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Crypto needs financial products — simply positioned and simply transparent — to preserve and grow people’s assets in difficult times. 18034 Total views 46 Total shares Listen to article 0:00 Opinion …
With the COVID-19 crisis showing no signs of abating in the United States, central banks around the world have deployed financial airbags in the form of quantitative easing, and they plan to do a lot more. Modern Monetary Theory has taken center stage, and we are witnessing it in action. It’s a sight that will leave you awestruck: like witnessing the financial version of the first atomic explosion of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. What is going on with the world’s economy is unprecedented. We are entering completely new and uncharted territories, and all bets are off with respect to inflation/deflation. How will different asset classes react to the stimulus? Will we see price inflation, price stability or chaos? No one knows. One thing is certain: More absurdity is surely in store, and one should keep their wits about them and pay close attention. In 2008, the QE money printed did not enter circulation — it stayed at the Federal Reserve in a charter account of the member banks in the form of accounting entries on computers. This was just ignorance of how the financial flows worked, even though the net effect was positive: Bitcoin () was born as a reaction to QE. The QE of today is, however, one of a different animal — it is meant to go to households and small businesses to pay for food and rent, or simply put, prevent famine, mass homelessness, general riots and societal breakdown. What we have been witnessing is the end of 19th-century industrial capitalism and the reign of monetary capitalism. This has been true since the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement some 50 years ago, but not entirely evident for all. The goal is humanistic: to avoid death, misery and social upheaval. This new money has entered circulation all at once — no questions asked — directly into the bank accounts of households and small businesses as deposits pumped by the Fed, and these have inadvertently found their way into the financial markets. The result: a monster rally in the equity markets that has snapped a few necks and caught sociopathic short-sellers by surprise. Do not bet against the Fed. Doing so will give you a quick, unglamorous and leveraged death. While Robinhood traders are typically thought to be behind the market’s rallies, the truth is, operators directly linked to the Fed do the bulk of the “behind-the-scenes” buying, and they buy everything from bonds to index funds and single equities, and soon –– cryptocurrencies. Ironically, crypto heads are uniquely conditioned to understand what is going on with the current monetary system and market-led shenanigans — it’s all in the market-making order
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Home » Interviews » Ryan X. Charles: ‘It will take me rest of my life to master all of the material’ Few bothered to try to understand Bitcoin in its early days, and some manipulated it to suit their …
own purposes. Over the years, misunderstanding Bitcoin—deliberately or just misguided—has led to a lot of wasted time, missed opportunities, lost money, and confusion. Money Button founder Ryan X. Charles has made it his mission to find Bitcoin’s true meaning, and educate himself and others. To that end, he and Dr. Craig S. Wright have created the “Theory of Bitcoin” series of very in-depth discussions on both the broader philosophy and finer points of Bitcoin. We chatted to Charles about why Bitcoin and its creator have been so misunderstood. Bitcoin is both radically new and yet timeless, and to build something truly worthwhile, it helps to understand which parts of its nature fall into those categories. That said, Bitcoin’s true nature isn’t exactly obvious. Charles himself says it wasn’t until recent years that he began to understanding it better, and even now it would take him the rest of his life to master it. One key to understanding Bitcoin is, you need to learn a lot more than just Bitcoin. A proper classical education with all the history, accumulated human knowledge and guiding principles it provides is rare these day. But it’s not impossible. Educate yourself, and you’ll begin to understand the “why” of Bitcoin as much as the “what.” And you’ll also realize that the “why” was probably the most important thing all along. If you’re reading this article then you’re already on the right track, and that’s an advantage. Charles has written a lengthy blog post about what he’s learned so far, and why it’s important, but read on to hear a little more about where he thinks Bitcoiners went wrong and why, and how they can fix it. Interview with Ryan X. Charles, Money Button CEO/founder and co-host, “Theory of Bitcoin” series Do you think there’s a difference between Craig Wright the public figure, and Craig Wright the person? If yes, what is it? Yes. Many people in the cryptocurrency industry have an interest that is in opposition to the Craig’s original vision for Bitcoin. They have done a good job using Craig’s weaknesses against him in order to create an image that suits their interests. Craig’s weaknesses are essentially that he is not good at interacting with people (although he is getting better). They have taken snapshots of Craig’s public failures, like his faux pas about Rwanda, “I have more money than your country,” and use it against him over and over. But the real Craig Wright is nothing like this public image. The real Craig Wright is a hyperfocused knowledge geek who obsessively tries to learn everything and who is generous with his time with people who help him. Are all the people working in “crypto” or “blockchain” outside the BSV world actually wasting their time and energy? Yes. Every single one that is not BSV has limitations that will prevent them from achieving mass adoption. The only one that has a chance is BSV. How much of the “other 99%” of Bitcoin do you feel you understand, at the present time? I’m not sure, but I will say that I have learned immensely by talking with Craig in this interview series. In every single interview I learned something important that grew my understanding of Bitcoin, and many other subjects as well. I estimate that it will take about five to ten years to master the most important background material for Bitcoin. I believe it will take the rest of my life to master all of the material. You said the conversations with Dr. Wright had led to you changing your very definition of Bitcoin. If you could take your knowledge of Bitcoin now, and give it to yourself in 2011, what’s the best advice you would give? I would tell myself to adopt maximum responsibility for the success of Bitcoin (and for my own success). A key mistake I made early on was to assume that other people would understand the incentives of Bitcoin and would identify and fulfill their niche in the ecosystem. That is not what happened. Instead, almost no one bothered to understand Bitcoin, but rather manipulators got involved who twisted the
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Rachel-Rose O’Leary is a cryptocurrency writer and trainee C++ developer at PolyTech. Currently a contributor to CoinDesk and the Defiant newsletter, she has written about cryptocurrency since …
2015. She holds an MA in digital art and philosophy.
These days I spend most of my time tweaking the code of a bitcoin wallet that runs in Terminal. Based on Libbitcoin, it’s built to work over Nym Technologies’ anonymizing mixnet. I call it the Dark Renaissance wallet.
It’s mostly a learning exercise to hone my C++ skills, but the Dark Renaissance wallet is a harbinger for what is to come.
Working with a small, focused and ideological team, my comrades at PolyTech are upending some of the key assumptions on which the crypto industry has been built, and are plotting an all-out privacy offensive.
Our mission – the Dark Renaissance – is strategic and philosophical. At a personal level, it relates to a lifelong obsession with the philosophy of technology, and an intense awareness of the power of software.
It represents a desire to reconnect with bitcoin’s crypto-anarchist roots and fend off the forces of surveillance that creep into every aspect of our lives in 2020.
But first, it requires an understanding of the distant past.
Like the ancient Irish poets, the filí, programmers have the ability to alter reality with an utterance. Code is an incantation, an act of summoning ideas and inclinations into material reality. It is a conduit between the sphere of ideation and that of politics and sociality.
But technology isn’t merely the product of ideas – it actively shapes belief systems, reconfiguring the world in which it is applied.
