Tech Won't Save Us - What Rural China Teaches Us About the Future of Tech w/ Xiaowei Wang

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Xiaowei Wang to discuss how technology is being used to connect rural China to global supply chains, what that means for life and work in those communities, and how China also holds inspiration for a different way of organizing production and technological development.Xiaowei Wang is a technologist, artist, and writer. They are the creative director at Logic Magazine and author of “Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside.” Follow Xiaowei on Twitter as @xrw.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets. You can also find out more about 49th Parahell on its website.Also mentioned in this episode:How China’s Sanlu milk scandal shattered trust in the food systemGarrett Hardin, who came up with the tragedy of the commons, was a racist, eugenicist, nativist, and Islamophobe — and those ideas are baked into the conceptElinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on the governance of commons, rebuking Hardin’s ideasXiaowei wrote about the Chinese concept of “shanzhai” provides a vision of an open-source future of technological developmentSupport the show

The farmers that I hang out with, they're just like, why would you need that? This is definitely the invention of like city people who have nothing better to do. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today my guest is Xiaowei Wang. Xiaowei is a technologist, artist, and writer who serves as the creative director at Logic Magazine. They're currently working on their PhD at UC Berkeley and are the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of tech in China's countryside. Xiaowei's book forms the core of our conversation, looking at how rural China is changing as technology and global supply chains move into small communities all around the country and change the way that farming practices and the everyday lives of these people operate. It's a really fascinating book that I highly recommend.

Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Another of the great podcasts on the network is 49th Parahell with host Rob Rousseau, who digs into the wild world of Canadian politics with an incredibly critical and left perspective. You can find more information in the show notes. As always, if you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share the episode with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy it. That kind of social proof, especially sharing it on social media, really helps bring in new listeners. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show, you can go to

patreon.com slash techwontsave us and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Xiaowei, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much, Paris. I'm so happy to be on this show. I read your new book, Blockchain Chicken Farm, and I absolutely loved it. I think it's like so unique. It's so different from so much of what we read when it comes to technology. And it gives us this real insight into not just what's happening in rural China in terms of like technology and kind of changing economic circumstances, but also connects that to these much broader kind of systems and changes that are happening, right?

And so to get started, I wanted to ask, like, obviously, the book brings us into China and into rural China in particular, and what's happening there. But all of these examples and stories that you tell also discuss your experiences getting to know people in rural China, spending time with your family, your friends. So can you talk a bit about what your motivation was when you kind of set out to write this book? Absolutely. So when I started writing this book and doing research, there's definitely one big thread, I would say the dominant thread of China writing, where it's all about surveillance and look at life in cities and about pretty much no difference between a North American city and a Chinese city, right? These

kind of visions of modernity, very imperialist logics, and life is tightly controlled in an urban environment. So then when I started digging deeper underneath the surface and looking at these larger systems that both cut across the Pacific between the U.S. and China, but even just extending globally, food, agriculture, trade agreements, shipping, all these things really stemmed from the countryside. I think especially being American and after the 2016 election, there was this renewed interest in the countryside, so to speak. But obviously, there's a longer tradition of that in, you know, Marxist intellectual history. And so I think, you know, also on a personal level, hearing

stories of the countryside as kind of the heart of Han Chinese civilization, as the heart of also, you know, where my family's from, kind of trying to make it out of the countryside is the total goal of life. And so I was really interested then in tying all these back together and also grounding the story of tech, not just as an urban one, but also as a rural one. Yeah, I love that. You know, when you kind of think of that urban narrative, right? And you talk about like this metro normativity, that's very much something that's present that I've recognized in North America and Canada and the United States as well, right? This kind of focus on the city and the city is the place where

all of this activity is happening, where the future is coming into being, and the rural is this backward area that we kind of need to leave behind, but still kind of see it through this very kind of traditionalist lens. And so I was really interested when I read your book, kind of learning about the changes that are happening in rural China and how they are adopting new technologies that are coming in there. And I immediately, again, kind of related that back to my experience naturally, because I'm not that familiar with what's happening in China outside of reading your book. And so obviously in North America, we have this experience where corporate consolidation over a number of decades has brought

