Blockchain Chicken Farm

What if the future of technology isn’t in the glittering cities we see on screens, but in muddy rural villages where blockchain tracks chickens and farmers livestream their crops? In Blockchain Chicken Farm, Xiaowei Wang asks how technology reshapes rural China—and, by extension, the human story of progress. Through field travels across farms, factories, and data centers, Wang reveals that the countryside doesn’t just depend on technology; it feeds the global technological system we live in. Beneath the neon and algorithm, this book wrestles with what it means to be human when our lives are measured by data and advanced by machines.

Wang’s core argument is that understanding technology’s global power requires seeing what happens in its rural roots. Whether through blockchain used to mediate food trust, AI farms that raise pigs, or drone entrepreneurs soaring over rice paddies, rural China becomes both laboratory and mirror—a place where social order, economic ambition, and digital capitalism collide. Technology claims to liberate us, but Wang contends that it also binds us more tightly to systems of surveillance, inequality, and fantasy. To grasp the human future in technological progress, we must look not at Silicon Valley’s utopias but at the countryside: the ghosts, the farmers, and the chickens that make progress possible.

The Forgotten Center of Globalization

Wang challenges the metronormativity—the belief that all meaningful life and progress exist in cities. Rural China has long been treated as archaic, backward, and disposable. Yet it powers the world’s digital infrastructure, from rare earth mines that build phone chips to agricultural villages that produce data for artificial intelligence models. When we talk about globalization, we imagine the “cloud” hovering above us, but the cloud has dirt beneath it—the land and labor of people who remain invisible in the global supply chain.

Through sensory, personal storytelling, Wang interweaves family history and political reality. Famine, hunger, and political campaigns haunt the villages she explores: reminders that modern China’s technological rise rests on a historical memory of control and sacrifice. Her ninety-year-old great-uncle once lived through famine and revolution, now scrolling through WeChat—the intimate fusion of past suffering and present digital comfort.

Rural Revitalization and Digital Dreams

The Chinese government’s “Rural Revitalization” program becomes Wang’s lens for the emerging rural-tech order. Blockchain and AI are not just urban luxuries—they’re tools of economic planning in villages. Farmers are encouraged to use mobile payments, build data-driven food businesses, and cast their crops into the digital marketplace. But behind this optimism lies a deeper paradox: technology appears to offer freedom and modernization, yet it produces new dependencies, surveillance, and social inequality. Rural reality becomes a metaphor for digital life everywhere—an uneasy negotiation between empowerment and exploitation.

You see this contradiction when Wang visits the blockchain chicken farm, where every step a chicken takes is recorded for authenticity. The charm of blockchain transparency hides a new kind of control. Freedom in data becomes submission to the machine. Wang compares this logic to Thomas Hobbes’s view of humanity as selfish, requiring authoritarian systems of discipline and order. Blockchain thus mirrors the fear within governments and corporations—the fear that people cannot be trusted, replaced instead by surveillance and algorithms.

Beyond Progress and Prediction

Throughout the book, Wang invites you to question the story of progress itself. Engineers often believe technology simply solves problems, but she shows it perpetuates cycles of inequality and ecological destruction. In Chinese AI farms, pigs are monitored by algorithms for efficiency. Yet this optimization creates fragility, new diseases, and a loss of meaning in human labor. The promise of AI—to make farming rational and perfect—turns life into data. Wang reminds us that farming, coding, and living all demand commitment to uncertainty. As philosopher Sylvia Wynter notes, “what it means to be human” has always been a construct—redefined by those in power. Wang builds on this, revealing how the modern ideal of the rational, optimized life erases the messy, embodied, emotional parts of existence.

By returning us to the countryside, Wang reframes questions for any reader living amidst screens and algorithms: Who writes the fictions of progress? Who benefits from them? And how do we reimagine a life beyond prediction, beyond the logic of optimization? The book ultimately becomes a meditation on living with technology instead of under it. The fate of rural China uncovers the fate of us all—entangled between control and freedom, the physical and digital, the local and global. The challenge Wang leaves you with is simple and profound: to see, in every technological promise, the ghosts of the human labor and longing that made it.

Wang opens with haunting imagery—a food court in Tianjin, fluorescent lights reflecting the digital loneliness of old age. In this first chapter, she entwines personal family memories with China’s technological modernization, connecting famine and factory to firewall and smartphone. The ghost in the machine is history itself: how the past continually shapes digital life. Her great-uncle’s reflections on famine and revolution reveal that every byte of progress carries residue of collective trauma.

Memory and Modernization

The weight of China’s historical memory—from jiushehui (the old society) to the Great Leap Forward—makes progress inseparable from pain. Technology, once the ideological promise of socialism, now functions as a marker of capitalist success. Yet Wang reminds you how fragile such progress can be: skyscrapers rise and fall, social apps proliferate, but ghosts remain under the surface. Her grandmother’s amputation during the Cultural Revolution embodies the human cost of political control; her uncle’s WeChat use symbolizes a digital rebirth that’s eerily continuous with past surveillance.

The Rural as Foundation

Wang traces how rural life became the foundation of both Chinese socialism and capitalism. Peasants enabled Mao’s revolution, then became factory labor for global consumption. When young people move to cities, their villages turn hollow—but they still feed the digital economy through cheap food and data. The hukou (household registration) system remains a haunting mechanism of control, similar to class divisions in capitalist countries: urban privileges—top schools, healthcare, and tech jobs—depend on rural laborers who remain excluded.

Agrarian Transitions and Technological Dreams

From peasants smelting pig iron during the Great Leap Forward to blockchain monitoring chickens, the trajectory feels cyclical. Technology keeps reappearing as salvation—first socialist science, then free-market innovation—but Wang reveals that both rely on ideological control. The new “Rural Revitalization” campaign asks rural citizens to become entrepreneurs using big data and AI, echoing Deng Xiaoping’s dream of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Yet technology cannot erase inequality; instead, it recodes it into statistics and apps. As rural farmers learn mobile payments and e-commerce, they also become data points in national optimization systems.

Seeing Beyond the Mirror

In Wang’s closing reflection, Tianjin transforms into a mirror for global fears and desires. “What is China but a projection of American fears?” she asks. Through this mirror, she invites you to see the world’s politics of projection: nations viewing each other as screens of anxiety. The ghost in the machine, then, isn’t just history—it’s imagination itself. Every vision of technological futurity depends on stories told by those in power. To live meaningfully, Wang implies, you must stop dreaming of the future and start seeing the present—its ghosts, hunger, and humanity.

One of the book’s most memorable journeys takes Wang to Sanqiao village in Guizhou, where blockchain technology is used to monitor free-range chickens. It sounds absurd, even comical, but it exposes how technology becomes a moral system for trust. As China faces food-safety crises—melamine milk, recycled “gutter oil,” soy sauce made from human hair—blockchain arrives as salvation. A chicken’s every step is tracked via ankle sensors, uploaded to the cloud, and sold to wealthy consumers who crave authenticity.

Technology as Faith

Wang shows how blockchain mirrors an authoritarian desire for perfect visibility. Instead of citizens trusting government inspectors, the machine becomes judge and priest. This logic is deeply Hobbesian: human nature assumed evil, requiring an all-seeing mechanism to preserve order. Blockchain replaces moral community with mathematical consensus—it assumes mistrust and automates control. The irony is striking: technologies once invented for anarchy and decentralization (Bitcoin, Ethereum) are absorbed into state and corporate systems to make obedience efficient.

From Guizhou to San Francisco

When Wang attends San Francisco’s Decentralized Web Summit, she finds the same ideology mirrored. Silicon Valley’s blockchain enthusiasts treat code as salvation from government corruption. Yet both systems—Chinese state surveillance and Western techno-libertarianism—share the same paranoia: a belief that humans can’t be trusted. Wang calls this the colonial logic of information science, derived from Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons.” (Ecologist Elinor Ostrom disproved this notion, showing humans can manage shared resources through cooperation.) Whether in Guizhou’s chicken farm or California’s startup pitches, blockchain’s technical utopia always rests on mistrust disguised as neutrality.

Trust, Inequality, and Data Colonialism

Farmer Jiang’s ankle-braced chickens earn him little profit—RMB 100 per bird—while data ownership remains with the tech company. Blockchain promises equality but delivers enclosure: villagers become data laborers, and technical knowledge stays with urban elites. Like colonial systems exporting raw materials, data flows upward from the periphery. Wang’s poignant observation—Ren, the village secretary, doesn’t even know what “blockchain” means—reveals how easily technology becomes mystified power. It manufactures obedience through complexity.

Wang’s broader message: technological trust replaces human trust. Poverty alleviation projects use the same data surveillance to measure progress, turning welfare into algorithmic status. So the blockchain chicken is not just a farm animal—it’s a parable. It shows how our craving for certainty leads us to replace humanity with systems. As Wang writes, “Pick your poison: Who do you trust more, the machine or the government?” Her answer is uneasy but essential: trust people, even with all their flaws.

In one of Wang’s most striking sections, she explores how artificial intelligence in agriculture turns life into an optimization problem. During China’s 2018 African Swine Fever outbreak, millions of pigs died, threatening food security. Tech companies like Alibaba and NetEase offered salvation: AI farming systems that monitor pigs, feed schedules, and breeding, designed to produce perfect pork while minimizing risk. But Wang shows how this logic of optimization doesn’t just reshape pigs—it redefines humanity itself.

The AI Farmer and Factory Life

Wang visits industrial pig farms so mechanized they resemble electronics factories. Workers in hazmat suits manage animals through screens. Each pig bears a QR code mark, monitored by Alibaba’s ET Agricultural Brain. Algorithms decide feeding and disease control with near-total precision. The countryside becomes a testbed for techno-rationality: farmers must adapt to data, not the weather. Yet the promise of “rationalization” hides a spiritual void. Where once farming was care-based, rooted in uncertainty, now it’s efficiency-based—an algorithmic ritual that erases empathy.

The Fantasy of Artificial Life

AI’s expansion into agriculture reflects a deeper philosophical crisis. Engineers dream of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that outperforms humans, freeing us from labor. Wang connects this to Western Enlightenment ideals—Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”—which fragment knowledge into quantifiable parts. As Audre Lorde and Sylvia Wynter argue (and Wang builds on), rationality alone cannot define being. The “optimized life” is not human life; it lacks commitment, joy, and pleasure. Replacing farmers with AI erases meaning in work, turning stewardship of the earth into production metrics. Wang parallels this with her mother’s cafeteria job in Boston, optimized with schedules and metrics that stripped away dignity—even without AI, the logic of optimization dehumanizes.

Living Beyond Prediction

The book’s central philosophical pivot comes here: the future cannot be predicted, nor should it. To live is to commit, not to calculate. In quoting James Boggs, Wang argues that “to work for others rather than oneself” redefines human purpose. The AI pig farm becomes an allegory for modern anxiety: our hunger for certainty and control. Against the seduction of machine perfection, Wang proposes humility: tending to life through care, not optimization. Farming, coding, and community require risk; they thrive because of uncertainty. Her insight resonates globally—you cannot algorithmically design ethics or empathy. They must be lived, imperfectly, by people.

Through the story of Sun Wei, a young drone pilot from Anhui province, Wang paints a portrait of rural youth caught between socialism’s legacy and the digital future. Wei, once destined for his father’s stable state job, becomes an entrepreneur using agricultural drones for pesticide spraying. His story glows with optimism—a new Chinese Dream of rural mobility. Yet Wang uses his life to show how education, technology, and class intertwine to create unequal futures.

