“Smart city, smart city, y en a que pour les city, et le rural ça compte pas ?” (“Smart city, smart city, it’s always just about cities, what about rural areas? don’t they count?”). That’s a quote from a old farmer I met in one of my alpine field trips. Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang, recently published by FSG Originals × Logic is exactly about this sort of question. Based on a series of stories – one might say ethnographic vignette – about the use of Blockchain, machine learning, drones, massive open online course or 4G/5G in rural China, the author confronts the “metronormativity” of such technologies.
“metronormativity – a portmanteau of ‘metropolitan’ and ‘normative’, coined by the theorist and scholar Jack Halberstam (…) it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to live the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology and media literacy will somehow ‘save’ or ‘educate’ rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.”
Why blogging this? The detailed descriptions of Wang’s foray into various usages of technologies related to food and agriculture highlights the social, cultural and political dimensions of a digitized rural world. An interesting overview of how the technologies we hear about here and there can be situated in the context of the Chinese countryside, Blockchain Chicken Farm offers a nuanced account of the opportunities, limits, and frictions caused by these new uses of the “digital”. As a former software engineer, Wang is not naive about technologies and although various limits are described, the tone isn’t anti-technologies. The perspective about China are also quite relevant and I found interesting to look at the complexity of the Chinese countryside and smaller cities from the author’s perspective. Overall, the main objective – to offer a counterpoint to the metronormativity of digital technologies – is accomplished.
