Blockchain Chicken Farm Quotes

“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.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“In Xi Jinping's China, it's uncomfortable for two strangers to go too deep into the subject of politics. There are no clear cut consequences for discussing politics. After all, this is preceisely how the system of censorship works, with a shadowy unease that looms over public conversations. Censorship is not made explicit, you just censor yourself. No one knows the consequences of critique, but no one wants to find out.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“Xiaoli adds that older police officers tend to view the technology as an annoyance, but since they have to use it, they will resort to a kind of magical thinking about it, convinced that technology can do more than it actually does, or they eschew deeper understanding for lazy, one-click solutions.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“This 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 a basic human right.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“Rural culture is marked by a different sense of time, a different cosmology. 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.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“And this line drawing is enabled by distilling life into arbitrary parts: class, race, gender, with the line of criminality itself constantly shifting throughout time, serving political-economic crises. “Crime went up; crime came down; we cracked down,” writes the scholar Ruth Gilmore.2”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“My typically easy-going aunt is rankled by the murmurings of a Donald-Trump-led trade war. For her, the trade war is personal. "Good riddance!" she says. "I say its' good that we have this trade war." We used to export all the good things to the United States and kept all the defective stuff to sell here! And look at how we've damaged our environment, just for you Americans! Crafty people, manufacturing is a dirty job, didn't want to ruin your own country!”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“A visceral glow of life surrounds them. In this glow, the word "commitment" surfaces. A commitment to the path of living as life unfolds, no matter how it transforms. A desire to keep living, not against but _with_ the specter of frailty, failure, and death. This commitment is a naked pleasure that exists under the ever-shifting, open space of change, palpable against the hungry, narrow world of optimization.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“In that light, the post-2016-election pleas for all of us to log off and just talk to each other in real life are naive. We haven’t been talking to one another in real life for a long time. Unless, apparently, we’re trying to sell each other something.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

“After all, code is words made executable—we must take care in what we say.”
― Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside