A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Selected for the 2023
National Book Foundation's Science + Literature Program.
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"A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global
capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing**
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From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that
reveal new truths about the globalized world**
In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang
explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural
China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that
rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant.
Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid
globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use
today.
From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive
luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce
villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology,
agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by
humorous "Sinofuturist" recipes that frame meals as they transform under
new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing
look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized
rural world.
FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in
everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian
imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats
to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech's reckless
pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story,
one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and
innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history
through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and
gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into
the tech industry's many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh
conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible
explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life
today.
