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Caracas-based bitcoiner and …
journalist Javier Bastardo has covered the crypto scene in Latin America since 2017. In that time he’s been living partially off bitcoin, thanks to BTCPay server and a variety of employers that pay in crypto, like CoinTelegraph Espanol.
“Even when I’m trying to report in an unbiased way, I’m really bullish on crypto,” Bastardo said. “Bitcoin could be useful to other Venezuelans.”
Beyond holding it as savings, many Venezuelans use cryptocurrency as the fastest way to obtain dollars. Bastardo said there is more in common between crypto readers across the Americas, both Latin America and North America, than similarities within local geographies.
“We’re talking to a very specific audience, even if I’m writing in Spanish and you’re writing in English,” Bastardo said, referring to CoinDesk writers in New York and California. “We are more connected than I would be with a person who writes about politics in Venezuela … The way they [crypto audiences] look for information is very particular to the types of viewers that we have.”
See also: India May Be Starting Its Biggest Bitcoin Bull Run Yet
Despite the struggle to identify reliable
“They [crypto readers] are already against journalism, against the information industry. They have more anger about the information,” Bastardo said, describing the challenge of making media for this niche audience. “They need the
While the outrage associated with crypto coverage may be unique, the dynamic of media-driven markets is hardly new. After all, the financial outlet Bloomberg reportedly gave bonuses to reporters for “market-moving” stories and many American outlets offer bonuses for web traffic, which may incentivize sensationalism. These policy decisions come from the top, as with most business models, and rarely originates from the newsroom itself.
See also: The Mounting Evidence of a New Bitcoin Bull Market
From his perspective, Bastardo said it’s unclear whether North American media, including but not limited to crypto journalism, is deliberately biased.
“I really don’t know if the things we see on CNN or CNBC are identified with some party,” he said. “We have those
In particular, he said some crypto content creators might be “aligned” and “trying to push some agendas,” but that it’s unclear what is really going on with the overlap between journalism and cryptocurrency marketing. For example, he said people overhype and sensationalize stories of bitcoin usage in Venezuela, which can be both dehumanizing and misleading. It becomes even harder for readers to decipher because some of the most trusted sources in the crypto industry are individuals without journalistic training or oversight. This creates even more opportunities for freelancers with bold personalities, but a more challenging environment for readers seeking relatively objective information.
“We have a similar way to get information in Venezuela, but it’s worse because we don’t really have open media,” he said. “But the crypto-related media, I don’t know if the writers are biased … I don’t know if this is true. This is only an opinion.”
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Nouriel Roubini is right about BTC, Tether and the criminal cartels that pump the prices of BTC while laundering out real fiat profits through their exchange partners. While tax evasion and …
general financial malfeasance is problematic enough, one has to wonder what else is occurring with the laundered funds, as it is well known that Bitcoin has a sordid history of being utilized in gray and black market business—like The Silk Road, which has links to Bitcoin.com and supported by Roger Ver. Despite the romantic, libertarian view of Bitcoin subverting the oppression of the centralized fiat economy, in reality, they were engaging in drug smuggling, assassination markets and human trafficking. To be fair, some interesting civil disobedience was occurring as well, but the immorality of their deeds far outstripped any political footing that could have been established in the early era of Bitcoin.
But, while some of Bitcoin’s ideology of civil disobedience and the hope of building a shining new economy upon the distributed ledger was exciting for a time, the Bitcoin Civil War side-tracked the project heavily. Once Dread Pirate Roberts and The Silk Road was closed down, nastier websites emerged, and so too did some of the shadiest venture capitalists in the world—necessitating the split of the Bitcoin protocol away from the BTC economy in 2017. But that requires some context.
What is Bitcoin actually for?
The Bitcoin protocol is a rule set that enables the creation of a secure, public data distribution network that allows frictionless payments across an open ledger. It secures that data across multiple cooperating systems so that the integrity of valuable data is maintained even amid attack, while also enabling millions of economic interactions to occur between consenting parties.
Bitcoin data is money in the sense that any commodity can be money, but the thing that gives the network itself value is the ability to secure and properly price any and all data in real time. That also includes valuable data included in the ledger itself—such as video content,
In short, Bitcoin is data money. Hence the name: bit=data coin=money.
