Introduction

In places across the world, if you fall quiet and listen – often not even very hard – you might hear the call of a cockerel at dawn or the bak-bak-baaak song of a hen laying. Despite there being around 26 billion chickens alive on the planet at any one time, this noise is probably not as familiar as it once was. That’s where Our Chicken Life comes in. With just a few clicks, a fifteen-camera, twenty-four-hour livestream of a flock of seventy chickens in Utah on Twitch allows viewers to hang out with chickens and participate in their care. For a small fee, subscribers can feed ‘M&Ms’ (mealworms and millet) to chickens, mealworms flying down a chute next to one of the fifteen cameras with a quick command. These cameras are controlled by subscribers, who can focus on different events and individuals around the barnyard.

It’s spring in Utah, and the hens have been setting their eggs for weeks. Chicks are finally beginning to hatch. Utah is seven hours behind England. My working day typically runs from 8am to 4pm, meaning that for the first seven hours or so, the chickens at Our Chicken Life are asleep. At around 3pm, when my calls have finished, I log into the stream and watch the hens wake up, potter around, and mingle with the rabbits and ducks. Farmer Spence faithfully puts out their food and refreshes their water. A few weeks later, the camera pans to Ada hatching her last chick. In March, broody hen Ada began the incubation of four eggs, placed under her by Spence, the farmer and owner of Our Chicken Life. Peeps emerge from under Ada. Her body lifts and falls as she guides the chick out, clucking along with their peeps. Their sibling, born a day earlier, now fluffy and bright-eyed, pokes out to watch the commotion. Ada looks down as a black chick emerges from underneath her, wet and shiny.

Our Chicken Life was set up in 2018 by Farmer Spence. Spence has kept a flock of chickens since 2015 and thought that other people might enjoy watching the chickens and interacting with them. With 71,000 followers on Twitch in 2021 and a growing YouTube platform, Spence was not wrong. During the pandemic, the livestream grew at a remarkable pace, with these encounters being part of what Turnbull, Searle, and Adams understood as novel and affective human–animal relations produced by lockdown.¹ It persists in popularity with 91,000 followers on Twitch, and a doubling in YouTube followers at the time of writing. On average, Twitch streamers tune in for forty minutes, indicating an engaged following rather than fleeting encounters.

Our Chicken Life allows subscribers to interact via the Twitch chat, primarily through ‘feeding’ chickens. Subscribers can feed the chickens once per day by posting word commands like ‘food’ and ‘feed’, ‘noms’, ‘dindins’, ‘munchies’, or ‘chow’. When a subscriber enters one of these commands, ‘M&Ms’ drop from a chute next to a camera, and the chickens rush towards it. Subscribers can also use commands to switch camera views 24/7, including ‘inhouse’, ‘coop’, ‘nest’, and ‘shade’, each of which correlates to a space. The feeder is filled once a day and once empty, a message is posted in the chat. This regulates consumption as part of a healthy balanced diet. Our Chicken Life presents a novel form of recurrent encounter that produces a digital community of ‘carers’, supporting the chickens’ costs while also controlling their daily lives.

Our Chicken Life is a unique case study for digital ecologies where non-human labour, care, and control intermingle with the exploitation of centuries of galline knowledge to find new frontiers of value extraction. In this chapter, I explore the communing of care and control through digital encounters, contending that this galline digital ecology relies on the byproductive labour of chickens. Ultimately, I argue that this is a new way of eking capital from non-human bodies, theorising these encounters within ideas of non-human labour, consumption, and commodity in the Anthropocene, with an emblematic Anthropocene species.² This builds on digital ecologies’ explorations of encounters overlapping with other chapters in this book like Remme’s ‘relational ambiguities’ with individual lobsters who are simultaneously enrolled in commodification; and Adams et al.’s assertion that digital encounters can ‘expand the number and diversity of people who can observe wild animals from [a]‌ relatively narrow circle’, albeit with chickens not being the ‘wild’ animals of concern to them.³