Programmers know this: When a user’s behavior is influenced by code, it’s called opinionated software. When a user is manipulated for corporate interests, it is known as a dark pattern.
Software also has unintended consequences. Released into the wild, code propagates ideology in unpredictable and chaotic ways. Inevitably, it backfires, and innovation flows through human society, irrespective of, and indifferent to, political difference.
To what extent technology is informed by and produces belief systems has haunted me throughout my adult life.
It has also given me dreams. I believe it is within humanity’s power to reshape the
Crypto is at the front line of this struggle.
I came to crypto through encryption. I saw hash functions as a kind of abstract poetry that spoke of the secrecy of nature and the unknown.
Crypto was immersed in a romantic glow. In Ethereum’s early days, I believed I was witnessing the emergence of Skynet. It was the promise of Turing Complete, general computation and if artificial intelligence was going to emerge anywhere, it would be there, I believed at the time.
It was my doomer phase, and Ethereum was a source of dark fascination. Inspired by the Ethereum yellow paper, I wrote my master’s thesis in 2016 on what I felt was a sadomasochistic dynamic between natural language and code. It included an erotic poem featuring a kind of vampire DAO (far before I had familiarized myself with the unicorns and rainbows that better represent the Ethereum community).
But while my
This hierarchization of reality – of partitioning nature into the more and less real – occurs across philosophy in different guises and names. For some philosophers, such a partition gets us no further in understanding the “things-in-themselves.” Humans are encased by a sphere of representation, wholly cut off from an inaccessible and inhuman outside.
At the time, I believed the reality hierarchy had a
With this philosophical backdrop, code acquires a profound metaphysical weight. It became a way to transmute the lowest level of reality into human experience.
The DAO hack was the first crack in this worldview.
Implicitly, I maintained at the time that natural language was somehow inferior to the perfect objectivity of code.
Not only that, but I believed the behavior of technology within capitalism – its tendency toward monopolization, value-extraction and surveillance – was technology’s true nature revealing itself.
Martin Heidegger – a philosopher known for supporting the Nazi party and for transforming Western philosophy – calls this tendency Gestell, or enframing.
According to Heidegger, technology is a process of dismantling, quantifying and repackaging for export. In modernity, it has captured humanity, reducing people and everything else into a resource, a “standing reserve” to be exploited by the technological regime.
An equally controversial philosopher called Nick Land takes this process and gives it an agency.
According to Land, technology exposes an inhuman intelligence optimizing itself at the expense of the human. Stimulated by finance and a strange, contorting temporality, this inhuman intelligence is climbing its way up the reality hierarchy, threatening to replace the human as the world’s top predator.
It might sound like science fiction but crypto is full of this kind of rhetoric. Early efforts toward smart contracts promise nothing short of optimizing humans out of the equation. The blockchain is described as pure, trustless and incorruptible, turning all that it touches into glacial, inalterable code.
Ethereum’s infamous experiment in corporate governance, The DAO, echoed this language.
As Ethereum Classic fans will no doubt remember, The DAO was a high-profile fundraising campaign for a decentralized incubator. Its marketing spoke of “the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code” – a phrase whose irony is hard to forget.
Due to a vulnerability discovered in Solidity smart contracts not long after its launch, The DAO was subject to a re-entrancy attack, in which a hacker exploited a function within the code to drain 3.6 million ether out of it.
Following a heated discussion that resulted in the birth of a new cryptocurrency, ethereum classic (ETC), Ethereum developers implemented a controversial upgrade to refund DAO investors.
The DAO episode exposed many myths about blockchain, but this one stands out: Despite claims to the contrary, crypto contains an inextricably human element.
I spent the subsequent years following the ebb and flow of Ethereum software development as a reporter for CoinDesk.
For two years I attended every single Ethereum core developer call. I tracked decision-making on the platform like a jealous lover, refreshing Twitter handles, expanding sprawling GitHub discussions, quietly watching chat groups.
During this time, Ethereum faced the fallout of its DAO refund and dealt with the challenge of informal, decentralized governance. This challenge was intensified by a few simple facts: Ethereum has a leadership that is ideologically opposed to authority, and a vision that is inclusive to the point of being meandering.
Criticisms aside, Ethereum was in uncharted territory. And despite the odds, the platform managed to keep its course, even with pressure from monetary interest pulling it from each side.
Over time, I understood the mistakes I had made. Ethereum is not Skynet, and code has much more in common with natural languages than the raw mechanics of primary nature. I learned that sometimes, developers actually trade efficiency for readability; favoring clear, modular code over code which is fast.
I also learned power exists on all decentralized networks, but it is typically nameless and therefore unaccountable. Over time, power relations solidify. Networks become institutionalized and the rift between users and developers deepens.
Software, I decided, is a social good, like water and clean air. To maintain the balance of power, coders must elevate those around them. They must discourage passive user-ship, inspire users to become active network participants and train the next generation of coders to replace them.
Armed with a newly found focus, I left the Ethereum beat to join the Rojava revolution in North Syria.
Inspired by the writings of Kurdish ideologue Abdullah Ocalan, the Rojava revolution sprang up during the Syrian Civil War. Its supporters maintain that the nation-state is an abstraction badly suited to the Middle East. In its place, Rojava is pioneering new forms of decentralized social organization.
But it is not merely a social organization that binds Rojava together. Rather, Rojava is governed by a collective idea: the concept of democratic modernity.
In his five-
But Ocalan does not identify this process with technology. According to him, it is the logic of capitalist civilization itself.
The task of democratic modernity is to decouple technology from globalization. In its place, new modernities can be built, based on a plurality of logics – not merely Western-style reductionism that has come to dominate the world.
In Rojava, learning is paramount. People are encouraged to develop “xwe zanîn,” or self-knowledge, inspired by the Ancient Greek maxim “know thyself.” This is a project of remembering, of resurfacing histories worn away by globalization.
Here, I spent my time establishing technical academies. Inspired by the scientific centers of the ancient world, like Plato’s Academy and the House of Baghdad, our goal was to train a new generation of philosophical programmers.
But my time in Rojava was cut short.
During the nine months I spent there, the risk of a Turkish invasion weighed heavily. It cast a dark shadow across all of our work, like a storm cloud looming in the distance.
Finally, the storm came, and the sky rained bullets and bombs. Disguised as a man, I was among the last foreigners to cross the border to safety before the death count started to rise.
I found myself at the Devcon5 Ethereum conference in Osaka, Japan, one week after leaving Syria.
With friends on the front line, I found it hard to look people in the eye. Ethereum’s unicorn-punk aesthetic set against the backdrop of war was hard to stomach.
Sleeplessly refreshing the Syrian Civil War subreddit and Syria Live Map on my phone, I watched the war play out in total horror.
Airstrikes, bombings, body counts. On stage, well-meaning developers called for diversity and social justice, innocent to, or oblivious of, the blanket of physical safety that surrounded them.
It was overpriced and sparsely attended. At a panel on Ethereum-based mixers an audience member warned that facilitating “bad guys” through privacy-tech could alienate the “average user” – a statement that was met with broad approval.