more economic activity into the major cities, right? And we particularly see that after the Great Recession, but it's been an ongoing trend. And I think, as you mentioned there, when we think of China, we also think of these major cities that have been built up just over the past few decades, right? But I feel like your book also gives us this insight into how it's not just about cities. And while I feel like in North America, we've kind of just left behind rural areas and said, like, you know, maybe there is this political discourse about the importance of rural areas, but we still haven't really changed much economically to try to like revive them or anything like that. Whereas in China, there seems to be this active desire to now kind of bring these technologies and this economic activity back into the rural sphere

after it's kind of dominated in the urban. And so how are these kind of strategies of renewing rural life affecting people who live in rural China and those communities? So I will say that I borrowed the word metronormativity from the amazing queer theorist Jack Halberstam. And I love that as a framing of both how we think about and represent rural spaces. In China, there is definitely a concerted effort to change the countryside. And a lot of it is because, as I mentioned in my book, the U.S. has gone through its agrarian transition. And so in the countryside of the U.S., it's industrial farming, industrial slaughterhouses, the people who work for these

places. If you imagine the American farmer, it's unfortunately not the person heroically plowing their own fields. It's an automated tractor run by GPS. In China, there's still a lot of smallholder farming going on. The government has always viewed this kind of, for better or for worse, the hukou or household registration system, which is fairly common in a planned socialist economy, of tying people to the land. You have a bunch of people who are farming, a bunch of people who are in cities, and then you plan out the whole economy. And so individual farmers, they have these land rights. It's a kind of form of poverty alleviation as the government sees it, because you can always go back and farm your land, producing food for you and your family. kind of the crazy nature of globalized agriculture has really changed this. So throughout the past 20 or 30 years, a huge number of rural migrants have been moving into the cities of China, doing things like working at factories, producing iPhones,

really helping fuel China's economic boom. At the same time, because of the Hukou or household registration system, and also just the realities of trying to live in a large booming mega city, oftentimes these urban migrants, they can't really stay. And so how do you get them to go back to their hometowns, right? Or attract people back to the countryside in order to not make it like a completely abandoned landscape. And so all these initiatives as part of the government's rural revitalization plan, in official policy language, they're trying to use the most cutting edge technologies, everything from blockchain to AI to e-payment and e-commerce in order to generate economic opportunity in the Chinese countryside.

And it's not to say that this isn't necessarily possible in North America, but I also think because of the intricacies of the hukou system, people having land stewardship rights in China, the nature of family structure, things like that, it does feel like a very China-specific phenomenon. Yeah, I think that makes sense in that there's more rural activity that still exists to try to incentivize or work with than we might have in North America. And what continues to exist in North America looks quite different from what you'd see in China because the system is very different, right? So I think that makes a lot of sense. And now in your book, you discuss a lot of really big questions in terms of how things are developing in rural China in terms of trust, surveillance, consumption, and how all of

these things relate to technology and larger economic trends. And so I want to dig into a few of those. You explain that part of the reason these technologies, and you mentioned blockchain in particular at one point, are becoming more popular is because of a lack of trust, not just between the citizenry and the government, but also between citizens themselves. And that the narratives around many of these technologies, and again, blockchain in particular, enforce this mistrust in order to sell a technological solution to it. And so I'm wondering, can you explain how that plays out in China and how it encourages the spread of these technologies in urban China, but also all the way into rural China and smaller villages.

Food safety is a great example of the issues surrounding trust, and especially how trade agreements and asking farmers to scale up production at a rate and also an output that is staggering and not environmentally or fiscally good for anyone is kind of the heart of the issue. So a really good example is the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal in China, where these smaller dairy farmers, they were being asked to produce milk at a huge amount. And it ends up getting funneled into this giant dairy company, Sunlu. And in order to achieve that target, but also keeping production costs a little bit lower, farmers started putting melamine into their milk, which is sometimes used throughout the dairy production process, but they did it at an amount that was fatal to infants. And this caused a number of infant deaths. So here you have something which by its nature is deeply problematic. And the problem here is not the farmers being unable

to reach their targets, but actually just the pressures on production and maintaining like the system of prices. And so as a result, you have over and over these food safety scandals and a deep lack of trust between the person consuming the food from the farmer. And I visit this blockchain chicken farm where the farmer, he was raising free range chickens for a long, long time, but consumers didn't really believe him that he was raising free range chickens. So that just goes to show you just how low the level of trust is.