In this chapter, I look at the livestream in relation to digital ecologies literature and more broadly within more-than-human encounters. Then, I focus on the behaviours and relationships of the chickens; human interactions with the platform and the flock; and byproductive labour in the digital flock. I build on Whitney’s concept of byproductive labour as both concept and tool, applying it to the role of the digital flock in metabolising waste affects and affective byproducts.⁴ I ask how this novel form of encounter builds on and expands previous knowledge about chickens. To quote Haraway:⁵ follow the chicken and find the world; following the digital flock, I look at new worlds being created that bring together chickens, technology, and human observers in a unique ‘digital ecology’.

The digital flock

Alexander and Kerr claimed early in the pandemic that two kinds of entertainment nature livestreams had emerged: 24/7 cameras in cages and daily programmed events like feedings.⁶ The first resembles ‘a nature film in which humans are nowhere to be seen’, while the second ‘emphasizes the interdependence of humans and animals’.⁷ Our Chicken Life collapses these categories: there is a constant livestream and Farmer Spence is sometimes on camera, but the real draw is the ability for watchers to ‘feed’ the chickens themselves. Koch and Miles contend that digital technology changes the possibilities and challenges of encounters with strangers, making them ‘a matter of choice as much as chance’, and it is certainly under these circumstances that the digital flock has coalesced.⁸ The chicken, emblem of the Anthropocene and symbol of capitalist food production, is not, usually, encountered by chance or choice in the non-digital realm.

It isn’t simply the novelty of the platform that makes Our Chicken Life a compelling case study: it is that this form of encounter is with chickens – one of the most maligned species on earth, and quite literally the stratigraphic writing of the Anthropocene.⁹ Chickens, while the most populous bird on earth, are perhaps the least ‘natural’ of animals; in 1975, Smith and Daniels argued that ‘feathered bipeds bearing a superficial resemblance to the chicken, will continue to exist under the auspices of our technological society, but, and one must insist on this, they will not be chickens and their eggs will not be eggs’.¹⁰ In the 50 years since, chickens have continued to morph into creatures that are now forced to grow to twice the size of their 1930s counterparts in half the time.¹¹

The chicken is no longer a ‘natural’ bird and, perhaps, hasn’t been since the massification of their labour with the development of egg incubation over 2,000 years ago.¹² By the end of World War 2, the ‘tweaking’ of chickens reached new heights with the Chicken of Tomorrow contest that saw the birth of the industrial hybrid chicken found across the world today. The contest, co-hosted by the US Department for Agriculture and A&P stores, wanted to create a chicken that could feed a growing population: a hybrid bird good for both egg-laying and meat. The contest created new biological conditions for chickens, ushering in a new era of labour and enclosure. This contest set in motion events that would lead to the global chicken population having a mass greater than all other birds on earth combined, and to chickens being the most numerous terrestrial bird on the planet. The chicken is not just a symbol of the Capitalocene,¹³ but ‘vividly symbolize[s]‌ the transformation of the biosphere to fit evolving human consumption patterns’.¹⁴

The chicken – as both an industrial labourer and commodity – does not fit easily with ideas of ‘nature’ often explored in digital ecologies and more-than-human studies. Büscher contends that ‘online trends influence the politics and political economy of conservation, namely, how they stimulate and complicate the commodification of biodiversity, ecosystems and landscapes, and how they help to reimagine ideas, ideals and experiences of (‘pristine’) nature’.¹⁵ In the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, new ways are always being realised to eke out value and labour from ‘nature’. However, the chicken is not a ‘natural animal’, but rather an Anthropocene animal, produced by and for humans. Where there are arguments for and against virtual commodification of ‘nature’, how and why does this matter for the chicken? In the digital flock, traditional galline labour – producing meat or eggs – takes a back seat to new kinds of labour that rely on chickens performing ‘natural’ behaviours; on being willing to interact with the cameras; and on byproductive labour – maintaining positive affective atmospheres and metabolising ‘waste’ affects.

