centering technology "on the margins," with Blockchain Chicken Farm
A review of Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm, plus some attendant thoughts on technology, economics, politics, and the assumptions and values we imbue them with.
Dear friend—
On January 1, I finished what I am sure will be one of my favorite books of 2023—if not my absolute favorite. It’s called Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a collection of essays by Xiaowei Wang (they/them).1
I think it goes without saying that China is a central figure in the global economy, especially when it comes to technology manufacturing and development. That’s the starting point of this book.
But Wang wants to move past the first-glance assumptions and beliefs that Americans have about China, the economy, and technology. And to do that, they journey throughout China, to the smaller cities, the towns, the farmlands.
They talk with and bear witness to those on the margins, who really bear the foundations of our global supply chain and some of the most cutting edge technology we now see.
I will be honest here — when I think of China and technology, the first thing I usually think of is Shenzen, the megacity that has boomed in recent years into a global hub of technology and manufacturing, packed to the gills with tech companies and migrant workers.
Or the manufacturing plants owned by the likes of Foxcon, where workers work grueling hours with little freedom to put together iPhone parts.
Or the internet censorship that allows the Communist Party to keep a tight lid on information flowing in and out of the country.
Or the oppressive surveillance of the Uighur people of Xinjiang.
While all of these are true facets of the country’s current reality, Wang portrays a more nuanced and complete picture. The technology that Chinese people are developing and using, in new and novel ways, go far beyond iPhones and surveillance.
That technology includes drones to improve planting in the fields; livestreaming platforms on which youth countercultures flourish; new methods of cultivating rice, pearl oysters, and pork; e-commerce systems for rural communities to work in small-scale and home manufacturing; and, as the title notes, blockchain chicken farms, in which companies use the blockchain to track a chicken throughout its life cycle, providing peace of mind to rich customers concerned with food safety.
To explore these technologies requires centering the experiences and ideas of those usually forgotten on the international stage: residents of farms, villages, towns, and smaller cities.
This is one of Wang’s goals for the book: to challenge metronormativity, the tendency to focus only on cities and brush off the rural “backwaters.”
Rejecting metronormatvity, they write, is especially important in conversations of globalization, as rural areas are often the “engine” behind urban economies, “the site of extractive industries from industrial agriculture to rare earth mining.”
Urban culture and urban way of life, they argue, doesn’t happen without rural areas, just as the inverse is true. To ignore the impact of rural places further marginalizes them, and it also means we fail to see the full picture of national or global economics/cultural/politics.
Moreover, through their explorations of those places and people, Wang counters the West’s narrow, often Orientalist perspective of China.
Rather than docile sheep controlled by an oppressive government, Chinese farmers and small-town entrepreneurs are more in charge of their own communities and their own futures than Westerners might think.
Moreover, Wang unpacks the Western, especially American ideas of what is entrepreneurial, what is innovative, and what is valuable in the first place.
Y’all know me. I love those good good “grey areas.” I love this quote from the introduction:
The difficult work that we face is to live and thrive beyond binaries and assumptions, and to aid and enable others to do so.
Wang’s accounts and commentary balance the individual stories of agency and decisions with the wider stories of systems and impacts.
To that end, they avoid blanket statements like “X tech is bad” or “Y tech is good,” instead choosing to thoroughly examine every impact, big and small. But I think one takeaway I had, even if Wang didn’t mean to convey this, is that we all live amongst systems that we shape and are in turn shaped by.
While plenty of the book’s subjects chose to use certain technologies, Wang details how their circumstances shaped their decisions—and then, how those technologies shaped their future decisions.
This especially true when it comes to commerce and online shopping. Wang writes about China’s policy framework of building a “new socialist countryside,” which entails building everything from data centers to small online shops; reducing poverty with the help of technologies like big data; and attracting rural youth away from the city and back to their hometowns with the promise of new opportunities.
But along with these goals, the “new socialistic countryside” is about creating “new consumers (and internet users) through a rural ‘consumption upgrade.’”
The policies are partly about improving quality of life, but they’re just as much about growing the country’s economy. More rural folks reaching something like the middle class means more people are buying more stuff.
Wang questions this goal and their attendant goals—more growth, more perfection, more control, more independence—which we see beyond China. And they explore their underlying philosophical questions:
How do we decide what’s ‘good’ for a person, a family, an economy, a technology?
What values or assumptions undergird our policies and our technologies, and how does that affect our perspective on the wider world?
What happens when our economy, our technology, and our policy is so intent on growth, toward some future perfection?