And so, you know, all these technologies are coming in and it's highly profitable for these companies, right? Like I talk about how with the blockchain chicken, you scan this QR code and you see the number of steps that the chicken has walked and it's on this little website, but it would actually be incredibly easy to fake that website. And I think most of us, I know myself, especially I'm not on like not browsing the blockchain casually and seeing what's on there in my spare time. So I think it's actually really tragic, which leads me to my next point, speaking of tragic and tragedy, that at the heart of all these technologies, we've been set up with this idea

that humans are bad, humans are evil. Oh my God, look at those dairy farmers. They're willing to sacrifice people's lives in the name of profit. But it's not the dairy farmers that's the problem, it's the corporations. And in blockchain too, a lot of the people I've talked to, sadly, their argument for blockchain is like, you know, the tragedy of the commons argument, which was espoused by Garrett Hardin, who is actually a white supremacist. And he came up with this idea and baked it into ecology because he was an ecologist, a scientist, but it also shows you the process of how you can put ideology into something seemingly neutral of, you know, if you don't regulate people, everyone's going to just ruin this common natural resource. Like if you don't have blockchain or if you don't have

these like, you know, centralized forms of power controlling dairy farmers, they're just going to do horrible, terrible things and not care about their consumers. And I think that at the core of it, you know, those underlying beliefs is something that we really need to question. And it just shocks me at how much of capitalism is really good at like generating a thought industry to validate these underlying assumptions about human nature. Whenever the tragedy of the commons comes up, I always think back to my experience in undergrad, because I did political science, and we had to do this course. And I remember that the tragedy of the commons was like one of the leading things that we like studied. And there was no mention of the fact that like,

it was basically bunk and like made up by this white supremacist guy, right? Like it was taken as like very seriously. And at the time, like a decade ago, like I wasn't really prepared to do the critical thinking and like searching to find the alternative. And I always think back at that and like, think about how many other people have had this fed to them and believe it and don't realize that like, it's complete bullshit. That like, really frustrates me. And so then when I read that piece of your book, it really effectively shows how, you know, these technologies are being rolled out into these rural communities. And kind of the idea is that this is going to like solve this problem and increase this trust and give more kind of power and autonomy to these local producers,

because now they have these technologies that can show and prove that they are like legitimate, right. But I think that you really effectively show that actually what these technical systems are doing isn't redistributing power down. It's just shifting it to people who have technical knowledge to kind of serve as this almost like, I don't know, technocracy or whatever. I actually got into a conversation with one of my mentors the other day, and we were talking about the task of educating undergrads who are about to go into engineering and computer science industries. And it's like, how do you undo even before the undergraduate level, right? Like at the high school level, like elementary

school where you're presented constantly these stories of like needing, we need these like kind of centralized, very technocratic, autocratic forms of governance in order to control people. It's like, oh, like, you can't even have like a real democracy. We need the electoral college, like all these things, right? People can't handle it. And we ended up strangely talking about British colonialism, right? And like, there are so many instruments of power in creating that colonial empire, like railways, roadways, engineers who are building out roads. And how, when you're an engineer and you're asked to, you know, do the great survey of India and actually like plan out these roads, plan out these settlements, things like that.

How do you understand that mesh of power that you're in? I think oftentimes it is this weird technocracy because yes, certainly you have people who are the big VCs that we hear about who clearly have an agenda, but then you have the people who have the technical skill. And oftentimes it's like, well, we're just trying to like get paid and pay our kids college tuition, right? Or like pay off our mortgage. What do you do when you're in that position of both having a ton of power as being a member of the technocracy that knows how to build these things, but then at the same time, not having a sense of political awareness that, you know, is provided in education more in like social sciences and humanities.

