The data fix: Smart farming and the sociotechnical politics of datafication and assetization

This article brings critical data studies into dialogue with agri-food scholarship to theorize the data fix—the use of data infrastructures to manage economic, social, and ecological contradictions under digital capitalism. Drawing on China's mushroom industry in Gutian, it traces how the data fix operates through the assetization of data, land, and labor. Historically, China's trajectory, from cybernetic socialism to the agriculture digital brain, reveals a distinct mode of state-led assetization, in which data function both as speculative assets and as instruments of governance. Unlike North American corporate financialization, China's collective land ownership and state coordination constrain market speculation while transforming governance itself into a site of value creation. The article situates China's hybrid model within broader debates on data colonialism and Southern data politics, arguing that the data fix provides a comparative framework for understanding how digital infrastructures reconfigure agrarian relations, state power, and capitalist accumulation across uneven but interconnected global contexts.