The Bitcoin Civil War, Abridged
Unfortunately, in the era spanning 2014-2016, venture capitalists created media entities such as CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, development groups such as Blockstream and MIT Digital Currency Initiative, exchanges like Coinbase and Bitfinex, and they hired professional social engineers like Gregory Maxwell and Samson Mow to subvert the
These are Blockstream’s Venture Investors: a group of strategic partners shared by most of the major players in the BTC economy. Most of the pictured firms share advisors and board members, making the case for a well-connected racket masquerading as independent firms. Let’s highlight two stand-outs:
In the 2014-2016 era, these VC-backed usurpers of Bitcoin were able to gut the protocol—turning off most of its capabilities and painting the rhetoric that Bitcoin was merely digital gold, not meant to scale, not meant for the average person to transact upon, and making it impossible to utilize any form of tokenized data as a form of value. They replaced Bitcoin’s economically useful features with a Ponzi scheme-based investment thesis, and replaced professional economists with investment influencers and social media glitz. Rather than building businesses or assisting the economy in moving value on chain, they created the “HODL” meme and deployed a wall-to-wall
They also built out infrastructure between their connected entities to take transactions off the BTC network and connect them through their privately controlled networks to throttle the flow of BTC to stay within rails that make them money without ceding their power or requiring actual liquidity for movement.
The need for artificial settlement liquidity would be solved by the creation of “Tether” in the same era, and by the same group of financially connected scammers.
Tether: US dollars, but worse
Due to the massive subterfuge campaign, real Bitcoiners left the BTC project to the cabal of well-funded, well-connected criminal cartels who run it today. Bitcoin’s unbounded protocol is set in stone on the Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision) network, where it can be built upon by real businesses who require reduced global payment friction or increased global data integrity. Bitcoin SV users do not have to worry about petty squabbles or technocratic take-overs any longer.
But in the absence of Bitcoiners creating an honest and open economy on BTC, iFinex Corporation (parent company to Bitfinex, Tether and all of their subsidiaries) colluded with their partners to conjure up limitless liquidity out of thin air. While BTC advocates criticize the money-printers of the Federal Reserve out of one side of their mouth, they insulate Tether (USDT) from criticism, and defend it violently out of the other!
Tether has been under investigation for over five years due to their inability to secure banking partners, registered custodians or submit to third party audit. As such, rumors of their fractional reserve holdings made their way to various offices of financial regulation enforcement, and ultimately to the New York Attorney General’s Office. Under pressure in 2019, Tether was forced to admit that the USDT coin is only backed 74% by cash “and short term securities,” calling into question the reserves from which any of BTC’s liquidity and price action is derived.
In 2020, the supply of Tether has gone up over 400% and the rate of inflation of the supply of Tether is increasing. Just last week, Tether added nearly a billion dollars to the circulating supply amid increasing pressure from the NYAG’s office to come clean about the nature of their reserves especially since both retail and institutional investors have fiat rails on which to buy BTC if they choose. Why spend USD to buy USDT to buy BTC, if you could simply buy BTC directly from USD with registered custodians, OTC desks or directly from mining pools?
Well, research has shown that Tether isn’t being used to make purchases at all, but rather Tether exists specifically for wash trading on and between VC-owned exchanges to stabilize and pump the price of BTC artificially in order to cash out real fiat currency from the private ledgers of those exchanges by connected insiders. Around 95% of BTC trading volume is faked, according to the Wall Street Journal, which begs the question: how much of BTC’s price is truly stored value at all?
Where is Roubini mistaken?
His criticisms of BTC are valid, but BTC’s weak points are a product of it no longer being bitcoin.
BTC is a project that was overtaken by a shadowy group of wealthy criminals who control the
Fortunately, in all the ways that BTC is a bad form of digital money, Bitcoin SV is superlative:
In short, Bitcoin SV is a sound money system deployed as a frictionless, electronic cash, connected to a global public ledger and powered by a world-class super computer network.
We commend Nouriel Roubini for his criticisms of the technical and cultural problems with the BTC network, and we invite him to take another look at the bitcoin protocol that has been restored on Bitcoin SV. We believe it to be superlative in all of the ways which BTC has failed, and we believe it is the single best network in the history of the world for monetizing and serving and spending valuable data.
