Blockchain Chicken Farm

China has a rural vitalization plan. To bridge the socio-economic divide and to stop/reverse the rural flight. Alibaba & co are active participants in transforming farmers into tech-savvy and successful entrepreneurs, as a healthy agricultural society will have money to spend on online shopping. Wang goes on several trips to the Chinese countryside to learn about the application of blockchain technology to counter food-safety scandals, the use of drones to map hard-to-access farmland, and the use of AI-software to track the health of pigs at pig farms. They visit Taobao villages (whole rural villages dedicated to producing/selling on e-commerce platforms) and local police departments tracking ‘urban villages' (low-income neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities, filled with the migrants workers).

Super fascinating book, not just full of stories about China's collide of technology and countryside, but also of thought-provoking musings on the evolution of technology and where it takes us.

With Xiaowei Wang's ‘Blockchain Chicken Farm,' it was one of these cases where the title intrigued me before knowing anything about it. It was quite interesting to read their main theme throughout these short essay-like stories that tie together, which is about the disconnections and connections between China's rural and urban tech sectors, mainly having to do with the interesting tech innovations that rural Chinese communities are doing, especially in agriculture. Topics include chickens being tracked through the blockchain, pigs being tracked with AI, pearls being harvested on livestreams, Chinese made goods' common stigmas, and even the future of technology that's being presented versus the future we would actually want. I liked the tie ins of Xiaowei's perspective, storytelling, and interviewing rather than the author just being black and white with the reporting. At points it was a bit difficult to follow everything since this isn't a topic that I'm at all knowledgeable in but it's an insightful read regardless.