Technology in Rural China

“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.

From conversational agents to robots

Mark Meadows wrote an interesting piece at Robohub. Basically, on virtual assistants such as Apple's SIRI, Microsoft's Cortana or Facebook's M are "the testbeds for tomorrow’s personal robots":

"Our mobile devices are becoming natural language interface hubs for life management and, as a result, having a gravitational pull on an increasingly complex buzz of connected services and APIs. This means that things like search will change: we will no longer have to speak Googlese; paper and page metaphors will be supplanted by the more dynamic (and cognitively more addictive) character metaphor. And if trends in virtual assistants and intelligent helpers – software robots – continue, then knowledge-bases (such as Wolfram Alpha or IBM Watson) will continue to come peppered with a patina of natural language, allowing us to move through data faster, with less training, and in a more human manner.

[...] We can also foretell the future by looking at less advanced natural language systems. Bots – essentially natural language oriented scripts – are a good indicator of where the robotics industry is at because bots are pervasive, useful, and simple to author. TwitterBots and FacebookBots crawl through these systems like bees in a hive, industriously providing retweets, reposts, summaries, aggregations, starting fights and flocking to followers. They can be bought, auctioned, sold, and deleted; you can buy 30,000 Twitter followers on eBay for as little as for $20, provided they’re all bots."

Why do I blog this? Although I'm not sure whether these agents need a proper physical instantiation (bigger than a phone), Mark's argument is relevant; especially if you consider how talking to objects (interacting with voice, or chatting/tweeting to bots) becomes slightly more present (= less weird).

"These machines can be a metaphor for whatever's on people's minds."

A dialogue from Mad Men S07E04:

"Lloyd: These machines can be a metaphor for whatever's on people's minds.

Don Draper: Because they're afraid of computers?

Lloyd: Yes. This machine is frightening to people, but it's made by people.

Don Draper: And people aren't frightening?

Lloyd: It's not that. It's more of a cosmic disturbance. This machine is intimidating because it contains infinite quantities of information, and that's threatening, because human existence is finite. But isn't it godlike that we've mastered the infinite? The IBM 360 can count more stars in a day than we can in a lifetime.

Don Draper: But what man laid on his back counting stars and thought about a number?

Lloyd: He probably thought about going to the moon."

Why do I blog this? Just found this dialogue interesting as a metaphor for discussion in the 1960s about "computing" and the role of this machinery in society.