The Read: Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Pure impulse. The title caught my eye, I read the back blurb, and I thought to myself, that this is exactly what most of us know nothing about when it comes to 21st Century capitalism, the tech industry—and it’s not just because we aren’t studious enough, it’s because the subject of this book is remarkably difficult to write about.
Is it what I thought it was?
More, I think. I was expecting a tightly-focused account of the rurally-sited production of technology and rurally-sited technological operations. And this is indeed a carefully observed inquiry into the rural sites of tech usage in China, but it’s also an inquiry into rural-urban relations in China and their global implications, and substantially focused on agriculture and food. It has a lot of interesting things to say about general futures of work, of our relationship to tech and capitalism, about being human in the 21st Century. It’s deftly written and introspective much of the time, and there’s a great wide-ranging erudition underpinning the writing. (I also think the book has to be careful or circumspect at times when its subject matter is sensitive, though I don’t think anything is being withheld.) There were points where I wanted an even sharper and more continuously observed sense of everyday rural life in a specific place in China for and of itself, but the book often gives some sense of why that might be both conceptually and practically difficult, or stem from a flawed and “metronormative” expectation on my part.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I have a brilliant departmental colleague who studies and teaches about this subject matter, so I doubt I would ever use this book in a course of my own—though I could imagine a fantastic course that my whole department could co-teach on global capitalism and the Anthropocene from 1950-2050 where this book would fit in beautifully. Actually, I could use at least one essay from it in my surveillance course if and when I teach it again.
It would be a really interesting book to talk about with folks who study other aspects of the tech industry, 21st Century capitalism, and rural-urban circuits of migrations and exchange.
Quotes
“I have traveled to rare earth and copper mines in Inner Mongolia, driven along dusty highways past wind turbines and data centers, visited villages where artificial intelligence training data is made, and seen empty villages where all the young people have left for electronics factory jobs in cities. Rather than seeing the way technology has shifted or produced new livelihoods in rural China, I have been humbled to see the ways rural China fuels the technology we use every day, around the world.”
“The hukou system reveals the unabashed directness of socialist central planning. There is no dark magic like the American Dream, a sugarcoating that lets you believe in an imagined freedom, when really, the way we have structured our capitalist economy in the United States also relies on distinct labor and class differences.”
“I annoy my host in Xiangyang with a slew of questions. ‘Do you raise pigs in the village? Where does this preserved pork come from? How much do you pay for pork? How do you raise pigs?’ My host is incredulous at the simplemindedness of my questions. ‘Why would we raise pigs here?’, he responds. ‘Pigs are so hard to raise well,’ he tell me. ‘They’re smart animals and have a lot of needs. When you feed them, you have to buy grain, and then cook the grain, since they won’t eat it raw. They’re like humans. Even then, when you sell the pork, you’ll never make back the money you invested in feed. Pork sells for cheap at markets these days; you can’t just go selling expensive pork and expect people to buy it.’”
“After all, life is defined not by uncertainty itself but by a commitment to living despite it. In a time of economic and technological anxiety, the questions we ask cannot center on the inevitability of a closed system built by AI, an how to simply make those closed systems more rational or ‘fair’. What we face are the more difficult questions about the meaning of work, and the ways we commit, communicate and exist in relation to each other. Answering these questions means looking beyond the rhetoric sold to us by tech companies. What we stand to gain is nothing short of pure pleasure, a recognition that we are not isolated individuals, floating in a closed world.”
“Rice Harmony’s form of organic rice farming ensures that the fate of one person is tied to everyone else’s…Every five years, farmers switch paddies through a lottery system, ensuring that no family is stuck with a paddy in a lower or higher region forever. No one has contiguous paddies from this random lottery system, making irrigation a space of constant negotiation.”
“I don’t want to live in a world where privacy is declared a human right only for a category of humans like me, and not for others. And this right to privacy is not an individualistic one of secrets and stories, but a social one that requires us to lead with trust in our daily lives. In doing so, we might even end up with a freedom from fear, the freedom we are looking for in notions of ‘safety.’”
“For my friend and many others, the data on a past crime remains committed to his record. And while his life changes—he becomes a friend, a husband, a doting father, an artist, an uncle—all the data points about this past remain static. Data cannot truly represent the full spectrum of life. It remains a thin slice of the world. There is always some kind of bias built in. Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls ‘quantifauxcation’: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty.”