So yeah, that's, that's something that's been pressing on my mind for sure. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I often think back to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And like, that's always a fantastic book that I've returned to. And actually, I did three years of my undergrad and then took three years off and went back for like a fourth and final year once I like kind of figured out what I was doing. And in that final year, I did a Marxism course and kind of like the whole teaching structure was based around pedagogy of the oppressed.

And like, so that was really interesting. But now returning to rural China and the technology that's being introduced and the economic development that's being introduced and the economic development that's being produced, one important aspect of this is to integrate rural China into e-commerce supply chains, right? So these initiatives are being pushed by the government, but also major corporations that are part of this kind of e-commerce industry, I guess. And so obviously, for a while, there were new factories being built in urban China, but now urban places are becoming more expensive. There's also a push to build them in kind of the Chinese interior, where it's still a bit less

expensive. But now this kind of program that you talk about in the book is trying to extend those supply chains directly into rural communities where cost of living is very low. And they can also cut corners in other ways to cut costs, right? Through entrepreneurship and people being their own boss and all this kind of stuff that we're used to hearing from the gig economy, right? You say that some rural Chinese people are profiting greatly off this and doing really well, while others told you that it was a scam and was altering farming practices and other sustainable ways of life through this commercialization. So what do you make of the effect of this larger transformation on rural communities in China? My general impression overall is that unfortunately,

like any attempt that tries to create a free market of incentives as a form of economic development while cultivating scarcity, it's not a long-term sustainable theme. The e-commerce landscape is really wild in China. So at first, it was this organic phenomenon of a few migrants who were going into cities to do work, which is very common, and then eventually being called back to their hometowns because of family care duties or something like that. And they had all this knowledge of things, you know, just seeing the big urban world of like, oh, we can manufacture sweaters. So one village I went to, people produced performance costumes. So for like screen, TV, play, things like that. And the first entrepreneur in that village, he kind of cut his teeth in the

city understanding, okay, like, this is how you make stuff. And when he got back home, he started up manufacturing in his family workshop. It definitely is this gig economy gone off the rails where you have people saying like, oh, it's really good that my grandma who's like 90 years old helps package all the orders. It gives her something to do. Otherwise, she feels like she's wasting away and just has no reason to live if she can't work. You have children who are helping out in the workshops. I just saw a fair number of kind of scary, unsafe manufacturing practices. But it is this race to the bottom because, you know, once this started happening organically, Alibaba, which is this big sprawling e-commerce tech giant in China, they actually created this whole Alibaba Rural Development

Institute where they study these Taobao villages, they try to figure out like, what's the best way to kind of, you know, sink their teeth into the countryside, they set up these rural service stations that are supposed to teach digital literacy. And of course, you go on to like, it's called twin.taobao.com, which is like village.taobao.com. And you can like buy plane tickets, buy things that you need and get them shipped to your tiny village. But it's all through their portal, and you're paying using their e-payment structure. So it is this, you know, very concerted effort. They're also Alibaba Rural Development Institute, they're almost trying to act like a, I want to say, development

organization. And they're trying to argue for the success of this rural e-commerce so that they can export it to other places. But of course, because so many people are joining, people are cutting corners, people have to buy ads so that they show up first when you search for a product. And that's also a race to the bottom. It is this complete centralization to have like everyone just being on Taobao. It's not like people are starting their own stores on like their own platforms. It has its tentacles into the US to through drop shipping as well. One of the aspects of kind of what you described going on in rural China that worried me was how it's affecting farming practices, right? Because, you know, I've read plenty about how kind of the industrial farming practices in North America and many other parts

of the world are, you know, affecting the soil over long periods of time because these sustainable practices have been abandoned for, you know, all these pesticides and monocrops and all this sort of stuff, right? So part of what you described was these older people in rural China saying like, we used to have these sustainable practices, but now people are planting more cash crops and younger people have a different relationship to the land, whether planting things that can produce the highest return in a short period of time, but is not really thinking about these ongoing sustainable practices that they've been using for a long period of time. So I guess I'm wondering, you know, is there a worry that the changing incentives when it comes to farming in

