Read on Twitter
1/ So, I read “Blockchain Chicken Farm" by @xrw . It’s one of the best books I read this year, not just because its starting point (the countryside) is counter-intuitive for a “metronormative” person like me, but also because it’s much more than simply a book about tech.
2/ It’s a reflection on the transformation of social and natural life under digital capitalism, full of off-hand remarks such as: The “right to privacy is not an individualistic one of secrets and stories, but a social one that requires us to lead with trust in our daily lives.”
3/ @xrw is sharply critical of how the drive for optimization and scale underlying the transformation of the Chinese country-side is driving a ‘race to the bottom.’ Yet, the past of back-breaking poverty offers no reason for nostalgia, they (the author is non-binary) are also ...
4/ … very attentive to why people still grasp the very real opportunities and where there are forward-looking alternatives, in bottom-up, open-source, shanzai appropriation of tech. The story is about agriculture leapfrogging directly into a post-industrial phase:
5/ extremely fractured, yet highly integrated, free-wheelingly entrepreneurial, yet fully dependent on the all-powerful platform. Information-rich, but culturally impoverished. Moving between rural China and the US, they show how deeply intertwined these two have become,
6/ not just economically, but also culturally. Similar sadness, alienation, but also energy to somehow still make it, even if it means to fake it. Indeed, faking it has become an entire way of life.
7/ In the writing style, one can feel that the author also works as an artist. In this, the book is similar to @jamesbridle “New Dark Age”, but less panicky negative, rather the queer American-Chinese perspective seems to inoculate against the view that things used to be OK.