Drones and Social Mobility

Wei’s drone career exemplifies the techno-utopian promise of inclusion: anyone can learn coding, fly drones, and join modern China. Companies like XAG train rural youth through WeChat programs, merging gig work and entrepreneurship. Wang describes conferences where venture capitalists, engineers, and rural pilots sit side by side—though not equally. The back rows cheer for every minor technical update while the front rows, filled with investors, calculate returns. Like global gig economies, rural drone work democratizes income while centralizing power. Opportunity comes wrapped in dependence on platforms.

Education on the Screen

Wang’s account of Chengdu Number 7 High School’s livestream education program adds another layer. Elite urban schools broadcast lessons to impoverished rural areas, exposing students to excellence while reminding them of their “worthlessness.” The emotional divide mirrors the digital one. Though scores improve, Wang and cited scholars show that true educational justice requires changing families’ self-image, not just broadband access. Technology amplifies inequality when it ignores social belonging.

Rural Revitalization and Buffer Zones

Governments promote “Rural Revitalization” partly to prevent political instability among migrant youth. Wang links this to global rural crises—from prison-building in America’s rural towns (as Ruth Wilson Gilmore documented) to China’s e-commerce push. Rural drone pilots symbolize balance: keeping youth productive, hopeful, and local. But when they return home, they inhabit an uncanny middle—neither fully rural nor fully digital. “Buffet life,” Wang writes, is the illusion of choice amid predetermined systems. Drones, education platforms, and Rural Revitalization offer glimpses of autonomy grounded in surveillance and profit. The challenge, she warns, is not to abandon technology, but to reclaim it for genuine community rather than control.

When Wang turns her lens toward Shenzhen and Guangzhou, she redefines “innovation.” Made in China, once synonymous with cheap imitation, becomes a philosophy of reinvention. Through portraits of inventors, government analysts, and DIY maker Naomi Wu—the cyborg engineer who modifies her own body with lit-up implants—Wang explores how imitation becomes creation. “Shanzhai,” the term for knockoffs, transforms into a radical mode of collaboration.

The Myth of Originality

In Western narratives, innovation means disruption—icons like Steve Jobs hailed as singular geniuses. In China, Wang shows innovation as communal and iterative. Shenzhen’s electronics markets mix competition with cooperation, where makers modify, copy, and remix designs openly. This ecosystem epitomizes open-source creativity at lightning speed. Wang sees in shanzhai a challenge to Western intellectual property laws, which equate ownership with civilization. She draws on scholars like Lawrence Lessig and Susan Sell, who argue that IP regimes serve capitalist exclusivity. Shanzhai instead democratizes technology, enabling those excluded from formal systems to build and repair their own tools.

Innovation From the Margins

Naomi Wu’s self-titled “cyborg femininity” critiques both misogyny and technocracy. Her glowing corset is literal hacking of the human body, confronting stereotypes of Asian women as obedient drone workers. Wang places Wu in a lineage of feminist technologists—engineers reclaiming agency through self-modification. At the same time, makers in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei bazaar show how marginal innovation sustains global supply chains. These inventors defy the myth that originality belongs only to the privileged few. As Wu quips to Wang, “You have to give the computer what it wants.”

Decolonizing Innovation

Wang’s concept of “new shanzhai” aligns with global calls for technological decolonization. Instead of exporting Silicon Valley models, she proposes we learn from Shenzhen’s hybrid creativity—remix, repair, reuse. The Rice Harmony Cooperative in Yangguang village exemplifies this ethos: farmers collaboratively build machines, share irrigation, and balance ecology without corporate control. Innovation becomes renewal, not disruption. For readers, Wang’s redefinition matters: genuine innovation thrives on collective care, not competition. “To shanzhai,” she writes, “is to turn protocols into practices that bind us together.”

