Grab Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories Of Tech In China's Countryside Crafted By Xiaowei Wang Accessible In Edition
AI is not the balm to any problemit is just one piece of the everhungry quest for scale.
The purchase of Halloween costumes in suburban United States fueling the replacement of growing wheat with chili peppers in Dinglou is one of the many cases in Blockchain Chicken Farm of how technology and globalism are changing the ecology of rural China.
The book is an exploration of the changes in land, ecology, and migration in rural china as a result of technology, consumerism, and globalism.
Xiaowei Wang highlights the resulting precarity of life for gig workers and the exploitation of that precarity by internet platforms and government policies.
Wang talks about pearl parties where American shoppers pay to have direct sellers livestream the unboxing of lowgrade pearls artificially sealed inside an oyster.
The industry is a pyramid scheme that offloads all the risk on to the direct sellers of the oysterpearl experience while the company procures these “wish pearls” from rural Chinese farms.
While Wang doesnt directly describe or quantify the precarity of life for the sellers, they do note that the states with the greatest number of direct sellers North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana are also states with a high unemployment ranking.
At the same time, the increased cultivation of pearls in these rural farms leads to excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the waterways around the farms, changing the local ecology of these regions.
Xiaowei Wang, through these stories, says simply that technology and the internet are having serious impact on the natural world.
It is something to seriously reckon with if we are to address the climate crisis, However, Wang isnt trying to definitively make a case of what the solution or even the problem is.
They suggest an adoption of Shanzhai in tech development, building community, and letting go of the future.
It was a loose coming together at the end, one that felt more personal than a direct conclusion.
However, its one that resonated deeply with me,
Decemberloved it ! will be thinking about to for ages to come truly a thoughtful reflection on the relationship between environment, community and tech specifically within china's countryside as well as how it translates to the rest of the world and the globalization of tech.
thank u xiaowei! This is a fun and hugely informative book of essays on the state of technology in rural China.
The author is very smart ChineseAmerican woman who seems to combine the skills of a software engineer with those of a journalist and an entrepreneur.
There is fairly little that is available on the conduct of technology enterprises in China, much less outside of the major metropolitan areas.
While the chapters appear to be only loosely related to each other, they end of being well linked to any overall economic policy problem for the Chinese governments.
The country is strongly organized around an internal passport system, with rights and benefits linked to areas of residence, such that it is not at all easy to pick up and move oneself or ones family from a rural location to areas like Shanghai or Beijing where so many economic opportunities lie.
As a result, each year hundreds of millions of Chinese migrate overkilometers to find remunerative work and who largely send their pay back home while living in temporary “urban villages” while away from home.
To do away with internal passports would greatly exacerbate the population problems in the Chinese megacities, To further restrict the movement from rural areas would be politically dangerous as well and require the providing of new opportunities to the migrant workforce that ended up staying home.
Many of the chapters are concerned with efforts to consolidate and build large scale economies in rural food businesses, such as chicken raising and pork production.
These businesses appear to require large size and capital intensity to generatge sufficient profit, Unfortunately, it does not appear feasible to force large numbers of smaller producers out of business, which requires initiatives such as in the title chapter that seek to innovate around quality assurance for smaller producers.
Other chapters focus on the growth of large scale knockoff businesses that sell mostly to a rural customer base that could not patronize regular retail stores.
One of the more interesting chapters covered efforts to build entire new retail areas linked to Alibaba and TaoBao, the latter a direct to consumer internet firm that is not dissimilar to eBay.
A troubled financing venture that ran into troubles just prior to its IPO is related to this effort.
The writing is sharp, clear, and thoughtful, Ms. Wang is skillful at talking to a wide range of people to build her stories and the rich detail is helpful.
I look forward to more books in this series and more work from Ms, Wang. The firstpages were sufficient to convince me to follow the author to the end of the book.
Xiaowei Wang can certainly be described as technically adept or nerdy, Wangs enthusiasm for the use of digital technology is palpable, Nevertheless, Wang is critical of the consequences of this hasty transformation of China's economic and societal landscape.
This research amp contemplation, also echoed by the voices of contemporary or almost contemporary philosophers and writers she Wang is referring to, is definitely worth reading at least as far as I got.
It is a slow read for me, as I use to follow the references quoted,
Now that I have read Wang's book from thest page to the last, I feel I have come a tiny step closer to understanding contemporary Chinese life, the perceptions of it, and the expectations on its evolvement.
Understanding China will be one of the major tasks for all of us, and it will require significant effort.
China is vast, diverse, and changing rapidly in parts and remaining true to itself in others, The current fierce competition between the declining superpower U, S. and a rising China is not really helpful in accomplishing this task,
But Wang's book helps at least a little, It is, in parts, a personal journey, It begins with personal feelings in a small village in southern China, on the JianxiGuangdong border, It ends with a description of shehui ren, literally but ironically "society people", a kind of "no future" movement among less fortunate of the Chinese youth, reflecting the own feelings on their motivation.
