Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside (FSG Originals x Logic, 2020)

We are talking about AI-driven “pig facial recognition” technologies here. As Xiaowei Wang observes, “Given the computation time, the data required, the hardware infrastructure needed, and the cost, it currently makes sense to utilize AI only if you are raising millions of pigs, not just one or two.” Wang adds: “But the payoff is enormous.” This tremendous, deceptively simple, multi-layered and carefully-thought book really sneaks up on you. Part ethnographic travelogue, part STS technology analysis, part recipe book, Blockchain Chicken Farm paints a captivating, detailed and complex picture of high-technology infrastructure in rural China. Along the way, there emerges a lightly-rendered, but quite profound, meditation on the politics of scale, and the forms of mediation implicated in scale-making. Also: instructions for “How to Eat the World.”  - DB