Review of Xiaowei Wang's Blockchain Chicken Farm in The Nation
BCNM DE student Xiaowei Wang's book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside was recently reviewed by A.Y. Li of The Nation!
From the review:
Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside arrives in our oversaturated digital moment as a welcome reprieve, reminding us that there is more to technology than our thumbs hovering over our phones, unable to escape ourselves. Wang, who is the creative director at Logic magazine, visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism. Technology is steadily changing how work is done in these far-flung places. In a village in the southern province of Guizhou, chickens are tracked with Fitbit-like ankle bracelets; a 25-year-old man in the eastern province of Anhui remotely controls drones that spray pesticides on crops all over the country; in the southwest, small communities are being turned into manufacturing zones for online shopping.