Blockchain Chicken Farm

And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside

By: Xiaowei Wang

Narrated by: Greta Jung

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.

Great story. Not so good moderator

To The moderatorYou are a great speaker and you’re very talented. With that said I think your tone has much to be desired. I love your Chinese pronunciation. It’s remarkable but you have to work on the rest of your delivery. No disrespect. I wish you the best and your very successful successful.

Informative look of quotidian China

Interesting subject matter. Came for the blockchain chicken farm, and that was indeed interesting. The other stories were a good way to paint a broader picture without any dominant narrative outside of the rural empowerment.

Recommend.

Mispronunciations distracting

Audiobook publishers: For books with this many Chinese terms, place names, and personal names, please, please use a narrator who knows the language or at least follows phonetic instructions.

Although the narration is otherwise good, it sounds like the narrator is making random guesses (albeit with effort) at how to pronounce Chinese words and place/person names. This shouldn’t be a difficult problem to correct.

Examples include “jiu shehui” (old society) which is dramatically mispronounced. Even the westernized old name of Beijing (Peking) somehow gets pronounced “pecking” (?!).

Distracting and unnecessary, detracts from bring able to get into the book. Not the narrator’s fault - come on publisher!

social and cultural context to tech adoption in China

Makes the subject more accessible for non-techies overlaying it with the social and cultural context to tech adoption/ proliferation in China.