Notes on methods

It was a chance conversation that initially led me to Our Chicken Life. A colleague mentioned the livestream, telling me how their friend had become obsessed with this quirky flock of chickens in Utah. Immediately after that call, I headed over to Twitch. I was hooked. Every day, I would open the stream, soft clucks accompanying my lonely pandemic life. Contextualising my relationship with Our Chicken Life is my longer connection with my own small flock. In 2017, my mum and I had rehomed six ex-commercial hens. But, as ex-commercial hens, they didn’t live very long. In 2020, when I was a hundred miles away and locked down, the last two hens died. I didn’t get to say goodbye, but I deeply felt their absence. Our Chicken Life helped me to cope with their loss, offering a new kind of digital network through which I could connect with birds like the ones I loved.

As I watched and listened to the birds, I started to notice that I was being moved by these chickens, building a relationship with them through recurrent encounters. This assemblage of birds, algorithms, screens, camera, and humans made the digital a place of emotionality and connection. While I didn’t subscribe to the channel, and therefore didn’t comment or interact directly with the flock, I did get to participate in the atmospheres of excitement as birds rushed to scoff mealworms released when someone typed ‘nomnoms’. When I was in the Twitch stream, I began to write what I was experiencing. These observations form the basis of this chapter. However, because I could not be watching a livestream 24/7, I have also been watching Our Chicken Life’s weekly compilation videos that provide a showreel of the highlights of activity.

Galline behaviours and relationships

Since 1948, the chicken has transformed. The 50 billion chickens slaughtered annually for meat, and the billions more laying eggs, are for the most part kept in industrial farms. There, ‘they just have to be, in an existential void, until we kill them’.¹⁶ In Britain, the space given to each chicken in this system is 20×20cm for smaller bantams, and 30×30cm for larger birds. This is equivalent, approximately, to a sheet of standard printer paper. In one square metre, there can be between eleven and twenty-five birds. The reason that I include this detail is that this is how most chickens are living; in many cases welfare standards are lower. In these enclosures, chickens are denied the ability to perform their natural behaviours. There is no room to dust bathe, forage, or socialise and the close quarters can lead to conflict as the hens do try to find some distance from one another.¹⁷ Chicken’s alienation from their natural behaviours is not just through enclosure; chickens also have their annual laying cycles and moulting strictly controlled. Controlling and limiting these natural behaviours has been essential to the explosion of chicken farming.

At Our Chicken Life, the flock live in relative freedom, roaming a large space and living in more ‘natural’ set-ups than in commercial farms, with cockerels and hens living together, along with other ducks and sheep. I was fascinated with how the very behaviours industrial farming has sought to eradicate were being encouraged in part because this is what subscribers are here to see. In the opening encounter of this chapter, as I watched, a subscriber pans the camera to zoom in on Ada hatching her last chick. Embryos develop in eggs once the hen begins sitting on them, meaning that a clutch laid over a period of a week or longer will all develop and hatch together. During the incubation, hens turn eggs to ensure the embryo doesn’t get stuck to the shell membrane, that the gases move around, and a steady temperature is maintained. A day or so before they are ready to hatch, a chick begins to peep in the shell, establishing ‘a barely audible “communications network”’ between chicks and mother.¹⁸ The chick then saws its way out with its egg tooth; the hen does not break the egg but remains sat on her clutch as each chick breaks slowly from their shell.

Ada guides her chick out, clucking along with their peeps. She looks down as a black chick emerges from underneath her, wet and shiny. In the weeks that follow, we watch Ada raise her chicks surrounded by the rest of the flock, to applause and excitement from subscribers. This set-up, of young joining a flock, is unusual for most of the billions of chickens on the planet today. These ‘natural’ individual and social galline behaviours is exactly what subscribers are paying for.

