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

by Xiaowei Wang

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.