Maybe it was my state of mind, but it felt like the dissonance between cryptocurrency’s stated aims and its material reality was reaching a fever pitch. The general effort toward compliance was not only enabling certain forms of oppression but at times actively supporting it.
At that moment, I decided that anonymity is where all philosophy of technology collides. In technical terms, it is synonymous with freedom. Practically, it can mean life or death.
Since then, I have set about orchestrating the Dark Renaissance.
The Dark Renaissance is a revolution within cryptocurrency. It is a rallying cry to all who still believe in crypto’s true potential. It calls for a rebirth back to bitcoin’s original principles: to be autonomous, censorship-resistant and dark-by-design.
While crypto-anarchist in origin, bitcoin has lost its way. Rather than empowering black markets, it has allied with state and corporate interests – traded its radical potential for mainstream adoption.
But by suppressing its crypto-anarchist roots and whitewashing its aims to appeal to bankers, crypto has cut itself off from its source of power. The Dark Renaissance seeks to resurface that power, to allow the truly disruptive potential of cryptocurrency to realize itself.
That truly disruptive potential lies in cryptocurrency’s ability to extend the space of illegality outward: to increase the remit and power of unauthorized black market activity and strip resources away from the nation-state.
Our methods are part educational, part software production. We are setting up the PolyTech Academy, where technical skills are taught in tandem with a philosophy curriculum.
Read more: Code as a Weapon: Amir Taaki Wants You to Join the Real Crypto Revolution
Through education, we want to elevate the culture of the cryptocurrency space, to create a community of active network participants and to inspire a new generation of programmers to succeed us.
In our code, we build tools to practically enforce our ideology. Advocating autonomy, anonymity and censorship-resistance, we will lead with the launch of several financial products, and iterate into a full-fledged dark financial system.
These tools will enable us to create a new economic paradigm. We are building financial networks to disintermediate local economies away from the state and large banks, and to usher in a more democratic alternative.
Rather than controlling people through mechanism design as much crypto-economics often intends to do, we are instead seeking to inspire people – to create a vision of technology that empowers people from within.
We are in the midst of a turning point. Technologists today are faced with a choice: Either passively advance the interests of a system fated for destruction or undertake a psychic reversal.
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BIO:

Dan Held is a Texan who doesn’t drive a truck, drink beer, love Trump, or watch sports. He’s a tech enthusiast who isn’t into coding. He looks like a typical preppy dude, wearing a white-button-up …
shirt and carrying a swoop haircut, but he flies drones, tinkers on full nodes, and writes about libertarian principles. He doesn’t match the usual stereotypes. “It’s been hard to reconcile that in terms of where I fit in.” Football, Held says, is a big deal in Texas. Years ago, the growth lead at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken enjoyed success as a football player there, going 16-0 and winning state in his senior year of high school. He played tight end, a position that requires a high degree of versatility as a combination of offensive lineman and receiver. At Kraken, he’s continued in a similar vein spending his first year on business development, and now working on growth. Even while going undefeated in high school football, the self-described “jock-nerd” was also crushing advanced placement exams. But Held has grown accustomed to the ongoing dichotomies that have built his character — and, ultimately, his career. He grew up all over the political and societal map in an unusual melange of experiences, spending time in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas, eventually landing in San Francisco. He was one of the few people in his circles who was really into Bitcoin in its early days, yet was decidedly non-techie. What really grabbed him was Bitcoin’s value proposition as a solution to the failures of modern monetary policy. During his college days, the 2008 financial crisis caused him to question the system. He soon was captivated by Bitcoin’s monetary policy and how well it fit with the libertarian ideology of free markets. Studying finance as an undergrad in 2008, Held recalled a breakdown in his faith in the financial system and in the experts that were supposed to explain and defend it. “My professors didn’t know what they were talking about, everyone on TV didn’t know what they were talking about, all the institutions that we had formally trusted, we couldn’t trust anymore.” It shook his foundational trust in the financial system that most of us take for granted. Surrounded by the textbooks of his economics classes, he was hit with a revelation: “Wait. So, all these
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If the trick to living well with technology is balance—between scrolling and occasionally mustering up the energy to leave the house and see friends—2020 has not only tipped these delicate scales …
but managed to ensure that they were laid waste altogether. With billions of people isolated in their homes across the world with nothing but their screens to help them socialize, teach, learn, and work, many are discovering that digital relationships are a poor substitute for flesh and blood connections. We have gorged too much, too mindlessly, on this thing that ultimately doesn’t serve us awfully well, it seems; the only way forward is to deny, absolve ourselves, and repeat.
Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside arrives in our oversaturated digital moment as a welcome reprieve, reminding us that there is more to technology than our thumbs hovering over our phones, unable to escape ourselves. Wang, who is the creative director at Logic magazine, visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism. Technology is steadily changing how work is done in these far-flung places. In a village in the southern province of Guizhou, chickens are tracked with Fitbit-like ankle bracelets; a 25-year-old man in the eastern province of Anhui remotely controls drones that spray pesticides on crops all over the country; in the southwest, small communities are being turned into manufacturing zones for online shopping.
Stories about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.
Many Western
The countryside commands a mythic status in the
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside arrives in our oversaturated digital moment as a welcome reprieve, reminding us that there is more to technology than our thumbs hovering over our phones, unable to escape ourselves. Wang, who is the creative director at Logic magazine, visited a number of new businesses across China’s countryside during the past year to document the ways in which rural towns have become the engines of global consumer capitalism. Technology is steadily changing how work is done in these far-flung places. In a village in the southern province of Guizhou, chickens are tracked with Fitbit-like ankle bracelets; a 25-year-old man in the eastern province of Anhui remotely controls drones that spray pesticides on crops all over the country; in the southwest, small communities are being turned into manufacturing zones for online shopping.
Stories about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.
Many Western
The countryside commands a mythic status in the
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or ies about technology, Wang (who uses “they”/”them” pronouns) writes, often focus on cities, influenced by the bias of what theorist Jack Halberstam has deemed “metronormativity.” While metronormativity posits that “rural culture and rural people are backward” subjects who must be “saved” by “internet, technology, and media literacy,” Wang’s travels show the centrality of China’s countryside to global life. What does it mean to hold on to the binaries of “rural versus urban, natural versus man-made, digital versus physical” at a time when—as one of Wang’s case studies shows—nearly all the Halloween costumes worn by children in suburban America come from one tiny remote village in western China? It is only by bringing the supposed periphery into the center that we can begin to unpack the ties that bind us and see the systems that make our lives tick.
