans, and wheat are three common crops often grown using monocropping techniques.
Monocropping allows for farmers to have consistent crops throughout their entire farm. They can plant only the most profitable crop, use the same seed, pest control, machinery, and growing method on their entire farm, which may increase overall farm profitability.
Monocropping is a key part of what leads to the curious uniformity of a lot of the fruit and vegetables we see in the shops. People have found out that they can sell much more profitable crops if they look great, and have selected crops and practices based on that, and then dialled that all the way up to get the sort of produce we typically see.
This pattern repeats itself again and again, not just in crops. I’ve started to think of monocropping in the most general sense as the following strategy:
Identify what the single best thing to do is.
Scale it up as far as you can, adapting it to better scale as you go.
Monocropping is basically what happens when you let an optimisation process run wild on a particular problem domain: Everything that is not needed for the optimisation process tends to get ruthlessly pruned away over time. This is, for example, why supermarket tomatoes look great but are bland and tasteless compared to a home grown tomato.
In general the hallmark feature of monocropping is that something is simultaneously very widespread and weirdly bad - generally not awful, but bland and mediocre in ways that it seems obvious could be improved upon.
The badness is not an accident, it’s a function of the optimisation process - when you optimise something everything that is irrelevant to the end goal (profit in this case, but this is more general), attributes that are not that important to the goal will tend to be only as good as they need to be and no better: Looking good sells well. Tasting good… well as long as it doesn’t taste awful it can be quite hard to differentiate on taste, so monocropped foods often taste good enough but no better.
(In the tomato case, and many others, it’s not really just the monocropping that does it, it’s also to do with storage and refrigeration and a variety of other factors, but I’m going to keep using “monocropping” as a convenient shorthand for the whole thing)
Monocropping isn’t intrinsically bad. It’s good to be able to feed everyone at affordable prices. Whether or not monocropping helps achieve that is less clear to me (there are questions about nutritional value of modern produce, and also about whether the modern approaches to farming actually do a particularly good job of producing food or whether they’re just easy to replicate without investing in worker skill), but I’m not at all a food expert (I recommend listening to Sarah Taber over me if you want to learn more about this).
Either way, you probably don’t have much control over whether things get monocropped, so it doesn’t matter that much whether it’s good or bad. It’s a thing that happens, and it’s useful to be able to spot when it does for two reasons:
It helps you to understand when you’re better off moving off the monocrop.
It’s helpful for understanding what the producers of the monocrop are trying to do to you.
Back in Unusual Foundations I pointed out that often you’re better off figuring out how to build on your own strengths rather than following generic advice:
The majority of advice you hear is not tailored for you. It’s advice that is designed for “most people” - people repeat advice that worked for them and that is simple enough to spread to others, and so “good” advice spreads through the population.
In order to be successful it has to useful for enough people that they want to share it, and it has to be simple enough to share easily. Advice that fails to fit either of these criteria will tend to be hard to come by even if it’s exactly what you need - somebody might be able to give you that advice, but you won’t necessarily find them.
A consequence of this is that most advice works for “enough” people but it very rarely works for everyone, because as you make advice more general it starts to become harder to communicate because you have to add all of the caveats and preconditions (Do X, unless you have problem Y, in which case it might be worth trying Z…) and the communication stalls.
This is a monocropping problem: Advice has been optimised to be “sold” to you more than it has been optimised for quality, and as a result a lot of advice has the hallmark widespread but kinda bad characteristics of a monocrop.
Monocropped advice shares another common trait with monocropped produce: Often it wasn’t actually optimised for your benefit, but for the benefit of those in charge.
In Against the Grain, James C. Scott argues that a lot of the original grain monocrops were chosen not because grain was some uniquely good crop for people’s dietary health, but instead because it was easily taxed (it all ripens at once, it stores and travels well, etc). The fact that people could eat it was of course essential for this role - it wouldn’t have made a successful crop if they couldn’t! - but the fact that it was as wildly successful as it was was very much the result of how useful its success was to those in charge.
So monocrops are often a useful thing to pay attention to if you feel inclined to ask questions such as “What do those in power want and what are they doing to me in order to get it?” (I recommend asking these questions, but possibly quietly and in conversation with trusted friends and coworkers).
But also it’s worth noticing monocrops for another reason: If all you’ve encountered is the monocrop then you probably don’t know what the thing in its non-degraded state is like. If all you’ve encountered are supermarket tomatoes and you think you don’t like tomatoes, you’ll probably have your mind blown the first time you try one from the garden. If all you’ve encountered is corporate mindfulness programs, it may surprise you to learn that mindfulness is actually quite good when it’s not a flagrant attempt by a corporation to abdicate their responsibilities to you by insisting that you practice self-care to deal with their abusive work culture.
As a result, often when you encounter a monocrop it’s worth asking “What if we did this but, you know, good?”. You will likely be pleasantly surprised by the results.