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

by Xiaowei Wang

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.

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.

However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?

It’s a feeling that you have a right to the future, a right to imagination beyond the immediacy of the day—a feeling that may never have been in the United States to begin with but that, we are told by the media, is disappearing.

I don’t want to live in a world where privacy is declared a human right only for a category of humans like me, and not for others. And

Shopping is an ecstasy-inducing act, a brief tease that allows us to brush up against the life we desire, that we feel like we deserve.