For instance, in the title essay, Wang does a bit of a deep dive into blockchain technology, which is what makes online currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum possible. It ensures the validity of transactions between people. It’s a bank without a bank. It’s commerce without government oversight.
Wang writes about how a lot of government and economic systems are about mediating trust. Perhaps we can’t trust the stranger living on the other side of the country who’s selling us an iPhone. But we can trust the government to use laws and regulations to ensure that person doesn’t rip us off; we can trust eBay to steward our money and refund us if the seller turns out to be shady.
Born out of a deep distrust of these systems, blockchain eschews them to create its own. In the case of the blockchain chickens, the technology takes the place of government food safety protections. It ensures the quality and safety of the chicken that arrives on your doorstep—with an expensive, more complex system that only a few can afford.
Wang’s commentary on blockchain put some thoughts I’ve had into words—notably, that blockchain technology comes from—and perpetuates—a deeply pessimistic view of the world. It’s a very Hobbesian (”I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.“), very Hardin-esque “tragedy of the commons” perspective.
It imagines that there is no possibility for interpersonal trust or community; that the only answer to safeguarding our money and our spending is to lock it all behind a wall of powerful, energy-hungry technology—that, by the way, is contributing in a big way to the climate crisis.
This, despite—as Wang points out and as I learned in my own studies—plenty of research that shows human capabilities for community and altruism and trust.
I don’t think Wang is discounting the fact that the world can be a scary place, that we all need things from strangers, and that some measure of security, of mediated trust, is good and necessary.
Rather, we have come so far technologically—but we seldom use that tech, or develop new tech, to cultivate trust and community in the abundance we’ve made. Instead, right now, so many of our most-lauded tech “innovations” assume scarcity and cultivate selfishness.
I found that fascinating and poignant. So much about the past few years of tech development has aimed to make individual lives easier, provide us entertainment, give us more freedom or time. Which are fine goals, to a certain extent—but what would technologies look like that are expressly designed to help us become more trusting and interdependent?
Even our social networks, which were supposed connect us with our loved ones and help us make new friends in new ways, have devolved into social media. Facebook is no longer so much about connection as it is looking at memes, trying not to read virulent political discourse, and watching people do crafts in 1.5x speed.
While I’m sure there are exceptions, I would say most of our most-hyped technologies are consumer technologies aimed at gathering more for ourselves—at the expense of others.
Take, for example, electric cars, which are lauded as an opportunity to save the planet from millions of gas-guzzlers. They allow people to reduce their carbon footprint—certainly an improvement from our current state of affairs.
I’m not going to lie, if I end up in the suburbs and absolutely need a car for transport, I am going to try and get an electric one.
But the proliferation of electric cars further entrenches America’s “eat or be eaten” transportation system.
Buying an electric car does not solve the communal problems of growing traffic and resulting accidents, of our environmentally destructive and space-wasting highways.
As David Zipper writes for The Atlantic, a growing electric car market doesn’t stop the trend of bigger and heavier cars (in fact, it accelerates it). This is turning car-buying into a “race to the top,” in which everyone tries to buy the biggest car they can afford, so as not to get squashed to death in an accident. But at the same time, bigger cars are linked to more pedestrian traffic deaths. They provide safety for the driver, at the expense of everyone smaller than them on the road.
Electric cars also make it even harder to transition to more communal, more equitable, and even more environmentally friendly modes of transit (like buses and rail), by precluding the demand for those modes.
Environmental stewardship and lower exposure to dangerous exhaust pollutants become a luxury for those who can afford it. Everyone else is stuck walking on the shoulders of busy roads because those roads are built for cars, not people.
When it comes to new technologies, Wang reminds me that it’s always worth asking—who means to benefit from this? Who will benefit from this? Is it truly “disruptive”—the once-favorite buzzword of Silicon Valley—if it only entrenches existing wealth, power, and independence at the cost of care and community?
I could go on and on about the essays in Blockchain Chicken Farm—there are ideas and stories in this book that I didn’t write about, but which nonetheless are still stuck in my brain—but I won’t, and will simply add that Wang’s writing, reporting, and research are incredibly engaging. They immerse you in a place with all its sights, sounds, and smells. They make you feel like you’re meeting a person alongside them. They have some beautifully crafted passages that made me want to put pen to paper again.
So yeah. Big recommend!
Thanks for reading—I’ll be back soon,
—mia xx
P.S.—s/o to Mica’s edits! Errors my own.
For book reviews, I will now include the pronouns of every author.