New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin—as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto—and blockchain.
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From mid-December to early January, Tron (TRX) grew over 2,000% — yes, that’s 2,000% growth in just three weeks. Almost everyone's heard of …
Tron, but do you know exactly what it is? Or are you still asking yourself, "what is Tron coin?".
If the case is the latter, you're in the right place!
By the end of this guide, we will have covered everything you need to know to answer the question "what is Tron coin?". As well as the basics, I'll also introduce you to:
Let's get started!
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To fully understand what is Tron coin, we need to start from the very basics. Tron is a decentralized entertainment and content-sharing platform that uses blockchain and peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
You can think of it as a next-generation social media outlet on which you can create and share content with anyone, anywhere in the world. Tronix is the basic unit of accounts in Tron’s blockchain. It is the currency that pays you for your content, and is often referred to as its ticker symbol, 'TRX'.
People who enjoy social media, online gambling, and other forms of online entertainment, will enjoy Tron.
Using the Tron cryptocurrency’s ecosystem, not only can you share content with other people, but you are compensated as a content creator for the content and data that you create. This model serves in direct opposition to how traditional social media companies, such as Facebook, monetize user data.
They often do it without the user knowing, reaping in the benefits for themselves. When you use Tron cryptocurrency, you are in control of your data and you will be compensated for your content.
TRX already has some big partnerships, such as the one with oBike. The largest bike-sharing company in Southeast Asia (oBike), based in Singapore, launched its own token, oCoin. The token was launched on Tron’s network. oCoins have real-world utility, as the coins can be used to buy rides on the oBike’s platform. The company enables users to earn oCoins just by choosing to ride oBikes.
Other major partnerships include the one with a semiconductor giant, Bitmain, who is a leading producer and designer of ASIC chips used for Bitcoin mining. Bitmain’s Antminer S9 is one of the hottest products used in the Bitcoin mining community. So when anyone asks you what is Tron coin, don't forget to mention their huge network of partners.
Zag- S&W, another one of Tron’s partners, is a leading international law firm that focuses on commercial and corporate law. This is a promising addition, because the firm is part of the Legal 500, which has an extended network to some of the biggest companies in the world.
This partnership will offer comprehensive support in digital asset transactions, operations, risk management, and legal adaptation across jurisdictions. As Tronix is listed on more and more exchanges, the need for legal support only increases. This partnership is very strategic.
This is not a surprising move from the non-profit foundation behind Tron.
The Tron Foundation is a non-profit entity based in the Southeast Asian industrial strong-arm of Singapore. The foundation mainly engages in operating the Tron crypto network in the principles of openness, fairness, and transparency in supporting Tron’s development team.
The team behind the Tron Foundation considers regulation and compliance to be the highest of values. They have approval by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority and they are under the supervision of the Company Law of Singapore.
Still wondering, what is Tron coin? Learning more about the founder, Justin Sun, will help you understand the coin better.
The leader of the Tron Foundation is the young Justin Sun, who has an insanely impressive background for someone at any age, let alone, someone who is 27. To start with, he founded the Peiwo app which already has 10 million users. Justin Sun has led Peiwo to become the first live streaming app to receive cryptos. The Peiwo app is one of the leading members of the online
Forbes listed Sun as 30 under 30 in Asia. So when someone asks you what is Tron coin or why to choose Tron coin, always keep his successful founder in mind. He is also the protégé of Jack Ma who is the founder of the Ali Baba group. Jack Ma handpicked Justin Sun to study at the prestigious Jack Ma Hupan University, which has a lower acceptance rate than Princeton.
Justin Sun is also a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. While the relationship between Ali Baba and Tron is still unclear, some of the top developers from Ali Baba are leaving Alibaba to go to Tron, which makes the issues even more clouded.
Beyond Jack Ma, Sun surrounded himself with an even wider team of all-star mentors, including Feng Li and Tim Berners-Lee. For those of you that don’t know, Feng Li is an advisor of Ripple and led investment at Coinbase. Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web.
Beyond the team, there are a growing number of key influencers in crypto that believe the TRX coin will succeed, including Hacker Noon.
The biggest benefit of using Tron crypto is that you are empowering artists and content creators all over the world into having ownership over the content they create.
