Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

by Xiaowei Wang

coined by the theorist and scholar Jack Halberstam. Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology, and media literacy will somehow “save” or “educate” rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.

At the core of rural culture, he says, is a belief that the universe is already perfect as it is, and that our duty as humans is to maintain that harmony. This was a sentiment I heard often from farmers as I traveled throughout the countryside. One farmer told me that the future is a created concept, and that in the fields, in the long dark of winters, there is no future, because every day depends on tending to the present moment. An act of care. In contrast, urban culture is centered on the belief that the universe must be constantly corrected on its course, and that life is defined by the pleasure of overcoming future challenges.

Ultimately, food safety revolves around social trust, and John thinks that “social trust can’t scale.” When supply chains were shorter, being able to meet your farmer created this trust. With supply chains now long and complex, the chance you might meet the Australian farmer who grew the kiwi you eat or the Mexican farmer who produced the avocado on your plate is low.

And setting aside Hardin’s political ideologies, the tragedy of the commons theory is just plain wrong. The concept was disproved with in-depth data and careful science in 1990 by Elinor Ostrom, who would be awarded a Nobel Prize for her work.

By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is the reality of work and labor. For more than twenty-five years, my mother woke up at 4:00 a.m. and drove to her job as a university cafeteria worker outside Boston. She used to have a deep commitment to her job, and it gave her a sense of fulfillment. It felt good to feed stressed-out college students who weren’t taking care of themselves. She and her coworkers were trusted by management, given breaks and autonomy on the job. Over the past ten years, her feelings of fulfillment have drastically turned. The school optimized her work with arbitrary, quantitative metrics. As a result of this optimization process, there’s less autonomy, fewer breaks, and new, bizarre working schedules. My mother feels little connection to her job now. My mother’s is the kind of job that some people think robots should take over, that should be optimized and automated. After all, she would supposedly get more free time and fulfillment in life. The irony is, she stopped feeling fulfilled when her workplace became optimized, her work stripped of meaning, turned into mere labor.

China still relies on American chip manufacturers, while American chip manufacturers rely on Chinese rare earth mines. Even the chip engineers are an international community and chip factories are all across the globe. Indigenous innovation is just a nationalist parlor trick.

From the Chinese side, it appears that the Americans were cheating the Chinese—American corporations were asking for unimaginably low costs that made it impossible to manufacture high-quality goods, to not cut corners. Back in the United States, companies went on to sell these products at astronomical markups, making enormous amounts of money.

Shanzhai pushes the boundaries of what we currently think of as innovation and argues for the right not only to use a device or software but also to collaboratively alter, change, and reclaim it—a shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.

It demands building the communities that shift culture, that allow interbeing to thrive. It demands the work of awareness and care, instead of the tools of efficiency and scale. It demands seeing individual freedom as nothing more than a way for all of us to be oppressed. Most of all, the present demands the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.