Many Western
The countryside commands a mythic status in the
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
Many Western
The countryside commands a mythic status in the
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
The countryside commands a mythic status in the
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
Economists warn that China now faces an “agrarian transition,” which could further accelerate migration to urban sites as small-scale farming is supplanted by industrialized agriculture. In 2010, a state-affiliated think tank identified China’s 750 million rural workers—particularly dissatisfied younger workers living on the margins of a city—as a key threat to the government’s legitimacy: “Policy-making must confront the pressing reality that migrant workers now dominated by a younger generation will remain in towns and cities.” The government, in response, has spurred efforts to construct a “new socialist countryside” over the past decade, marshaling technology giants to develop a place, Wang writes, “filled with peasants starting e-commerce businesses, small-scale manufacturing, new data centers, and young entrepreneurial workers returning to their rural homes.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
The titular blockchain chicken farm is one such effort to forge a new countryside, itself doubling as a way to cool down social discontent about food safety. This is a perennial concern in China: headlines over the years have warned of human hair being ground up in soy sauce and bubble tea balls being made with plastic peas. In the quiet Sanqiao village, two hours from the southwest megacity of Chongqing, farmer Jiang oversees the local blockchain chicken operation in his area. Launched by Lianmo Technology, the project affixes free-range chickens with a tamper-proof ankle bracelet that tracks their steps and location, logging this information through a blockchain ledger, which provides data on the chickens in an efficient format. Chickens are further tested every two weeks for the presence of illegal antibiotics. A QR code affixed to each ankle bracelet takes the (largely middle-class) consumers to a website where they can see the data of the chicken’s life cycle and be assured that the chicken they are consuming is sufficiently free-range. Although the project’s future is uncertain—last year, Lianmo ordered 6,000 blockchain chickens, but there is no such order this year—Jiang remains optimistic, Wang reports. But the problem is, Jiang continues, that while his region is remote, pollution-free, and enjoys fresh air and clean soil, “the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
Blockchain, now hailed as a way to ensure social trust, ironically has its roots in a paranoid way of thinking. We can’t trust institutions, and every system will have bad actors, the thinking goes, so why not create a decentralized “ledger” where records are distributed and synced among many people—in the case of the blockchain chickens, they include the farmers, the inspectors, and the consumers—ideally making the project impervious to a single effort to sabotage it? But as Wang observes, “technical systems are legible only to a select few,” and judging by the audiences of the bitcoin conferences held in California, these few are overwhelmingly white and male.
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
A similar hierarchy is evident in a conference for a high-tech drone company that Wang attends in the southern city of Guangzhou; investors and venture capitalists sit at the very front, followed by engineers and bored-looking journalists, with drone operators at the back. This typifies a paradox inherent in many tech circles today: “utopian” projects are undergirded by ideologies that have little faith in people, ushered through by rigidly hierarchical businesses, and they run on systems that are so, complex and esoteric that any avowed commitment to a democratic ideal feels thin. Moreover, the goals they chase, which involve a complete “connection” of the world’s people, optimized control of global supply chains, and the synthetic generation of social trust mediated by a surveillance complex, will always remain mere illusions. The pandemic has shown us how easily the vast sprawling machinery of our lives can collapse in the face of an aberrant threat.
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
It has also led to a ramping up of tensions between the United States and China. Blockchain Chicken Farm is more interested in seeing what unites the citizens of the two countries than what distinguishes them from each other. A brief visit to a facial recognition company in Beijing, an account that would have benefited from further detail given rising concern about China’s surveillance apparatus, finds Wang expecting to encounter a sinister, Soviet-like den. “[I]nstead, I was met with a total indifferent openness combined with the dry, surgical threat of a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t remind me of Silicon Valley; it was Silicon Valley.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
And like Silicon Valley, the language of the hustle is everywhere. When visiting Sanqiao village, Wang chances upon a large red banner strewn across a local hospital that announces “Being lazy is a disgrace. Being self-reliant leads to strength,” a slogan that is “eerily reminiscent of several American values: Don’t be lazy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” Wang later visits an oyster farm near the coastal province of Zhejiang, where they meet an entrepreneur who runs a global pearl business. The oysters that yield the pearls are packed up and sealed, then flown halfway across the world to America. Their pearls are sold by cheery white women influencers on Instagram via live “unshucking” videos. These influencers often hail from North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, and other places with some of the highest unemployment figures in the United States and are “consultants” for various Multilevel Marketing schemes (MLMs). They have bought the oysters at a hefty price and must offload them quickly to avoid spiraling into debt: “direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.” Technology, along with globalization, has evidently helped to connect the world, but such connection feels overwhelmingly like a mutual race to the bottom for ever diminishing profits. It’s unsettling how what looks like joyful self-empowerment can edge so close to its opposite.
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often “caught in a long list of binaries: Tech is dehumanizing, tech brings liberation. Tech dragged the world into the mess it’s in, tech frees it from this mess.” Can we ever break out of the binaries? Wang’s cautiously optimistic
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
One of the shehui ren Wang profiles, a young livestreamer named Nicly, shuns conventional beliefs in the value of education and hard work. School, she says, is lame and boring; besides, only the already wealthy can get rich from the usual paths of social advancement. Instead, she hustles, selling face masks and perfume on her live videos. Counterculturalism, in Nicly’s worldview, is indistinguishable from materialism—an
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
Much has been written of the domination that tech giants exact on virtually every aspect of our lives, but increasingly attention is being given to ways we can challenge this, whether through pushing for policy changes or deleting apps and accounts that weigh us down. Wang appeals, counterintuitively, for us to look at the way we relate to ourselves and to others offline, gently exhorting us to continually exercise awareness and care. It’s the sort of work that asks us to set aside the values circulated by technology today—the continual hustle to secure one’s future; the placement of self-image at the center of one’s universe; the glinting promise of easy reward—and sit with indeterminacy, the present, and the unglamorous duties we owe to one another. “The present moment promises nothing—it only demands,” Wang concludes. What’s left is “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning, instead of looking, waiting, or wanting.”
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BIO:

The central banks of Britain, Japan, the euro zone, Sweden and Switzerland have grouped up to assess potential use cases for digital currencies. Talk of such currencies gained momentum after Facebook …
announced plans last year to introduce a cryptocurrency called libra, CNBC. In the light of such developments, it is evident that those who view crypto as an engine of freedom are losing control of the
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BIO:

Mustafa Yilham, VP of global business development at Bixin, joins the show. Bixin is an early Asia-based Bitcoin miner; they operate a popular wallet app, and they run a Bitcoin-denominated quant …
fund of funds. We cover prevailing myths around industrial Bitcoin mining and the reality of sourcing energy at competitive prices for mining. In this episode:
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Nic Carter 0:00 Mustafa, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us today.
Mustafa Yilham 0:07 Yes, thank you so much for having me today, Nic, really appreciate it.
Nic Carter 0:11 I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. Actually, I think we’re gonna learn a lot about mining in particular. You’re a wealth of knowledge on the topic. So I’m super, super pumped. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your role at Bixin and your responsibilities over there? And also, tell us about Bixin too, because I don’t think Americans are sort of as familiar with it.