“I tell Xiao Niu about the E-Commerce Help Station and the pig slaughtering. Shangdiping’s attempt at e-commerce is going very poorly, he says. He laughs good-naturedly when he says this, as if he doesn’t mind telling the truth—something people loathe doing these days, when preserving the image of success is about the same as achieving success.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
A super-unfair complaint is that the blockchain chicken farm of the title isn’t quite what I imagined when I heard that phrase—I was thinking “oh, is it some kind of automated chicken production facility that uses blockchain as some sort of marketing hype?” It’s simpler and makes real sense and yet also has some absurdity to it, as Wang gets around to explaining when they look at blockchain as a concept. The titular farm uses blockchain as part of a strategy to secure better food safety in China by locking in metadata about food production at every stage of the supply chain. The specific chicken farm they visit doesn’t even use blockchain in the title because the owner is sensitive to how ridiculously overhyped the term “blockchain” has become. The chickens at the farm wear ankle bracelets that can’t be removed that record data in this stage of the blockchain (uploaded regularly to a cloud storage service) about the chicken’s life, including periodic testing for disease, and its eventual death. The bracelets stay attached to the chicken right up to the delivery to upper middle-class consumers so they can check to be sure that they’re getting the safe chicken they paid for. And interestingly, the overhead costs of that level of food security threaten the financial future of the farm using it. In the second part of the essay on the farm, Wang unpacks the worldview embedded inside blockchain and cryptocurrency and asks how we got to this point where simpler and cheaper systems of human social trust are viewed as impossible to build in contrast to technologically complex, exotic and expensive measures like making every chicken on a farm in rural China wear a bracelet that uploads data to a cloud server.
(The vision I had of an AI-run chicken farm, it turns out, shows up in the next essay about a pig farm.)
I especially appreciated one thread that works its way through all the essays: a polemic against “the worship of scale”, that systems of production and valuation that are relentlessly driven by “scaling up” are a form of anti-human deformation that we have to resist wherever those systems appear. This is very much my own view both in specific terms, say in how small educational institutions get derided constantly by ed-tech purveyors who want Arizona State University to become the gargantuan tech-innovative boot that stamps on the student face forever, and in general terms—that a better future requires us to live at smaller scales, to stop building systems with global scope and power.
I was really pleased at the mix of commentary, introspection and observation in the book. It sticks with me far more than a more conventional kind of journalism or ethnography might, and vastly more than the kind of top-down analysis that more conventional social science offers.
The essay on pig farming reminded me of an episode of the TV version of This American Life where a contemporary industrial pig farm is portrayed with exaggerated horror and disgust rather than curiosity and inquiry. The starting point for any representation of food production, rural life, work, etc., makes such a huge difference for whether you gain a better understanding of something in the world. When something is framed from outset as revolting or alien, there’s no chance to get beyond that frame—it compels you to share its perspective.
This book was the first time I’ve encountered shanzhai, described as “open source on hyperspeed, an unapologetic confrontation with Western ideas of intellectual property”. Or to put it more properly, it’s the first time I’ve heard it described in these terms, since this is what is relentlessly narrated as intellectual property theft or copycatting in the US frame. I wondered a little bit at whether Wang’s move to put that kind of shanzhai (“knockoff iPhones”) in the past and to exalt shanzhai’s present and future as a better approach to technological change and dissemination that empowers and democratizes was a little too trusting—US tech culture started with a lot of similar ideas and beliefs that may have been real when it was Stewart Brand or Steve Wozniak saying it but quickly curdled into an ideological veneer covering over capitalism as usual. They tie shanzai to a group of rice producers called the Rice Harmony Cooperative so that it exemplifies their general call for local scales of real human social infrastructures, but it’s the kind of idea that folks at Alibaba could just as easily associate with themselves, etc.
I didn’t come to the book expecting it to be a kind of manifesto for humanistic perspectives on economic and social life, but that’s what it often is, and very persuasively so. I felt a real connection with a lot of the way that Wang sees the world and especially with how they continuously call for a rescaled, fully social, fully intentional way of making, selling and buying food, tech and other commodities.