particular will create challenges in the future for China to be able to properly feed its population? Because, you know, obviously, you mentioned food being a big aspect of this earlier. A lot of people will argue whether sustainable traditional agricultural practices can actually scale up and can actually feed people. I believe they can. And I think that this concept of scale, of viewing the land as like, you just put something in and then you get an output and you count the yield and that's fine, is a deeply problematic way to view ecology. China is pretty exuberant about this whole project of modernity. And a large part of that includes, you know, importing food, exporting food, really

being a country where it's not just like, okay, we have enough to feed our people. And that's, that's that. It really does want to plug into this bigger kind of system. I was talking with someone the other day, actually, about how China is like the number one producer of pumpkins, but actually a large part of it's like, you know, pumpkins, pumpkin products, a lot of that gets actually exported abroad. And it's become this really lucrative industry. So I actually think that the way that these Taobao villages, especially e-commerce, and that's changing the ecology, the way that that's going is in line with the government's view of modernity. A lot of the e-commerce entrepreneurs too,

they're kind of downsizing, right? Like if I'm growing the cash crop of chilies, which is what was happening in one of these Taobao villages I went to, you don't need as much land. You just build a little greenhouse, and you can lease out the rest of your land to one of the bigger industrial agriculture, they towards like modernized agriculture, you know, pesticides, fertilizers, all these things. And they actually put a stop to that because they noticed that it was affecting their soil and just the general health of their environment. So, you know, I have some optimism in that, that hopefully it's not all doom and gloom. Yeah, that's definitely a positive story that you found there. And, you know, maybe as more communities see what's happening to their land and their farming areas, something like that will

happen to right, you know, what we do over here in the West, I'm not really sure, but hopefully, China will figure it out. But you know, when I was reading the book, I was thinking a lot about my own work, which recently has been thinking a lot about North American and Western societies and how they kind of changed after the Second World War, when there was this kind of focus on embracing automobility, embracing suburbanization, and in particular, embracing mass consumption, and how that really changed people's lives as they became more commercialized in service of economic growth and particularly measurable economic activity. And I feel like now we can kind of look back and see that that hasn't necessarily been the most positive thing, and it has helped to contribute to the kind of erosion of workers' rights as we've kind of embraced this kind of consumerist culture, but also to kind of decimate the communal bonds that we used to have because everything is so commercialized, right?

And everything needs to be a registered kind of purchase so it contributes to economic activity. And I feel like when I was reading your book, it sounds like China is kind of in the process, or at least rural China, maybe it's already happened in urban, of undergoing like a similar sort of commercialization process where these communities are being brought into the larger economy so they can contribute to the economic growth that the Chinese government wants to show. And so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how that is actually playing out in China. I think that, you know, your read is totally spot on. China is all in on being like the rest of the world of emphasizing a consumer based economy where the economy is

essentially kept alive by like people buying movie theater tickets and clothes. Accompanying that is both on the ground, this sense of kinship and communal ties and who your community is in not just, you know, community in the sense of like people that you rely on, but also, you know, people that you rely on for food, for material goods, and, you know, who's your economic community, right? And instead, it's now this like, in China, this broader landscape of all these like weird financialization and fiscal incentives. It's interesting for what I've seen in rural China, at least, and maybe this was also my hope in looking at rural China. I feel like urban China has totally gone in that direction. There's the exact same things that I see in San Francisco,

in Guangzhou, if not more accelerated and people just like buying things all the time and living the exact kind of like isolated San Francisco white collar life. But in the countryside, at least from the older generation, there is still some sense culturally of like, well, maybe this is not exactly the way to go, right? Like you have all these, I love hanging out with farmers, because they are very direct. And you know, like just watching TV with them. They're just so clear on everything, you know, they'll watch like some kind of ad about like how great this new invention is. Look, there's robots.