Subscribers go on a journey with the flock and become invested in their care and wellbeing. This is evident from the hatching season, as we follow along from laying to setting to hatching, cheering them on through the chat, throwing treats through the camera as sustenance. One subscriber posts: ‘It is nice to see Ada finally getting at least a little bit of sleep’ and another replies: ‘I bet it’s difficult when little ones keep wiggling under her’. This sanitised online space transforms often physically and emotionally gruelling chicken care into something as easy as paying a small monthly fee and clicking a few buttons.¹⁹ But this online platform is not just about the chickens, it’s also about building identities and community around them, and encouraging particular kinds of encounter between human and chicken that subvert the usual relation, mediated through capital and commodification. In a world where chickens are usually hidden away, it’s revealing that these natural behaviours entice an audience who reward pecking, crowing, dustbathing, preening, and seeing chickens live in a flock.

Interacting with the digital flock

In The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière argues that the theatre is ‘the place where an action is taken to its conclusion by bodies in motion in front of living bodies to be mobilized. The latter might have relinquished their power. But this power is revived, reactivated in the performance of the former’.²⁰ Might it be possible to also conceptualise the digital flock and their spectators in this kind of relationship? In doing so, the chickens shift from pixels and images to creative producers. The galline body becomes a productive one, which creates affective (and economic) value through its relationship with the camera and the audience beyond. This section therefore looks at the role of ‘care’ in these digital encounters with this flock, ultimately questioning what, exactly, this encounter is doing in Our Chicken Life – for both chickens and humans.

Guéry and Deleule look to the ‘productive body’ to think about identity.²¹ They insist that ‘animal bodies are referred to their nature as living beings, not as producers’ and that ‘being productive is not the property of whoever transforms, or informs, a previously furnished material … In truth, being productive is not the property of anyone or anything, whereas products are the property of whoever appropriates them’.²² Instead of insisting upon being producers, they look to productivity to understand bodies that have already become. It is thus important in thinking about the productive bodies of the digital flock in specificity. It is because they are chickens – these chickens – that this relationship is produced with the audience.

For its founder, the intention of Our Chicken Life doesn’t offer a unidirectional gaze of the digital chicken on the human screen, but rather a curated intersubjective encounter with chickens; as he explains:

This shift towards collectivity in the livestream is important, relying on a series of human and non-human interactions, digital and visceral, to commune the care of chickens. Subscribers become a digital community of ‘carers’, supporting the chickens’ costs through their monthly fee while also controlling parts of their daily lives. For Giraud and Hollin, ‘care is precisely what enables the instrumentalization of life, in being used to gain knowledge about entities that can be exploited for the purpose of control’.²⁴ Care has dominated recent debates in more-than-human geographies, animal studies, and multispecies ethnography: what does it mean to care, what are care’s contours, can we care and still kill?

Caring beyond the human is often argued to go together with violence; van Dooren has gone so far as to think about regimes of violent care, arguing that ‘caring is not achieved through abstract well-wishing, but is an embodied and often fraught, complex, and compromised practice’.²⁵ This raises questions not only over the appropriateness of definitions of care in scientific research on animals,²⁶ but also in ethnographic²⁷ and non-invasive research,²⁸ recognising animals not just as participants but co-producers of knowledge. As Ginn has argued of the ‘relational diagnostic’ of more-than-human ontology, it ‘ignore[s]‌ the non-relational, what may not be vital, and what may precede or be obscured by existing relations … a focus on connectivity, vitality and belonging obscures as much as it reveals … [it] has a constitutive violence – it is also an exclusion’.²⁹

Thinking about exclusion, Giraud explores how caring can be dismissed when it is caring in the wrong way; when certain ‘groups’ caring stance is (for instance) perceived as angry or so focused on caring abstractly about a particular cause that it is insufficiently caring toward other interlocutors’.³⁰ In the digital flock, it at first appears that the stakes are low: who, after all, could object to the livestreaming of animals who are, in a sense, cared for? The chat moves on to discuss whether it is too cold for the chickens to be running across to the ‘M&Ms’ chute. Then, subscribers collectively discuss their release strategy for the day: ‘I’d like to wait until it’s a bit warmer, make sure everyone has the chance to eat, not just the brave few’. These discussions are commonplace in the chat: the chicken care is a negotiation, wanting to make sure as many subscribers get to see the chickens rush for mealworms, but also that they get to see as many chickens as possible.