In “No One Can Predict the Future,” Wang penetrates China’s surveillance apparatus through the Real Population Platform in Guiyang—a database tracking every resident’s identity. Here, she uncovers the ethical paradox of prediction: the belief that data can foresee crime, disease, or disobedience. Policemen like Xiaoli collect fingerprints, faces, and electricity usage to create “total population control.” But Wang shows how prediction becomes punishment, and how fear of chaos justifies unending surveillance.

Data as Destiny

Xiaoli’s pragmatic realism—“no one can predict the future”—becomes a quiet revolt against technocratic hubris. The more data collected, the more control is assumed. Yet as statistician Philip Stark calls it, this leads to “quantifauxcation”—assigning false precision to complex human life. Wang reminds you that a person can never fit neatly into columns and rows. She contrasts the data logic with Frantz Fanon’s call to invent oneself “against history”: living beyond classification. Prediction and safety, she argues, are moral illusions that trade freedom for comfort.

Global Surveillance

At Megvii (Face++), Wang finds engineers designing face-recognition algorithms that misclassify her nonbinary identity as male—a telling failure of machine understanding. Surveillance capitalism, she writes, is not uniquely Chinese but global, blending investors from Silicon Valley, Abu Dhabi, and Seoul. Governments and corporations share the same goal: transforming trust into data. The result is a world of quantification where “code becomes law.” This mirrors Ruha Benjamin’s insight that predictive policing doesn’t prevent crime—it produces it by targeting the poor and racialized.

Safety vs. Freedom

Wang’s ultimate critique is psychological: we confuse safety with freedom. From corporate Alexa devices to state surveillance cameras, fear becomes the moral justification for control. To reject surveillance, we must redefine safety—not as the absence of fear but the presence of trust. She draws from abolitionist thought (Tawana Petty, Ruth Wilson Gilmore) and argues that privacy must be collective, not individual. True freedom is achieved through community care, not data fences. The policeman and the coder, she suggests, are trapped alike by the illusion that certainty equals stability. Neither can predict the future—and that is our saving grace.

The book’s later chapters weave together consumerism, e-commerce, and global identity. Visiting Taobao villages in Shandong and pearl farms in Zhejiang, Wang shows how China’s rural entrepreneurs produce the goods fueling global online shopping. The story of Ren Qingsheng, a farmer turned millionaire by selling costumes online, epitomizes the dream: technology as equalizer. Yet Wang uncovers darker consequences—the hollowing of local ecology and family life, the endless drive to sell amidst algorithmic demand.

Rural E-Commerce and the Digital Economy

Alibaba’s Rural Taobao program encourages villages to sell on the platform. Each house becomes a storefront; each transaction becomes data. What looks like empowerment is exploitation masked by convenience. Wang compares this to Amazon and Wish.com in the U.S., revealing global symmetry in consumer capitalism. Sellers chase ads and livestream fame, buyers chase comfort. Both become trapped in Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”—the promise that consumption will bring happiness, even as it ensures dependency.

Livestream and Desire

In Zhejiang, Wang watches Zhao and Lisa reinvent pearl sales through livestream platforms, echoing Facebook’s “pearl parties” hosted by American women like Kristie. The parallel is uncanny—both rural Chinese vendors and suburban Americans perform joy to survive economic precarity. Wang calls this “monetizing emotion.” Livestream sales blur commodity and community, promising connection through consumption. Whether it’s an influencer singing “Like a Pearl-gin” or a Chinese farmer hawking jewels, both become entertainers for survival.

The End of the Future

Wang closes with philosophical clarity. Drawing on Lee Edelman’s No Future and Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of “interbeing,” she argues that obsessing over predicted, optimized futures blinds us to the present. The drive to “manifest” happiness—on Taobao, on Facebook, in politics—mirrors the same logic that powers algorithms. Against this, Wang calls for awareness and care, community and meaning. “Software may eat the world,” she writes in her recipes, “but the world can still feed itself.” To eat the world ethically is to build technologies that nurture life, not consume it.