Overall, I liked but did not love Blockchain Chicken Farm. My expectations for the book were set by its title: stories of technology applications — and impacts — in rural China. And to a large extent, the book met these expectations. Wang wrote dutifully about their subjects and the regions they dwell in; the technologies documented throughout the book were diverse; and Wang generally provided history when necessary, allowing me to connect the dots between China’s many rural policy programs and the consequent rise in rural technology adoption.
Critique
At times, I felt that Wang leaned too heavily into the social sciences and their subjective experience, leaning away from the stories in the process. There is one example that, I think, captures this pattern well.
During their chapter on blockchain chicken farming, Wang recalls attending the Decentralized Web Summit and hearing a talk by the founder of Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol. Relying on a quote from the talk, they paint a picture of interest in blockchain technology as being motivated by a “cynical view of human nature.” To illustrate this point further, they allege that blockchain enthusiasts cite the “tragedy of the commons” theory often, but that this “concept” “was disproved with in-depth data and careful science.” This argument — and especially their paragraph on the tragedy of the commons — felt forced and overall distracting from the main goal of the chapter: to look at how rural farmers and wealthy Chinese urbanites are using blockchain technology to track the lifecycle of chickens (and opening up unique opportunities for digitally-verifiable food safety).
A number of other sections in the book followed a similar format, with the stories weaving in and out with Wang’s highly-personal beliefs on various social issues. This recurring discursiveness is my primary critique of Blockchain Chicken Farm.
Highlights
All that said, the storytelling aspects of the book were incredibly effective and informative. Each chapter had a new story that I otherwise may have never learned about; new people, technology, regions of China, specific social impacts. Some of these include:
- Using technology to monitor the welfare of pigs. Rising income levels across China have led to dramatic increases in national pork consumption. As a result, the risk of disease — especially the deadly African Swine Flu (ASF) — has risen. One way that farms are trying to combat this is using surveillance technology and artificial intelligence. Alibaba, a major Chinese internet and e-commerce company, is building ET Agricultural Brain, a massive AI model to monitor pigs for signs of disease by ingesting video, temperature, and sound data.
- Blockchain chicken farms, where every chicken wears an ankle bracelet donning a QR code. Scanning the code takes you to a page containing surveillance footage of the chicken; you can also find maps showing its lifetime movements. These chickens are also tested every two weeks for antibiotic usage, data from which is digitized and accessible. These chickens fetch a high price in the market: wealthy buyers appreciate — and are willing to pay a premium for — the data on their chickens.
Lastly, what struck me was how integral e-commerce operations are becoming to the economies of rural areas of China — and how co-dependent some rural Americans are on their Chinese counterparts. In the last chapter, Wang describes how the very same pearls that sustain the e-commerce operations of a small town in China might power some multi-level marketing (MLM) pearl schemes across rural America. I’m left thinking about how the evolving economies and technology adoption of both rural America and rural China are strikingly similar -- and inter-connected.