Blockchain Chicken Farm

September 14, 2020
Wang, Logic magazine’s creative director, debuts with a thought-provoking if inconclusive inquiry into how technology is transforming rural China. Investigating “Rural Revitalization” initiatives aimed at alleviating poverty, improving food security, and solving the social problems associated with rural migrants who leave the countryside to find work in cities, Wang travels to remote parts of China to interview costume manufacturers and agricultural drone operators. They detail how blockchain technology, which uses cryptography to stop records from being falsified, bolsters consumer confidence in the accuracy of the “free-range” poultry label, yet argues that such fixes also create a new, technical elite and an overreliance on inaccessible systems. In one of the book’s strongest chapters, Wang offers an illustrative and clear-eyed assessment of Dinglou, a rural village made wealthier yet more chaotic and dystopian through infrastructure investment by the e-commerce giant Alibaba, comparing the venture to Amazon assisting an Appalachian coal-mining town by “helping its citizens start candy businesses.” But without a clear central argument, the narrative occasionally drags, and speculative interludes (including a recipe for making mooncakes with maize grown on the moon) are equal parts intriguing and confusing. Still, this is a unique and detailed survey of an underexplored aspect of Chinese innovation. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review used an incorrect pronoun in reference to the book's author.

Starred review from August 15, 2020
Engaging travels through a Chinese countryside in which high technology meets the old ways. In this entry in the publisher's new FSGO x Logic series, Wang, the creative director at Logic magazine, blends studies of agriculture, anthropology, tech, and digital art. The author opens with a modest protest that while it is easy to both romanticize and overlook the countryside, and especially Chinese farm villages, "many of them are sites of economies and agricultural practices that are foundational to our world." China is now subject to the same market forces and consumer preferences as Western nations, so that everyone wants nice things such as high-quality organic food. That opens many doors to rural enterprises. As one entrepreneur observes, whereas big corporations such as Nabisco dominated the food world in the past, "hundreds of smaller, fragmented companies will dominate the future, catering to a continuum of different tastes and experiences." One of the author's recurrent themes is the use of technology to improve agricultural production, as with the farm of the title, which caters to "upper-class urbanites--people willing to pay a premium on food." Along the way, Wang takes on science historian Joseph Needham's famous observation that China ceased to innovate well before Western traders arrived. The author distinguishes innovation from adaptation to show that there is not only plenty of "disruptive innovation" occurring in China, but also an emerging "shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy." In this case, shanzhai suggests the process of retooling outside products--an iPhone, say--to make affordable things for a less affluent local market and, in the bargain, "decolonize technology." Wang's whirlwind discussion, smart and well argued, turns to many other topics as well, from racism in high tech to microlending, trade wars, risk tolerance, and a rapidly changing rural China, with delicious recipes as a lagniappe. Technology writing with flair looking to a future that's fast upon us, with China playing a leading role.

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