Chickens and humans have a history stretching back 8,000 years, but since the beginning of the twentieth century, as egg and meat production scaled up, knowledge about chickens has exploded,³¹ while becoming known to far fewer people. In addition to their biology, intimate knowledge of chicken behaviour was essential to scaling up meat and egg production. The selective breeding of chickens for food dates to at least the sixteenth century but it was the nineteenth century that saw meat production take over the globe.³² With the rise of chicken eating came a burgeoning of knowledge about chickens, albeit through a lens of exploitation. As chicken consumption scaled up, selection for specific traits has led to significant reductions in effective population size and overall genetic diversity of chickens. As chicken and egg production scaled up, their behaviour and environments became more strictly controlled. To do this, a significant and intimate knowledge of genetic, nutritional, and ethological traits was needed.³³ One lineage, of the less violent kind, has led here, to a farm in Utah, where chickens are conscripted to perform for the camera as a far-flung human audience watches on.

When a spectator ‘noms’ into the chat and mealworms topple down the chute, this can be conceptualised as communing the care of the chickens – participating through an intricate series of cameras, algorithms, and mechanics in their maintenance, as described on their website: ‘many cams are utilized to give our twitch viewers as many viewing options as possible’. When a command is typed into the chat, as detailed in the introduction to this chapter, a signal is sent to a chute to open and release some treat foods into the coop. A camera above the chute can then be controlled by subscribers. In the chat, the audience comment on the chickens: how they look, their behaviours, cooing when treats are released as chickens run towards the camera. The rewards are released to attract chickens towards the camera, to coerce them into encounters, but for the human audience, control or experimentation doesn’t consciously seem to come into it. The sense is one of commensality or beneficence: simply participating in communal care. As Sutton has critiqued there is an inherent violence in taming and tempering animals, where ‘unequal relations manifest in the “creation” of pets – purposive breeding, coercive training and physical restriction and adornment’.³⁴ The presence of cameras and interaction open this space while simultaneously shallowing it, centring encounters to produce anthropocentric value.

However, the digital flock is also a new frontier of labour, extracting from chickens the metabolisation of affects through byproductive labour, exacerbated by a turn to ‘nature’ as curative during a pandemic that saw our abilities to engage with the other-than-human world constricted.

Byproductive labour

Our Chicken Life has seen a huge surge in both viewers and paid subscribers during and since the pandemic. While Farmer Spence does not track data on why people are watching or subscribing, the growing popularity of the livestream is related to the temporalities and isolation of lockdowns,³⁵ and a trend in keeping chickens.³⁶ Walton engages critically – but seriously – with the connection between (mental and physical) health and nature, including digital nature, by asking if some of the places we seek nature in the future might be entirely virtual.³⁷ There are, Walton argues, ‘ways of experiencing nature from a distance that are just as valid, and maybe more powerful too’.³⁸ In February 2022, this ‘entirely virtual’ future was brought to the fore with the WWF releasing ‘NFAs’ – non-fungible animals – to ‘raise awareness and funds for the conservation of ten endangered species’.³⁹ With virtual chickens, this conservation angle is absent but a connection with a simpler way of life remains. Through the screen, caring for chickens becomes a digital encounter of and with animal care, where the stakes are passed off onto someone else. If you don’t log in for a day to feed treats, there aren’t repercussions; the relationship is an optional, non-essential one.