Mustafa Yilham 0:41 Sure, sure. So my current role at Bixin is vice president of global business development. And my main task, you know, is to help different subsidiaries on their Bixin group to expand internationally. And to tell you a bit more about Bixin mostly have two different business focus. One of them is Bixin wallet, and another is Bixin finance. We are one of the largest blockchain crypto wallet provider in Asia is I think, currently, 1 million registered users and Bixin wallet offer different services to its retail clients such as custody, escrow, trading, lending, payment, cloud mining, etc as part of its ecosystem. And at Bixin finance, we run two very large operation like Bixin mining and fund of fund. We currently manage around 300 megawatt of power roughly that’s currently equivalent to 2% of global Bitcoin network. We are also very early investor in Whatsminer which is one of the largest mining manufacturer. And on the fund of funds side, which we announced earlier this year. We currently have an asset under management around 7000 Bitcoin with the main purpose of investing in global crypto quant funds. And you know, the fund is completely Bitcoin denominated and also supported by our prop capital. And lastly, we also have $100 million fund that is focused on open finance venture investment. Previously, we invested in companies such as micro bt, whatsminer, nervos, algorand, arweave, etc. And, you know, our newest investment is to a $2 million Asia lead investment to Mina protocol, formerly known as Coda.
Nic Carter 2:40 That’s a lot of separate concerns within one institution. Mustafa.
Mustafa Yilham 2:45 Yes [laughs].
Nic Carter 2:46 I dont know how you manage it all. There’s so many things we can cover, maybe we can start with the Bitcoin denominated quant funds, because that totally blew my mind when I first heard about it. So the objective of that fund is to invest Bitcoin in sort of arbitrage for quant funds. And actually, you’re not targeting fiat returns, you’re targeting returns against your Bitcoin benchmark, right?
Mustafa Yilham 3:14 Yes, so the fund of fund is completely Bitcoin denominated. So we are targeting returns only in BTC. And you know, the main goal is to obviously increase our Bitcoin holding and at the same time hopefully provide liquidity to global Bitcoin network.
Nic Carter 3:37 Have you found that the managers that you
Mustafa Yilham 3:49 So I think that have a slight difference between quant fund in the West and Asia. And, you know, we we actually started investing in crypto fund quant funds since last year in China. And after we announced the news this year, we started to build more global presence on the investment side, in US, Europe, Russia, the Singapore. In China, most of the quant managers are very used to Bitcoin denominated terms when investing in crypto funds. And outside of China and most team we spoke to offered USD denominated terms. I think that’s mostly due to regulation and institutional investor preference that these teams are there are potential investors. But I think that’s like rapidly changing now, starting quarter two this year, more team actually have come back to us and told us, you know, they now have a Bitcoin denominated terms on more us teams we spoke to no also have a Bitcoin denominated terms.
Nic Carter 5:06 And so your perspective as an institution as you’re just interested in increasing your stock of bitcoins, as opposed to its value in fiat terms, because I guess in your view, that’s the most important thing is gradually growing your share of bitcoins. Kind of on your balance sheet is that right?
Mustafa Yilham 5:27 Yes. And you know, when we first announced the news, us it was a huge surprise to a lot of people. I think it was May where we put in right 6600 Bitcoin and at the time, you know, people were very surprised because this this portion is all hatched. It’s one zero Fiat 100% Bitcoin denominated, but you know, six months later now, the original value, I believe was around $66 million with 6600 Bitcoin now the asset under management is at 7000. Bitcoin with overall value in fiat value over $130 million at the fund of fund alone. So that’s like two x, then, I think now six months, and, you know, people start to change their view on whether it be a right decision or not,
Nic Carter 6:21 right. So as a as a firm, like bixin, you’re miners, but you’re not trying to actually hedge your exposure and be market neutral, you are sort of directionally long on Bitcoin, generally.
Mustafa Yilham 6:37 Generally, we are Bitcoin denominated. But you know, as a miner, we still have operational costs, such as electricity, labor costs, etc. So, you know, obviously, we do have a risk department that constantly ensure, you know, we are hedged to certain degree, but largely speaking, yes, we are very Bitcoin dominated.
Nic Carter 7:02 So, let’s talk about mining for a little bit. This is an topic of endless fascination for me, I think a lot of traders are paying attention to mining, there’s been a huge amount of chatter recently about miners not being able to sell their coins. So that was the rumor, at least, which I think you helped dispel a little bit on social media.
I think the one big question that people ponder is, you know, what is the effect of miner behavior behavior on Bitcoin cycles? You know, because there’s this one theory that, you know, miners have a pro cyclical effect on Bitcoin in terms of, they sort of hoard the coins that they’re mining during bull phases. And then in bear markets, they are forced to liquidate a lot of their coins. And so that actually adds to the sell pressure and bear market. So it sort of intensifies the price action in both directions. Is that kind of consistent with your experience? I mean, that’s definitely the popular
Mustafa Yilham 8:11 Yes, most miners are like this. But I think it’s very important to note that it has nothing to do is the situation that’s going on in China right now, it has always been like this, and this for a very similar reason. Because, you know, for most miner, after they invested a lot in purchasing mining machine and setting up operation, they don’t have a lot of extra capital just sitting there to pay for electricity. So they need to sell their Bitcoin to cover that. Now, obviously, during a bull market, you can sell less to cover your cost. So you can hold more Bitcoin and during the bear market, you know, our experiences that electricity cost can be as high as as high as 90%. So for most miners, you know, during the bear market, you would have to sell more to cover your cost. So I think that statement hold true. But again, it I don’t see it have anything to do with what’s going on in the China ecosystem currently.
Nic Carter 9:11 Right, right. Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply they’re related. Would you say just, as far as attitudes go, I mean, the entrepreneurs that set up mining farms, are they doing it because they want to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible? Or are they doing it because they see an arbitrage and they feel that they can get they can mined Bitcoin more cheaply than the sort of median Bitcoin is mined, and they just want to play that arbitrage and they don’t really care about the asset in the long term.
Mustafa Yilham 9:40 Um, I think that really depends on different miners from our experience in China. Most large scale miners are very firm believers into bitcoin take Bixin as an example the founder actually started mining Bitcoin, I believe in 2009. And since then, himself and the firm have been a very firm believer into bitcoin and we are Bitcoin denominated, and I think there are other miners that hold different view and constantly liquidate their portfolio. So I think it really varies.
Nic Carter 10:25 Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair. So part of your mandate in your role is actually finding suitable electricity for mining. And this is another topic, which really fascinates people, because there’s all this chatter, you know, about, like, you want to have a cold climate and you want cheap electricity, you want sort of geopolitical stability and so on. But I figured I would ask you, you know, what are the traits you look for? In a, an energy, you know, center, you know, when you’re scouting for a suitable place to mine? What are sort of the key considerations for you?
Mustafa Yilham 11:08 Yeah, so when we are looking at different market to source electricity, I think the most important thing to note is that we’re looking for electricity surplus or waste energy. And to give you an example, China has a lot of electricity surplus during summer months, especially in the Sichuan region, which produce a lot of hydro power during the rainy season. So the price of electricity is much cheaper compared to you know, rest of the world. In addition, we also consider costs such as like logistic cost and labor costs. And we have also been paying attention to overseas market and already made some significant investment in Central Asia. And during the due diligence process of mining, farm investment, there are a few key factors we look for, such as energy type, price, voltage, and capacity, and location, geolocation. The price of electricity normally is the most important crucial component in crypto mining. And the voltage, you know, oftentimes determines our potential cost for infrastructure investment. I think in addition, we also pay very close attention to other factors such as local regulation, policy, taxations, governmental support, we also want to pay close attention to reliability of the local energy company, our local partners background. So I think during this initial due diligence, and the sourcing process of electricity, there’s a lot of factors that we normally put in taking place.
