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

by Xiaowei Wang

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.

The People’s Republic of China was founded October 1, 1949,

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.

This is the core of the Bitcoin blockchain. It leads with the idea that bad actors are intrinsic in a system, and to prevent their actions, enormous amounts of electricity must be spent on preventing them through hashing functions.

make food a commodity. That is the intrinsic flaw, the infuriating circular logic. We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of as a basic human right.

The logic is striking. A demand for pork drives industrialized farming of pigs, which increases disease transmission. The constant emergence of diseases drives the implementation of new technologies like AI pork farming. These technologies go on to make pork cheap, driving even more availability and demand, as people start to believe pork is a necessary part of their diet. AI is not the balm to any problem—it is just one piece of the ever-hungry quest for scale.

The fear instilled by these radical proponents of AI is ominous and forceful, and it implies an inevitability written by those in charge—leaders in the tech world, owners of companies that are building this scary AI. The same fear of automation drives a public discourse that glints with a subterfuge: that being human is the only thing that makes us special.

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.

To turn protocols into practices that bind us together rather than centralize authority. To turn back the worship of scale and renew our commitments to care.

the military science lab was seen as the birthplace of twentieth-century nuclear annihilation, the twenty-first century’s death by ecological destruction and unfettered capitalism is symbolized by a glass-cube conference room with a whiteboard.

Looking at the engineers at their desks, it can be easy to judge their ethics, to question why they continue to show up every day when Skynet videos play on loop next door. Yet, like most desk-based jobs these days, the ethical boundary becomes defined by awareness. When you have been made accustomed to solving problems by breaking them down into parts, how could you see the larger picture to know whether you’re doing harm? The world is certainly complex, but doesn’t it feel good helping law enforcement make the world safer? Why shouldn’t you trust that your work is being used by policy makers who know what they are doing?

In order for us to challenge surveillance, we will have to move beyond corporate, profit-driven platforms that track us and monetize our data, but more importantly we will have to combat our own fears and illusions of safety. We must question the culture of surveillance and carceral punishment that condition us to think living with fear is the only way of understanding we are alive. We must rethink what safety means, and what it means to build communities that allow everyone to live an unbounded life, instead of punishing people for being poor.

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.

Ads mesmerize us by instilling a “cruel optimism,” a relation that the theorist Lauren Berlant describes as when “the object that you thought would bring happiness becomes an object that deteriorates the conditions for happiness. But its presence represents the possibility of happiness as such.”

Refusal and purchasing to support are both cruel optimism, providing a false sense of control. It’s that same sense of control that makes shopping so pleasurable. In a world that is so interconnected, with problems at a scale I cannot comprehend—climate change, plastics in the ocean, e-waste, political instability from globalization—the trick of shopping is that it makes me feel like I am doing something about those problems.

While software may be eating the world, this is not inevitable. The promise of software and technology is that they help solve the problems we face right now, without addressing how those problems began—problems including the uneven distribution of basic resources like food. This recipe imagines a world where we have continued using technology simply to solve problems, without taking time to think about the maintenance and care of what we have in front of us.