The virtual flock livestream isn’t simply a representation of the other-than-human world; there is a real connection between the spectators and the chickens. People are invested in the chickens and come back each day to check in with them. There is a kind of reciprocal relationship, albeit one that is mediated through cameras and in which one species is watched without being able to look back. In the surge of subscribers and viewers during the pandemic, Our Chicken Life offered something unique in the digital encounter: the ability to interact. The livestream became somewhere that people could go to put their worries aside and become absorbed in this galline ecology – and in that absorption, pass their excessive affects onto the chickens through the screen by directing their anxieties onto the digital flock. The inability for the chickens to look back – the removal of their power to interact – is essential to this encounter.

On the livestream, the chickens perform a byproductive labour of affect disposal and affect accumulation. Whitney’s ‘byproductive labour’⁴⁰ builds on ideas of emotional⁴¹ and affective labour,⁴² arguing that this is ‘not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts’.⁴³ A framework of byproductive labour is aligned with the literal galline labour producing eggs, but one that can also aid in conceptualising these unique Nature 2.0 ecologies that have nothing to do with conservation or wildlife. As the emblematic Anthropocene animal worker, the chicken is the antithesis of the usual animal subjects of online environmental spaces.⁴⁴

‘Byproductive labour’ not only produces affects for others to consume and does the reproductive work of maintaining positive affective atmospheres, but also metabolises ‘waste’ affects and affective byproducts. The chicken as a byproductive labourer metabolises waste or excess affects and becomes a receptacle for the disposal of affects and emotions,⁴⁵ consuming affective waste as the chickens take affects out of circulation. Outside of Whitney’s coining of the term, ‘byproductive labour’ has yet to emerge as a common concept with notable exceptions in feminist and cultural studies. For example, Meegaswatta defines byproductive labour as ‘a capitalist patriarchal practice that underpins the creation and perpetuation of female subordination’.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Táíwò uses the byproductive labour of metabolisation to theorise emotional compression and the priority of non-emotionality in patriarchal masculinity.⁴⁷ Veldstra pushes back against byproductive labour as ‘the shadow side’ of productive labour, arguing byproduction is production under neoliberal capitalism.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, outside of Whitney’s original theorisation, the promise of byproductive labour as a theoretical contribution has largely been unexplored. In the digital flock, byproductive labour finds a new mode of more-than-human elaboration.

The byproductive labour of these chickens intensified as Our Chicken Life’s popularity soared during the pandemic, opening and complicating questions of labour, circulation, and commodification through a byproductive lens. In the digital flock, a communing of control and care and conscription of labour exist, uneasily, side by side. The digital flock’s conscription in byproductive labour might also be understood as an exploitation of human knowledge about chickens to shape their environments to accommodate human pleasure. The negotiation of care and control through paying to ‘treat’ the chickens while offering constant insight into their lives demands questions are raised over whether the chickens’ observability is a condition of their thriving. Without the camera, (how) would these chickens exist?

Logging in to watch the chickens peck, bathe, and sleep, my anxiety is absorbed through the screen; when a subscriber releases pellets for the chickens, their squawks and excitement break my ruminations of hopelessness. As the chickens scoff their treats, with them goes my own affective waste that otherwise overwhelms the locked-down isolation of my bedroom. The digital flock are enlisted into byproductive affect-metabolising labour, alongside the traditional re/productive labour of laying and hatching, beginning before they are born. How might we see this as an under-studied consideration in other-than-human labour? How does this novel form of encounter allow us to differently understand chicken–human relationships, and how might it allow us to critique the eking out of capital and conscription of galline labour in ever more intimate ways?