Nic Carter 13:00 And so, I mean, your role basically involves scouring the globe and scouting out these locations. I mean, is that are you even during sort of COVID times, are you still sort of trotting around finding cheap electricity sources?
Mustafa Yilham 13:17 Yes, that is part of my role, because, you know, I spend like, like three to six months in Siberia, and this far east of Russia, for example, in end of 2018, and 2019, which was a very fascinating experience. And, but during the COVID time, our overseas expansion was kind of put in halt temporarily, just because labor and logistic are very difficult to arrange at this time.
Nic Carter 13:56 What are the most promising jurisdictions that I mean, you know, he don’t have to give up the full secret sauce, because I’m sure there’s some, some proprietary, you know, information as far as it pertains to your business, but what generally, you know, geographically, what are some interesting locations that you’ve discovered for mining purposes?
Mustafa Yilham 14:21 So I would say like, you know, when we look at a geolocation. So, you know, price, regulation, temperature are like the most important factors. I think Central Asia is great for mining outside of China, speaking in Central Asia is great. Russia, I think have huge potential. North America, I think has the probably most potential in next few years, for a few different reason. But I think those are generally the regions we look at when I sourced electricity?
Nic Carter 15:04 And so with North America, I mean, would it be because I know there is hydro here I actually visited an old aluminum smelting plant in in in Massena New York, which was powered by hydro which had been converted into bitcoin mine. So you know, I’ve certainly seen some of that firsthand what it what is it that makes you bullish on on North America as a potential venue for mining?
Mustafa Yilham 15:33 So, I think based on our conversation with different mining manufacturers, on average, right, like around 60%, of the mining machine sell in past two quarters or so have been outside of China, in recent months, and mostly actually in North America. And I think that there’s few factors that plays into why North America could be huge in mining in future. One of them is price. I think you’ll be surprised to hear that. In fact, the price right now in North America notice are cheaper than the average price in China. And in the past, we used to think, you know, US high labor costs, less mining ecosystem, and, but we can clearly feel that things are changing rapidly, who’s in past one to two years. And I think during the next cycle, you will see a much higher involvement from us and other country into mining. And I think the most important factor also for us miner, is that they have access to cheap capital cost, meaning, you know, they have the ability to go out there and, you know, basically borrow at a much cheaper rate than Chinese miners are able to.
Nic Carter 16:59 Is there an element of political stability that comes in I know, certain jurisdictions in the US, you know, kicked out foreign miners who said they didn’t even want Bitcoin mining to happen at all, but I guess there’s probably slightly less capriciousness in terms of, you know, local regulators changing their minds on mining, as compared with China. That’s sort of just me speculating. Does that political stability come into play at all for you?
Mustafa Yilham 17:30 Um, so I think for the next two to three years, I think you will see more local miners from US increase their hash rate, but I think the cross border geo relocation, we don’t see that happening quite a lot. Just because, at least under the current environment, like you said, there are a lot of uncertainty on political, economical, and overall macro side. And so I think you’ll see Chinese miners continue to grow in China, but a lot of the hash rate will also start to grow in other countries like Russia. And, you know, US and North America excetera.
Nic Carter 18:22 Have you I’m sure you’ve looked at this. Have you looked at the Cambridge center for alternative finance their dashboard on Bitcoin mining? location wise?
Mustafa Yilham 18:32 Yes. And I think most of you are looking at it in China, right?
Nic Carter 18:37 Yeah. Maybe I’ll pull it up right now. They we had Apolline Blandin on the show to talk about it. They partnered up with pools, and did some work on geolocation. I let me see if I can. Yeah, so right now China’s got 65% US 7%, Russia, 7%, Kazakhstan, 7%, Malaysia 4%, around three 3.8%? Do these numbers seem kind of reliable to you? No. You do see these numbers and think, yeah, this is sort of roughly, you know, consistent with my experience, or is it sort of wildly, wildly, you know, different in your experience?
Mustafa Yilham 19:25 Um, I think for now, it is consistent with our experience, but I think within next one or two years, those data will change drastically.
Nic Carter 19:38 What do you make of the kind of significant mining in Iran do does that strike you? Is the state subsidizing Bitcoin mining? I know the Iranian government has recently sort of indicated their desire to be more active with Bitcoin or have you you know, anecdotal Seen, you know, big mining operations kind of locating themselves in Iran?
Mustafa Yilham 20:05 Yeah. So this might come quite surprise to you. But I think even as a Chinese miner where we like, like Bixin, for example, I’m sure they are some miners who does not pay too much attention to, you know, OFAC and other sanction list. But yeah, as we have always avoided Iran, and we I mean, I haven’t even looked at the region or did any due diligence on that. Just because, you know, the, I think it has a Chinese miner, we do not want to, you know, just violate any OFAC regularly. That’s right.
Nic Carter 20:55 Yeah, that strikes me as a good idea. Yeah, I know. I, I, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but um, what would you say, you know, to someone who’s like thinking of getting into mining, what would you say would be a good electricity price for them to even be competitive in the market today? Would you say it’s sort of in the 5-6 cent per kilowatt hour range?
Mustafa Yilham 21:20 I think it depends on the scale you’re trying to go for. And the price of bitcoin? I think under I mean, right now, if you are you a retail customer, and you’re trying to go into bitcoin, I think it’s very difficult for a few reasons. Number one, you need to purchase mining machine, which I think both what’s Whatsminer and Bitmain are, are
Nic Carter 21:49 Right.
Mustafa Yilham 21:49 You need to find mine like investment very large scale investment mining farm. build that out. I mean, that it requires a lot of capital, and it requires a lot of experience to run a mining operation properly. If you are just trying to purchase mining machine, and there is a way for you to purchase a you try to host I think maybe, you know, four to five cents. Five point five could be a competitive price. I think that on the current bitcoin price. And I think that that’s general price we seeing North America for hosting at the moment.
Nic Carter 22:29 Yeah, but so you wouldn’t encourage anyone listening to to get into mining as an individual as a as a profession
Mustafa Yilham 22:38 At this stage of mining cycle, probably wouldn’t.
Nic Carter 22:44 What does it tell you that the hardware from whatsminer in bitmain is sort of spoken for? I mean, that sort of implies that people are like everything about what a an asyik is, it’s like a physical instantiation of future Bitcoin rewards. So it’s kind of like people have bought these forwards or these these physically settled Bitcoin futures in hardware form. I mean, that strikes me is pretty bullish. What’s your interpretation of that?
Mustafa Yilham 23:13 I think, you know, a lot of the purchaser, like we discussed earlier for this round of purchasing are from outside of China. A lot of them are very large institution, some even publicly listed company in United States. I think where you previously worked out fidelity’s, one of the large minor in North America, alone side few others, for institution to mine Bitcoin. You know, I think that’s really due to the fact that for them, you’re right, it’s a very long option, and also, probably better option than to buy bitcoin directly.