They're going to like do all the work. And the farmers that I hang out with, they're just like, oh, why would you need that? This is definitely the invention of like city people who have nothing better to do than to like create this thing. And equally, too, they have also, I wouldn't say a skeptical view of the government, they do acknowledge that their lives are generally better than they were 20 or 30 years ago due to putting in roads, things like that. But there is more of a tendency where like I described in that Tabat village, like, you know, the one line that someone told me, they're just like, we're peasants, you know, we like to stay away from the government stuff, because it's a lot of posturing, it's a lot of

rhetoric, it's a lot of the theater of politics. And that's not what we as peasants and farmers do. And this is not to cast them as somehow backwards or more authentic in any way. I think it's just to say that when you are confronted with this set of rapid changing material, and you're not kind of raised in this consumerist culture, you just have a different set of values and ethics, I think. I think that makes sense. And I think you could argue that you still see more of that in rural North America. In rural Canada that I'm familiar with, you would still see more of that kind of community that has been lost to a certain degree in urban Canada, I would say. But even there, it suffers. And as people have moved away from rural areas,

that's really affected what has happened there. And there's often very little economic base to rely on anymore, right? And so when we're thinking, I guess, more broadly about this larger structure that is now being created, you talk about how we really should try to get away from these kind of corporate profit-driven platforms that kind of enforce this surveillance, this lack of trust, you know, all these other negative things that help to sell their products, right? And so I wonder in the face of this kind of e-commerce onslaught, you counterpose the narrative of innovation from technology to a narrative of, and I'm going to totally butcher

this, shanzai? Yeah, yeah, shanzai. Awesome, which entails like a different relationship to technology, intellectual property, community, you know, all these all these different things, right? So how does that give us an alternative means of thinking about how we structure society, our approach to technology and our relations to each other. I love Shenzhai because I mean, I have a deep kind of, I want to say, philosophical investment in piracy. And so Shenzhai technology is derived from the Cantonese word for mountain stronghold. And it's kind of this riff on like, well, if you're from the mountain stronghold, you're not going to be able to buy like the official Disney backpack or like the official Disney CD, right? So you're going to kind of make these knockoffs. It's really

blossomed into its own industry in places like Shenzhen, which is known for being like the electronics capital of the world. But in the West, there's often this mantra of like, oh, China's just ripping off our technology, like they're doing a lot of piracy. They're horrible and immoral for doing this. But in China, it's really this like, I view it, you know, maybe somewhat over romantically as this real Robin Hood opening up technology for everyone, right? So there's this blogger, Bunny Huang, and also the scholars, David Lee and Sylvia Lintner have written a lot about this. But Shenzhai technology is really like, okay, well, there's this actual need for a smartphone or just a phone where you can open up and actually repair it. Like if you have an Apple iPhone, you actually need this insane special machine to even open it up if

something goes wrong. And once you open it up, like how are you going to like even have the equipment to actually operate on that, right? So instead, maybe we can make and design phones that anyone has the right to repair. And, you know, on Bunny's blog, if you look, he finds these like incredible phones that are just like modular, they're open source, you have a soldering iron, and you can figure out how to repair these things. Ashanti is also applies to software where we have things like, you know, Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, and you have to pay hundreds of dollars for it. And so like, if you're actually someone who's outside of North America, how are you going to come up with like a couple thousand dollars, a couple hundred bucks to just even like make a simple mock up of a UI,

a user interface if you're trying to make your startup or something. So I think there's a lot of potential for Shanjai to both open up tech and for us to recognize and kind of... It's more about hacking the system than kind of throwing out the system entirely. But I think it's really powerful. I also think that it upends a notion of what it means to be human that has stayed with us, which is that, you know, in order to be a citizen, in order to be human, you have the right to own things. And that includes everything from land to all sorts of private property to intellectual property. And that's really stuck with Western modernity in a weird way for many years. But I love that Shanghai troubles that concept.

