Jack and the Cloud Giant

In this story, we follow a young peasant called Jack up a data-vine that leads into the Cloud Giant’s techno-castle, where he finds out what happens when he plugs his farm into the glittering apps and the dazzling promises of precision agriculture.

"There was once a young farmer called Jack who helped his mother farm a small area of land. Like many small-scale farmers they were facing hard times and eventually Jack's mother suggested, reluctantly, that he should take their prize cow to market and use the proceeds to buy new seeds and animals. 

Jack set off full of good intentions and sold the cow for a good price at the market. Unfortunately, however, he was a gullible young man, and he was soon accosted by a corporate agribusiness salesman who dazzled him with promises of precision agriculture and digital farming. The salesman explained that if Jack shared real-time information about his farm with his company Jack and his mother would get all sorts of useful farming advice from the company’s Artificial Intelligence agents. The salesman convinced Jack to spend all his money on a subscription to the company’s magical digital farming platform app."

Read the story here!
 

We are so excited to share the audio version as one of our podcasts, narrated by Zahra Moloo (see the audio file below).

Jack and the Cloud Giant is illustrated by children’s book author, Garth Laidlaw.