Nic Carter 23:55 So there was a huge discussion point earlier this year, I’m sure you saw this hash rate dropped dramatically, a couple of months ago, and a lot of people were speculating that it was due to this seasonal migration, where I believe it’s, you know, the rainy season, this dry season, and the volume of water flowing through hydro in, you know, provinces like Sichuan declines. And so then maybe the miners base their migrate their hardware to other regions in China, with sort of non renewable sources of energy. That was certainly the speculation out here in the west to explain the hash power dynamics. Is that something you’ve noticed, I mean, are you aware of this, this seasonal migration? People talk about it, but, you know, is that something that they you know about?
Mustafa Yilham 24:51 Absolutely. seasonal migration, I think really depends on geolocation, but it does hold true for Chinese minor. So like for Bixin during the summer months in the rainy season, our operation are mostly based in Sichuan. You know, and during the winter, we migrate to Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. We also have mining farm in Kazakhstan, where we deploy some of our mining machine. But in countries like Kazakhstan price are same all year round. So migration is not required within the border. But it definitely holds true for Chinese mining community.
Nic Carter 25:34 Do you think that actually explains the rate the really dramatic drop we saw in hash rate? Or, you know, is it could it just be normal variance?
Mustafa Yilham 25:44 Yeah, I think during I think during the past cycles, each year, during the miners are migrating during the rainy and dry season, you will see a drop in the hash rate. And I think it’s just normal because, you know, see, if you look at China is very huge. And, you know, most of them are going by train and so trying to sit down have quite a distance for them to do that. I’ll just take I set it up locally afterwards.
Nic Carter 26:16 Yeah, it is a long way. Yeah. Besides the country entirely.
Nic Carter 26:23 I’ve so I’m so so curious about mining. This is amazing. It’s amazing. All the information. There’s so many, like myths that were busting or confirming? You wouldn’t believe. I mean, I guess you would the chasm in understanding between kind of east and west. I guess one thing is, you know, you have these withdrawal issues that the major Chinese exchanges, you mentioned on Twitter that you didn’t think that was the cause of the Bitcoin rally. I certainly agree with that. I mean, I had the team at coin metrics, look at this. And they found that miners were able to liquidate their coins as normal. So I guess we can sort of put that one to rest. In your view, the withdrawal issues at various Chinese exchanges did not cause this current rally, correct?
Mustafa Yilham 27:16 Yeah, I think that statement is not true. That’s for several reasons, which, you know, I didn’t- I made that statement
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As the bitcoin price gets crushed amid the Crypto Winter, financial commentators are warning stock market investors to not fall prey to reckless buying decisions rooted in FOMO (fear of missing …
out).As crypto bulls are aware, FOMO was cited as a key driver of the record bitcoin price at the height of the crypto bull market in December 2017.“The most powerful force in the market is fear,” financial commentator James DePorre writes at Real Money.When fear of losing takes hold, it creates powerful downside momentum. And when fear of missing out (FOMO) takes hold, it creates powerful upside. The recent market action is ideal for creating fear of missing out.DePorre pointed to the example of Facebook, whose stock soared this week after it beat analyst estimates for Q4 earnings and revenue. For the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, the social media monopoly earned $2.38 a share on revenue of $16.9 billion.Wall Street analysts had expected Facebook to earn $2.19 a share on revenue of $16.4 billion. Shortly after Facebook beat analyst estimates on both the top and bottom lines, its shares surged on heavy buying action.But James DePorre cautions investors to not impetuously follow the herd, which moves in lockstep based on daily stock fluctuations. This is a trend mirrored in the crypto market, where plunging cryptocurrency prices lead to noisy, premature wails that bitcoin is dead.Despite Facebook’s strong week, keep in mind that it’s still struggling with the ongoing data-breach scandals that tanked its stock just months ago. A good week does not mean the embattled company is out of the woods yet.Facebook Has 1 Billion Fake Accounts, Mark Zuckerberg ‘Greatest Con Man in History’: Researcher https://t.co/3mqsNk4Ux7DePorre explained that FOMO often leads to overly aggressive dip buying, while the fear of losing out triggers irrational selling. Both
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As the bitcoin price gets crushed amid the Crypto Winter, financial commentators are warning stock market investors to not fall prey to reckless buying decisions rooted in FOMO (fear of missing …
out).As crypto bulls are aware, FOMO was cited as a key driver of the record bitcoin price at the height of the crypto bull market in December 2017.“The most powerful force in the market is fear,” financial commentator James DePorre writes at Real Money.When fear of losing takes hold, it creates powerful downside momentum. And when fear of missing out (FOMO) takes hold, it creates powerful upside. The recent market action is ideal for creating fear of missing out.DePorre pointed to the example of Facebook, whose stock soared this week after it beat analyst estimates for Q4 earnings and revenue. For the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, the social media monopoly earned $2.38 a share on revenue of $16.9 billion.Wall Street analysts had expected Facebook to earn $2.19 a share on revenue of $16.4 billion. Shortly after Facebook beat analyst estimates on both the top and bottom lines, its shares surged on heavy buying action.But James DePorre cautions investors to not impetuously follow the herd, which moves in lockstep based on daily stock fluctuations. This is a trend mirrored in the crypto market, where plunging cryptocurrency prices lead to noisy, premature wails that bitcoin is dead.Despite Facebook’s strong week, keep in mind that it’s still struggling with the ongoing data-breach scandals that tanked its stock just months ago. A good week does not mean the embattled company is out of the woods yet.Facebook Has 1 Billion Fake Accounts, Mark Zuckerberg ‘Greatest Con Man in History’: Researcher https://t.co/3mqsNk4Ux7DePorre explained that FOMO often leads to overly aggressive dip buying, while the fear of losing out triggers irrational selling. Both
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Considering Bitcoin fell by nearly 50 percent during a single day in March, it may be easy to assume that interest in the cryptocurrency market is low; this would make sense, for a …
multi-billion-dollar asset to lose half of its value within a day would normally send consumers running for the hills. But interestingly, data shows that demand for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is truly on the rise. Data shared by Yassine Elmandjra — a crypto-asset analyst at tech investment fund and research firm ARK Invest — shows that the “relative Google search interest” for the term “Bitcoin” is
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The Norwegian press has been obsessively dealing with a kidnapping case for around a year and a half. Anne-Elisabeth Hagen, the wife of one of the richest Norwegians, was kidnapped in late 2018. The …
