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

by Xiaowei Wang

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.

And so the story of blockchain in China seems like a game of pick your poison: Who do you trust more, the machine or the government?

A system of record keeping used to be textual, readable, and understandable to everyone. The technical component behind it was as simple as paper and pencil. That system was prone to falsification, but it was widely legible. Under governance by blockchain, records are tamperproof, but the technical systems are legible only to a select few.

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.

In an early work, Understanding Computers and Cognition, the computer scientists and AI pioneers Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores point out our tendency to ascribe rationality to computers. We do this when a physical system is “so complex, and yet so organized, that we find it convenient, explanatory, pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it has beliefs and desires and was rational.” But neither computers nor humans are rational actors—and this is not a problem. They continue, “We treat other people not as merely ‘rational beings’ but as ‘responsible beings.’ An essential part of being human is the ability to enter into commitments and to be responsible for the courses of action that they anticipate. A computer can never enter into a commitment.”6

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.

Transforming work into abstract, quantifiable, optimized labor erases “any of the human and social purposes or the creative satisfactions that Work has always had in other societies.”11 It is easy to automate work using AI once you’ve made work devoid of meaning.

James Bogg

Like so many AI projects, ET Agricultural Brain naively assumes that the work of a farmer is to simply produce food for people in cities, and to make the food cheap and available. In this closed system, feeding humans is no different from feeding swaths of pigs on large farms. The project neglects the real work of smallholder farmers throughout the world. For thousands of years, the work of these farmers has been stewarding and maintaining the earth, rather than optimizing agricultural production. They use practices that yield nutrient-dense food, laying a foundation for healthy soils and rich ecology in an uncertain future. Their work is born out of commitment and responsibility: to their communities, to local ecology, to the land. Unlike machines, these farmers accept the responsibility of their actions with the land. They commit to the path of uncertainty.

Shanzhai’s past has connotations of knockoff iPhones. New shanzhai stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology, pushing us to think about access, maintenance, and the conflation of intellectual property and civility.

Outside the well-funded confines of places like Silicon Valley, for the rest of the world that can’t afford US$400 3D-modeling software or US$300 phones that can be repaired only by experts, shanzhai is desperately needed. How can you even begin to innovate if you can’t afford the tools needed for innovation?

In the world in which we travel, our right to life hinges on our endlessly creating ourselves.

gemba kaizen, or the art of continuous improvement, pioneered by Japanese management consultants.