Blockchain Chicken Farm

Metronormativity is pervasive—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 leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases.

After all, code is words made executable—we must take care in what we say.

in contemporary China, this is a common plague, the plague of being old and lonely. As younger generations leave villages, hometowns, even the country itself to chase after careers and jobs, and the tightening noose of income inequality squeezes leisure time, the elderly are left to their own devices. This is unusual for a culture so focused on family and filial piety.

Your ancestral home is often where your hukou, or household registration, is, part of a government system that incentivizes people to stay in certain geographical areas. If you were lucky enough to be born in Beijing, you’d receive a Beijing hukou and numerous benefits, including access to almost fully reimbursed health care in Beijing, home to some of the best hospitals in the country. You’d also receive education for your children at top schools, and they’d be given a lower bar for standardized test scores to get into the country’s top universities, Tsinghua and Beida (Peking University). On the other hand, if you have a hukou in a rural area, you are given a title to a piece of land you can farm, which technically you are stewarding for the government. If you do decide to migrate to the city, your children’s access to Beijing’s wonderful schools is limited. The amount you get reimbursed for a hospital visit in Beijing is next to nothing, and if you did have dreams of upward mobility by attending Tsinghua or Beida, you’d have to outrank native Beijingers on standardized tests, all the while harboring little hope that you’d be one of the lucky few to bypass the hukou-based admissions quotas at these schools. Despite all these disincentives to leave, more than three hundred million people have left their rural homes in search of work in nearby cities, creating China’s economic miracle over the past thirty years.

Closely associated with the goal of poverty alleviation is the desire to create new consumers (and internet users) through a rural “consumption upgrade,” where the hope is that rural internet users will become full-fledged online shoppers. China Mobile and China Unicom have rolled out feats of infrastructural magic, including 4G and 5G cell service to remote regions. Small rural entrepreneurs are being cultivated by tech monopolies like the e-commerce platforms Alibaba and JD.com.

The gaokao is China’s grueling university-entry test that spans three days, as the entire nation waits with anticipation for the average score. The nation’s obsession with gaokao is similar to an academic March Madness. During gaokao week, weather and map apps on your phone will text to alert you: “It’s raining, don’t forget your umbrella on the way to the gaokao!” or “It’s gaokao season, don’t forget to be quiet and courteous! Valuing education and the future of our children are our socialist values!”

China consumes five billion chickens a year (which is still only about half the American chicken-consumption rate of nine billion per year).

Each chicken wears an ankle bracelet that is physically tamperproof, which tracks characteristics such as number of steps taken and the location of the chicken. A chicken Fitbit of sorts. The front plate of the ankle bracelet has a QR code on it. All this data is viewable on a website accessible with a password, and the website includes constantly streaming surveillance footage of the chickens to ensure that they have not been adulterated in any way by an intruder. There’s also a map of the chickens’ movements. Data about the chickens is uploaded via the base station to Anlink, a proprietary enterprise blockchain that is an experiment by the sprawling ZhongAn, an online-only insurance company. Sanqiao chickens are under heavy surveillance. In addition to wearing the ankle bracelets, the chickens are tested every two weeks by the local branch of the Ministry of Agriculture for any signs of antibiotic usage, which is illegal under the category of free-range. While it may seem like overkill, it might be a small price to pay in order to win back public trust. These chickens are delivered to consumers’ doors, butchered and vacuum sealed, with the ankle bracelet still attached, so customers can scan the QR code before preparing the chicken. Scanning this code leads them to a page with details about the chicken’s life, including its weight, the number of steps it took, and its photograph. In Shanghai, these details are seen as a sign of authenticity and food safety, while in the United States they could easily be read from an animal-welfare angle.

Jiang sold six thousand chickens through the blockchain project. And as part of the communal nature of village life, several other local families were employed by the project. In a poverty-alleviation effort, profits were redistributed between Farmer Jiang’s family and the three hundred other households in the village.

Hardin’s tragedy of the commons was later exposed as deeply problematic, as politics disguised as science. His scientific ideas stemmed from his racist, eugenicist beliefs as a white nationalist, and many of the groups he saw as unable to manage shared resources were in non-Western countries. 5 And setting aside Hardin’s political ideologies, the tragedy of the commons theory is just plain wrong. The concept was disproved with in-depth data and careful science in 1990 by Elinor Ostrom, who would be awarded a Nobel Prize for her work.

if blockchain is DNA, Bitcoin is a distinct species. Blockchain is a special kind of distributed record-keeping system that uses cryptography to prevent records from being falsified, eliminating the need to trust a centralized authority to verify records. For example, since food-safety inspection records in China are subject to falsification, instead of there being one canonical record owned by one organization that could be tampered with, a number of records could exist. These records could be distributed among many people: the farmer, the local inspection bureau, the end consumer. If these records are coordinated and kept in sync through a system, people could trust this distributed system rather than a central government authority to deem food safe. If one bad actor at the local inspection bureau did try to fudge the register, the system would reject the change, making it nearly impossible to falsify a record. The special thing about this system is that the distributed record keepers wouldn’t have to trust one another; they may never even have to interact with each other, instead letting the technology mediate. This system of coordination and enforcement is blockchain—immutable, tamperproof records that have a range of mechanisms built in to prevent bad actors. To me, this system sounds ideal at first blush. But the technical implementation of such a system creates a different reality. In blockchain, a set of records is called a block. Multiple computers, or nodes, hold a list of prior records. Each block of records is mathematically chained to the previous block of records. In order to link the blocks, a “hashing function” has to be performed by computers: guessing random numbers to solve a math problem, a task that requires enormous amounts of computing power and electricity. After this hashing function, blocks are then on the blockchain, and this is transmitted to all the other computers on the network. Since the blocks are all mathematically chained together, to falsify a record would mean having to redo all the work for subsequent blocks on the chain, requiring so much electricity and resources that falsification is disincentivized.