kidnappers demanded a high ransom from the multi-millionaire – in the cryptocurrency Monero. The drama has not stopped since then and has led to unexpected suspicions. Was it kidnapping – or even a planned murder? It is said that Scandinavians love crime novels, and I like to imagine a tall, pale Norwegian with white hair sitting in front of the fireplace in his wooden house by the fjord and reading his crime story. The current top thriller of the Norwegians was not released as a
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The Honey Badger DiariesBy Aaron van WirdumAs coronavirus sweeps the globe... civil liberties are threatened, physical cash is abandoned, money printers go brrr, ...and bitcoin is halvening.Starting …
in undefined…00:001:00:291xEpisode 25: Stephan Livera, Sydney (Australia)Stephan Livera (@stephanlivera) is the host of the (you guessed it) Stephan Livera Podcast. He lives in Sydney, Australia, which is in lockdown like much of the world. We discuss the potential consequences of this lockdown for the economy, how we've gotten ourselves into this economic stranglehold, and why all of this may have played out very differently in a world where the Austrian school of economics would have more prevalence. Recorded: April 15, 2020 Donations: bc1qvqv4d9aqmr07ncmldy0umtr9vuflemglc4xrlf57:29April 17, 2020Episode 24: Jameson Lopp, Mystery Location (USA)Jameson Lopp is the co-founder and CTO of Casa, and lives in a mystery location somewhere in the USA. We discuss how the coronavirus interplays with the non-aggression principle (NAP), why (or whether) it's a good idea to get a gun, how bitcoin will perform in this economic crisis, and more. Recorded: April 14, 2020 Donations: bc1qwkztzahhclkah39d00cgxhppat0jhyeyslzfn258:02April 16, 2020Episode 23: Kain_niaK, Inside The SimulationWas the virus a Chinese bioweapon? Is the
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A university, the American historian Shelby Foote once said, is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.Foote, known for his three volume epic The Civil War: A
didn’t say it out of any ill will towards faculty, or a desire to malign the hard work of students. It’s not a sentiment rolled out to denigrate the many moving parts of a higher education institute or imply their superfluity. Instead, it emphasizes a simple truth about libraries: that they are not just places where information is stored and categorized, but sites where new knowledge is produced.Mark Hakkarinen is a man who understands this. As the founder of the Blockchain Library, since 2017 he has been assembling a comprehensive bank of resources on blockchain and cryptocurrency, targeted at scholars working in the field around the world. The website groups material by topic, linking to academic papers in key subject areas (“Bitcoin”, “Blockchain”, “Cryptocurrency”, “Ethereum”, “Proof-of-Work”), and showcases a small curated
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News Bitcoin NewsEthereum NewsAltcoin NewsBlockchain NewsScam NewsRegulation NewsLitecoin NewsRipple NewsMonero News Features Hodlers DigestFollow-UpAnalysisOpinionIn DepthQuizInterview Price …
Analysis Top 10 CryptocurrenciesWeekly OverviewMarket Analysis Market Tools Price IndexesICO CalendarHeatmap Cryptopedia ExplainedPeopleBitcoin101Ethereum101Bitcoin Cash101ICO101Ripple101Lightning Network101BTC Anniversary Industry DApplistEventsPress ReleasesJobs Store BlockShow 9 HOURS AGOBy How Tyler Winklevoss Converted His Biographer Into a Bitcoin Believer Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are portrayed as the good guys this time in Ben Mezrichs new book.Cointelegraph speaks with Tyler Winklevoss and author Ben Mezrich about Mezrichs new
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enjoying Hector's output on Twitter, as well as on his blog, so I invited him to come on for a chat about Bitcoin, his time in the Navy, his work at Casa, and lots more. Enjoy! More from Hector: …
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/HectorRosekrans WEBSITE: https://hectorrosekrans.com/ More from me: TWITTER: http://bit.ly/2P7PUjA FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/30lRjUB INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/30r7IqY YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/2TDeMy9 MEDIUM: http://bit.ly/2Zk0Dex1:21:01November 12, 2019Rapid-Fire: Hector RosekransOver the last few months I had been enjoying Hector's output on Twitter, as well as on his blog, so I invited him to come on for a chat about Bitcoin, his time in the Navy, his work at Casa, and lots more. Enjoy! More from Hector: TWITTER: https://twitter.com/HectorRosekrans WEBSITE: https://hectorrosekrans.com/ More from me: TWITTER: http://bit.ly/2P7PUjA FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/30lRjUB INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/30r7IqY YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/2TDeMy9 MEDIUM: http://bit.ly/2Zk0Dex17:10November 12, 2019Mauricio & Adam: Venezuela, Bitcoin and Ledn.ioMauricio Di Bartolomeo and Adam Reeds are the co-founders of Ledn.io, a Canadian-based financial services firm that currently offers bitcoin savings accounts and bitcoin-backed loans. Mauricio is also originally from Venezuela, and I recently heard him share his insights on what was going on there on the 'Tales from the Crypt' podcast. After hearing this, I really wanted to pick his brain more and ask him about how socialism got started there, what life is like now, and how the Maduro government was (reportedly) using Bitcoin to circumvent sanctions. So, the first 50 mins or so is mainly speaking about Venezuela with Mauricio, and the second half Adam re-joins the conversation to get into all the details about why they started Ledn and how it all works. Enjoy! More from Mauricio and Adam: TWITTER (Mauricio): https://twitter.com/cryptonomista TWITTER (Adam): https://twitter.com/adamreeds TWITTER (Ledn): https://twitter.com/hodlwithledn WEBSITE: https://ledn.io/ More from me: TWITTER: http://bit.ly/2P7PUjA FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/30lRjUB INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/30r7IqY YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/2TDeMy9 MEDIUM: http://bit.ly/2Zk0Dex1:55:42November 1, 2019Brady, Citizen Bitcoin: Journeying Towards a Bitcoin FutureBrady is the host and creator of Citizen Bitcoin, which in my opinion is one of the best podcasts in the bitcoin space. He has a very accessible style, is very well informed, and is always able to extract great insights from some of the top experts and entrepreneurs in the industry. I thought it would be fun to connect with Brady, hear how he got started with the pod, and of course, have some fun talking about bitcoin:) Enjoy! - More from Brady: TWITTER: https://twitter.com/CitizenBitcoin WEBSITE: https://citizenbitcoin.world/ More from me: TWITTER: http://bit.ly/2P7PUjA FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/30lRjUB INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/30r7IqY YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/2TDeMy9 MEDIUM: http://bit.ly/2Zk0Dex1:16:15October 30, 2019Rapid-Fire: Brady, Citizen Bitcoin PodcastBrady is the host and creator of Citizen Bitcoin, which in my opinion is one of the best podcasts in the bitcoin space. He has a very accessible style, is very well informed, and is always able to extract great insights from some of the top experts and entrepreneurs in the industry. I thought it would be fun to connect with Brady, hear how he got started with the pod, and of course, have some fun talking about bitcoin:) Enjoy! - More from Brady: TWITTER: https://twitter.com/CitizenBitcoin WEBSITE: https://citizenbitcoin.world/ More from me: TWITTER: http://bit.ly/2P7PUjA FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/30lRjUB INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/30r7IqY YOUTUBE: http://bit.ly/2TDeMy9 MEDIUM: http://bit.ly/2Zk0Dex24:33October 30, 2019Rapid-Fire: Young NikI came across Nik (@nikcantmine) on twitter and just loved his attitude and
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