Whether it'll stay, I mean, who knows? I always hear about how China is trying to clean up certain areas. And I feel like every year I've gone back to China and just seen how things appear more like the US than before. You know, in my read of it, it did really seem like it presented this notion of like democratizing the development of technology, I guess, in a way that we don't so much have when we think of it through the lens of like intellectual property and ownership, where this is something that has been created by a single person and cannot be built on. Whereas, you know, this kind of approach that you're detailing is kind of like, okay, so, you know, one person created this, and then someone else is building on it with something else. And, you know, it's this much

more collaborative process than the really corporatized and monopolized form of technological development that we would have in, say, Silicon Valley, for example. Absolutely. And I think it just opens it up to like, to who wants to be part of that building of tech. You know, there is that strain of like, if you're a white collar worker at Alibaba in China, you probably have like a similar background to someone who's working as a software engineer at Uber. But then if you're in like the more Shanghai realm of things, it's like you can feel empowered to enter into that conversation regardless of like, quote unquote, qualifications or things

like that. I guess one of the kind of worst aspects of that is obviously, in North America, we've developed this system that kind of encourages the real corporatized version of technological development, right. But I'm assuming that from reading your book that China is kind of moving in a direction away from this kind of Shanghai approach to this more corporate approach where things are really controlled by these massive companies like Alibaba, Baidu, instead of kind of embracing this more messy, more democratic way of developing technology and I guess approaching production more generally? Absolutely. I mean, it's just it's a real shame. And I talk about it often with friends where I think it's more of this framing of like,

it's not that China wants to be like the US, but it wants to be quote unquote, modern, whatever that means. And I think a big part about being modern is like image of, you know, this corporate campus, like efficient supply chains, everything's clean, there's no wet markets. And the government is very excited about going on that path, because it also means a further centralization of power to your book gives us a lot to think about, I think, in terms of like all of these really broad questions and a much deeper look into the e-commerce supply chains that we interact with every day, every week,

but really don't understand how far they extend, right? You talk about how, say, like the dropshipper on Instagram or the oyster shucker who's live streaming on Facebook has these connections that they might not even realize to small communities in rural China, right? And so that is also helping to contribute to this kind of ever faster hamster wheel where we always need to be earning more to buy more because that's what's good for the economy. And that's what the governments want, to buy more, because that's what's good for the economy. And that's what the governments want us to be doing. But that's not really making us,

or most of us at least, happier or more fulfilled or producing this kind of better world that we really want to see, right? And so what does your experience writing this book teach us about how to respond to that larger kind of push and drive toward even greater consumerism? One of the things that I came away with, especially talking to folks throughout the research process of the book, is that there are so many ways for us to intervene as individuals, as a collective in our communities, upon the kind of terrifying forces that is global racial capitalism. I visited this village, I think I mentioned, where they realized that their soil wasn't as healthy as before. And they actually were like, we'll stop listening to the local

agricultural bureau on this one. And we'll actually start to do our own form of organic rice farming and do this kind of lottery system where we make sure people aren't like secretly using pesticides. Because rice farming is terraced, if you have water coming in from the top, it flows all the way to the bottom. And the lottery system ensures that no one has contiguous rice paddies. And so if you use pesticides at the top, you might be shooting yourself in the foot later on when the water flows all the way to the bottom. But as a result of tying people together, stitching this community together through the land, you know, they really had to dig in and have these long community conversations, as well as how are they going to

sell their rice. And they did start using tech like e-payment, courier systems, an online store for getting this organic rice farm out to a bigger public. And it was really effective. I think that's just like one of many examples of how it can start really small. And it's all about bringing in this larger community of people who are going to come together and support each other in making change. I believe that anyone can do it, right? There's so many ways of intervening, whether you are that farmer in the field or the software engineer who's kind of like, hey, wait, this isn't right.

This isn't adding up. Yeah, there's so many possibilities. I love that, you know, communities have that power to push back against these larger forces that are trying to push them in a certain direction. It certainly won't be easy. But you know, it's possible to do and as you say, that example that you provide even pushes back against this notion of the tragedy of the commons and all of this to show that, you know, people can work together to build these more positive structures. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today. And I absolutely love the book and would recommend everyone to go and buy it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.

Xiaowei Wang is the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, published by FSG Originals and Logic Books. You can follow them on Twitter at at XRW. You can also follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. And you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a new group of left-wing podcasts in Canada. And you can find more information about that in the show notes. I really appreciate if you're able to do that. Thanks for listening. Thank you.