Blockchain Chicken Farm

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:

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.