Cybersyn 2

Cybersyn 2 is a project exploring how food distribution can be organised differently: more democratically, more locally, and with more control in the hands of the people who actually grow, move, and need food.

Developed by Radical Data and Rural Futurisms with communities in southern Africa, the project responds to a system that is failing from both ends. Rural producers are pushed into precarious and unsustainable conditions, while communities struggle to access decent food without paying inflated prices for lower-quality produce. In between sits a highly centralised food system built around supermarkets, middlemen, and infrastructure most people cannot shape or even see.

Cybersyn 2 asks what happens if that system is rebuilt from other foundations. Drawing on Chile’s Project Cybersyn and the Tswana Kgotla system, it prototypes a decentralised platform for food distribution rooted in food sovereignty, local knowledge, and democratic control.

Cybersyn 2 works through co-creation with pilot sites in rural, peri-urban, and urban contexts in South Africa. Rather than arriving with a fixed solution, the project develops the platform with communities, adapting it to different needs across production, distribution, and collective access to food.

The platform is designed to answer very practical questions: who has food available, where can it go, when can it be sold, and at what price. It allows producers to share what they have, consumers or collectives to place orders, and communities to organise distribution without depending entirely on supermarkets or other centralised intermediaries.

The system is built to be lightweight, decentralised, and understandable to non-technical users. It explores access through simple web tools, messaging systems like SMS or WhatsApp, and, where useful, local mesh communication infrastructure. Just as important, it is designed to be modifiable: not a sealed platform people must adapt to, but a shared system communities can discuss, question, and reshape in line with their own values and realities.

Food is never just about food. It is about land, power, infrastructure, climate, labour, and who gets to decide the terms of survival.

Right now, food systems are dominated by forms of control that are both extractive and fragile. Large agricultural and retail systems squeeze producers, limit public influence, and make communities dependent on decisions taken far away from where food is actually grown and needed. In moments of crisis, whether drought, conflict, or economic shock, that centralisation becomes even more dangerous.

Cybersyn 2 exists to push against that logic. It treats food distribution as a democratic problem, not just a logistical one. The project matters because food sovereignty requires more than access to land or production knowledge. It also requires control over the systems that move food, set terms, and shape who benefits.

By drawing on Global South political and technological traditions, Cybersyn 2 refuses the idea that meaningful innovation must come from corporate logistics or Northern platform models. It proposes something else: a food infrastructure shaped by autonomy, participation, and local accountability.