It is this absence of any pretence of conveying a general truth that makes this little book credible and true.
This book is a visceral disappointment,
For anyone planning to read this book, please understand that it is only maybeabout tech in China's countryside,random prose which is actually quite good which further fuels the disappointment, andgarbage tier takes on politics and social theory.
The remaining percentage contains bizarre recipes and speculations on the future,
In a way, I am glad I read this book, We all pretend we like to expose ourselves to the opposing viewpoints to become more well rounded thinkers, but rarely do we actually read entire books by someone we disagree with.
When I saw this book was by a "nonbinary" person I considered putting it down because of the assumptions that come to my mind regarding how such a person might write and interpret events, philosophy, and the like.
Well that would be prejudiced wouldn't it, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
As usual my presumptions were correct, but it always feels good to be right and it also led to a contemporary twist on an old joke: How do you know if someone is nonbinary replacing vegan, or "does Crossfit", etc Answer: They will tell you.
Sure enough, the author shoehorns how technology is not really all that advanced because the facial recognition cameras in China cannot recognize the author to be nonbinary.
The thought that the author
misses the supreme irony in such a statement and the fact that some reading this review might as well makes it all the funnier.
It is not even that I give a shit that the author is a far left nonbinary progressive.
But that is not the bought I wanted to read when I bought something called Blockchain Chicken Farm.
I wanted a book on technology in rural China with an emphasis on blockchain, The part about blockchain chickens is only maybepages or less and it might be one of the longer anecdotes from the countryside.
I did NOT want an illinformed progressive take on modern technology, There are much better modernist critiques, like pretty much anything published by Urbanomic,
Anyway, here are some specific issues I had with the book:
The claim that the blockchain is turning food into a commodity instead of a human right.
Mindblowingly stupid, this claim ignores the fact that many foods are already commoditized on modern financial markets and quasicommoditized in grocery stores.
The author provides absolutely no rationale for food being a human right, This is the same mistake the far left makes with healthcare and education, They prescribe positive rights which entitle some to the labor of authors, Positive rights are selfdefeating as even the simplest of thought experiments can illustrate: if I am stuck on an island and get sick, but nobody comes to provide me healthcare, are my human rights being violated No of course not.
Likewise, I can survive an infinite amount of time on an island while retaining my negative rights like free speech, as those need malicious actors to infringe upon the rights of others.
This is basic stuff, but shows how important axiomatic thinking is instead of the freewheeling nonsense common in this book.
The claim that Hobbesian philosophy has been disproven by "the research", The author then bizarrely links Hobbesian philosophy of a strong central authority being necessary to control the savage nature of man to the philosophy of cryptoanarchism.
Cryptoanarchism is simply a tool to bypass authoritarian structures altogether, Instead of debating banking regulations or having lobbyists influence legislation to have banks do this or not do that, cryptocurrency provides a way to ignore that altogether with peertopeer anonymous quasi on some coins I suppose payment systems that leave government out of the picture entirely.
The general lack of rigor the author has with defining terms, Sometimes China is the best, sometimes they are the worst insert mandatory We Stand With the Uyghurs blurb at the beginning of the book, the easiest kind of lipservice that leftists love paying to social issues without actually doing anything about it see: BLM.
Sometimes the author understands libertarian philosophy and the desire to be free from authoritarianism, sometimes the author wants the entire world to be based on communal feelings, whatever the hell that means.
There is one positive aspect of the book however, although it was unintended I am sure:
While reading this book, China launched an antitrust probe into the business restrictions Alibaba places on theirrd party partners.
I had the realization that there is no reason whatsoever to allow the ineffective agency, the government, to look into the practices of the most effective agency, Alibaba or substitute Amazon in the USA.
If anything, our governments are so ineffective that Alibaba or Amazon should look into their respective government's systems and try to fix them to meet even the most basic of free market baselines.
Our governments are almost completely free from accountability, as is evidenced by all the hypocrisy exhibited by our legislators during the covid pandemic.
Any of the archaic attempts to recall legislators available to us today are too slow for the modern world.
Here is an idea that would hold legislators accountable: all bills passed must be digitized for the public to read which EACH provision in the bill being hyperlinked to the primary legislator who added that provision.
Place a limit on the number of provisions per legislator and the number of legislators per provision.
The author then ends the book with a banal whimper for a better world, which reads more as an admission of the author's own shortcomings in lifedigits in debt, why are you buying MLM pearls.
They do mention an incurable disease, which as far as I know was not explained elsewhere in the book, so I do wish them the best with that.
Overall, a very disappointing experience, If the entire book was like the anecdote where the author buys the condiment from the rural farmer who asks her to pay in WeChat, the book would be at least aand maybe a.
Some of the prose is very wellcrafted, But as it stands, it is merely a testament to the fact that socialism will never work because people who can't guide their own lives surely should not guide the lives of others.
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