The first block on the Bitcoin blockchain was created along with the text “THE TIMES 03/ JAN/ 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”—the anti-centralization message of Bitcoin coming through loud and clear.

Blockchain, like an authoritarian regime, uses a parallel logic: people cannot be trusted in a free market, and bad actors are intrinsic to a social system. In order to mediate trust, a technical infrastructure is better than a government; governments are made up of fallible people, whereas technical infrastructure works automatically. Instead of the government moderating trust, blockchain does so with machines.

Brazil is poised to be the world’s leader in soybean exports as swaths of the Amazon rain forest are deforested for soy farming. Eighty percent of the harvest ends up as pig feed, and China is currently the top buyer of Brazilian soy.

Countries like the United States have wheat reserves as insurance against famine, and to control food prices. China is the only country in the world to have a pork reserve, consisting of millions of live pigs and uncountable pounds of frozen pork, hoarded from domestic and foreign sources. When the country experienced a 2008 food price surge, the government drew upon these pork reserves, which is how Smithfield pork ended up in China en masse.

For ET Agricultural Brain, so much labor goes into making the models: not just the labor of engineers at Alibaba, but also the labor of those who create the training data. Farmers examining training data and labeling the pig in the images as sick or healthy. Entire swaths of Guiyang designated as “digital towns,” where young rural migrants sit and generate training data for AI, clicking on images, tagging animals and objects. Despite stories of AI replacing humans, AI still desperately needs us.

XAG itself is partnering with Zhonghang Future(中航未来教育集团) to roll out a massive virtual online flight school as well as a hundred thousand physical flight schools across the country. By the end of 2018, more than twenty thousand people had finished the online training portion through WeChat. And if XAG does intend for existing farmers to become drone operators, and for existing drone operators to become geographic information data managers, will these internet-enabled, distance-learning initiatives work?

Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world. Riffling through recent coverage on innovation shows the most innovative products appear to be varying forms of management through technology—managing people, cars, take-out orders, or goods. Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?

for many companies in China at the time, innovation wasn’t about creating entirely new products—“ disruptive innovation”—but also about the ways existing processes could be optimized and streamlined, a form of “continuous innovation.”

the Los Angeles police even proudly tout “Police Diplomacy,” citing the number of police exchange visits between China and L.A.

in 2013 the internet giant Alibaba launched the Rural Taobao strategy, aimed at improving the lives of those in rural China. It’s as if Google decided to turn itself into a branch of the United Nations, or as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and giving them Amazon-backed loans. The strategy is two-pronged: Rural Taobao and Taobao villages. The first involves a series of Rural Taobao Service Centers, which are usually located at the village convenience stores and revolve around one URL: cun.taobao.com. At these Rural Taobao Service Centers, Taobao contracts with one or two local villagers as brand ambassadors. These brand ambassadors are not directly employed by Alibaba but are paid a small amount to help villagers buy and select items, as well as access other services from the e-commerce platform, such as buying train tickets online and scheduling doctor’s appointments. Shopping is the main highlight of rural Taobao, but digital literacy is also emphasized. In the rural Taobao world, “digital” means anything Alibaba-related.

Alibaba has a whole branch of its company focused on rural development, rural finance, and rural Taobao. It also has its own rural research institute, AliResearch, which examines the business cycles of Taobao villages to understand their successes and failures.

The global reach of drop-shipping is born out of Alibaba and AliExpress, allowing drop-shipping entrepreneurs access to millions of items, shipped at low cost, directly from China. There are numerous online articles about how to start a profitable drop-shipping business, and many of these businesses are responsible for the deluge of Instagram ads that you see: lifestyle brands selling sleek water bottles, new travel bags, and suitcases. These items are often from AliExpress: drop-shippers simply provide the advertising and marketing.

In 2019, Alipay had seven hundred million users, with nearly two hundred million transactions a day.

Farmers need access to loans, Jia said. But they typically have types of collateral that are different from those of city people. A farmer’s assets might be pigs or chickens. As a result, Ant Financial is setting up cameras on farms that can display a farmer’s assets in real time to help assess credit scores and risk in lending scenarios. Such data can also be used by ET Agricultural Brain to help farmers with the animal-raising process. With this risk-assessment camera in place, farmers can then use Alipay to apply for loans.

Wish.com, with headquarters based in Menlo Park, is a peculiar version of Amazon with half a billion users. It is a drop-shipper, sourcing from AliExpress, but its customer base is in the Midwest, Texas, and Florida.

In 2018, Alibaba announced plans to export the Taobao village model. The World Bank is interested in this model for other places in the world, including countries like South Africa. One former counsel for Alibaba tells me that Jack Ma envisioned the Electronic World Trade Organization (eWTO), before counsel advised him to change the name. It’s now called the Electronic World Trade Platform, or eWTP. The eWTP has become part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As of 2018, three eWTP outposts had been set up: in Malaysia, Rwanda, and South Africa.

Located in the south of China, with the Yangtze River running through it, Zhejiang is blessed with an abundance of water from plentiful ponds, groundwater, and favorable rains. In fact, the “glut” of water in the south has existed for thousands of years, with Xi Jinping recently trying to revive an ancient plan to funnel water from the south to the dry north.