If affective labour is always byproductive, this conceptual frame can bring a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labour. For chickens in the digital flock, this byproductive labour is not (only) found in the production of egg byproducts, but in their absorption and metabolising of human affective surplus and waste, thus producing ‘depleted embodied subjectivities: ones whose affects are diminished in their force as affections, constructed as non-intentional, non-agentic, or nonauthoritative, and who thereby are constructed as affect disposals, sites of affect accumulation’.⁴⁹ As well as eroding the distinctions between public and private, affective labour undermines the distinction between work and play, labour, and leisure. Affective labour’s byproductive work is twofold: it is (1) affect producing, which is byproductive in its failure as productive and reproductive labour, resulting from managing the behaviour of the labourer; and it is also (2) affect metabolising, where the byproductive labourer – here, the chicken – must absorb the waste of excess affects, akin to Ahmed’s ‘sticky surplus’.⁵⁰ The virtual chicken thus becomes a receptacle for affect disposal: consume, metabolise, produce, repeat as the chickens take affects out of circulation through an intricate network of cameras and codes.

If capital’s products are already byproducts, accumulating nature and binding them to remove them from organic circulation produces indigestible and unwanted waste that needs to be ‘dumped’.⁵¹ The digital flock, as well as undertaking productive labour through their eggs and reproductive labour through hatching, are also enlisted into byproductive affect-metabolising and affect-dumping labour. This conscription begins before these chickens are even born, with the hatching process on full display and the communed care of feeding, observing, and overseeing the birth of new chickens imposing the metabolising of affects from their conception.

Conclusion

The work of the chickens has intensified as Our Chicken Life’s popularity soared during the pandemic, opening and complicating questions of labour, circulation, and commodification through this unique byproductive lens. This unique digital ecology expands new frontiers in digitally mediated human–animal interaction while simultaneously using knowledge of galline behaviours to produce engaging forms of encounter. A digital ecologies approach to theorising more-than-human byproductive labour shows how exploitative relations are not eradicated in the digital world, but rather expand existing modes of relation. In the digital flock, there is a communing of care, but also of control and conscription of labour. The digital flock’s conscription in byproductive labour might also be understood as an exploitation of human knowledge about chickens to shape their environments to accommodate human pleasure. The negotiation of care and control through paying to ‘treat’ the chickens while offering constant insight into their lives raises troubling examples of conditional more-than-human digital ecologies. Our Chicken Life is a novel case study that aligns with and pushes existing research in the field, while identifying future areas of interest for the field that go further than simply understanding virtual livestreams as a gimmick to also view them as a new frontier of value extraction.

Considerations of virtual nature and digital ecologies have thus far, for the majority, focused on conservation, awareness, and extinction that rose in conjunction with the charismatic turn in conservation since the 1970s.⁵² In this context, a small flock of chickens – the most populous bird on the planet – might not seem the most interesting or important case for digital ecologies. But it is precisely because the chicken has had such an intimate, exploitative relationship with humans that this case provides such stark insights into how virtual encounters might be new frontiers for value extraction. The chicken, once again, is a keystone species for digital ecologies, much as it has been for the Anthropocene, albeit one that is largely ignored in favour of the spectacular and the charismatic.

Opening my browser as I finish writing this chapter, I can see that the ground in Utah is frozen and it’s minus 11 degrees Celsius. The chickens are mostly nestled into their nesting boxes but one bird after another braves the cold to snatch a few pellets of food. The cockerel is crowing to signal dawn and a subscriber posts ‘blast’ in the chat, seeing food rushing out of the chute by one camera. A few chickens dart out, their red combs bobbing past another camera on their way to the treats. A chicken pecks the frozen ground directly in front of the central pinned camera, her eye level with mine. If humans have a duty to socialise with domesticated animals,⁵³ this relationship isn’t untroubling, often carrying nefarious or dominating tendencies.⁵⁴ Our Chicken Life might be a less violent space than we might otherwise interact with chickens due to the novel kinds of encounter that digital ecologies can cultivate. It is a new kind of intentional community, but is it one that risks both reproducing and extending pressures on galline life? This digital ecology allows for new forms of access to extract value from non-human animals, creating new ethical and political questions that build on long legacies of troubling human–animal relations in critical animal studies. Following the chicken – once again – leads us to understanding new and changing worlds.