Tron is leading a movement that some refer to as the third web. Although it sounds futuristic, the third web, or web 3.0, will enable people to use the internet as it was originally intended to be used for - as a decentralized, open network.
During the dotcom bubble, the internet had taken a turn away from its decentralized origin. Social media giants in Silicon Valley built on top of the infrastructure that was given to them and rewired it so that Tech Giants could make money from user data. Cambridge Analytica is the case and point of this system. However, in the Third Web, Tron will put the power back in the users' hands, so that they are in control of their own data.
By using Tron crypto, you are leading the internet back down its original path. You are putting data back under your control where you have the choice of not disclosing or monetizing data for your own gain. So one of the answers to what is Tron coin is something that will lead the internet back to its original purpose.
From a developer’s standpoint, Tron is also special because it’s currently being built in a way that allows the use of any high-level language for smart contracts. This means developers in the future will be able to use whichever programming language they prefer to build on top of the open-software design.
One of the biggest products developed on Tron thus far is crypto puppies. Just after crypto kitties were first released, Tron attempted to play off the upcoming Chinese year of the dog. Tron dogs are still selling for the equivalent of $18. This is just one of many examples of successful products on the network.
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To help you fully understand what is Tron coin, I will give you a glimpse into how this coin's transactions work.
Like many other digital currencies, TRX coin transactions occur on a public ledger. On this public ledger, the history of each transaction can be traced all the way back to the first transaction. The transaction model that TRX uses is similar to the transaction model that Bitcoin uses. The only difference is that Tron has improved Bitcoin’s model by providing additional security. The model TRX uses is called UTXO.
In a UTXO model, there is a basic output which is an amount of money sent to a TRX user’s address alongside a set of rules that will unlock that specific set amount. The final product is an output that is called the UTXO.
But to fully understand what is TRX, you don’t really have to know too much about the UTXO model. That is more so for the developers and nerds who might know more than they should (not that there's anything wrong with that at!).
You should focus on the bigger picture, sticking to the overall utility that Tron delivers to people who want to regain control of their data and still use social media.
Since you already have a pretty good idea about what is Tron coin, time to discuss its potential. Justin Sun’s relationship with Jack Ma begs the question of whether there will be a merger or convergence of the two entities in the future. Any such news would be monumental and certainly catapult Tronix down an already well-trodden path to success.
Tron is still brand new and it is just getting started. But still, you can’t be too overly optimistic.
Tron crypto may fail to grow because of the way Justin Sun handles communication, which at times has angered investors. Sun has the reputation to deliver updates that simply announce that a big announcement will be announced in the future, which is understandably quite frustrating. People also view Sun as being too
Other negative shots to Tron and Justin Sun’s reputation surfaced in early 2018 when news circulated about Tron using some of Ethereum’s code and violating Ethereum’s copyright license. This has since been corrected. Around the same time, there were also rumors regarding Justin Sun cashing out $1.2 billion worth of his own coins. This turned out to be a false rumor, too.
Some consider that string of mudslinging as a FUD campaign in an attempt to destroy Justin Sun’s reputation. Sun’s reputation often comes under fire when people ask, "what is Tron coin?". Regardless, the coin is only at year one of a road map that spans all the way until 2023. In other words, it’s still very early days for Tron, so news like this will vanish in time.
Look at Jed McCaleb from Stellar. People forgot all about Mt. Gox when news about the Stellar partnership with IBM surfaced. Again, it’s early days for Tron.
If you are using Tron’s platform, the reputation around it has been pretty good thus far. The budget seems to prioritize security, which I can gather from Tron’s recent hire of a highly-demanded security engineer, Jorge Guo. He has received acknowledgment for his work from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, Huawei.
Guo will handle all research and development for Tron’s security. He helps answer security-centered questions related to the topic, "what is Tron coin?".
When it comes to holding TRX itself, you just have to be smart.
Like holding a secure passcode, you need to treat however you store your coins very sensitively. You can choose to store the coins in a wallet, like the Ledger Nano S, but if you use a wallet like that, be sure to write down your private key. If you don’t write down your private key, you can lose your coins forever.
Since cryptocurrency is decentralized, many wallets do not store your information at all. They do not have backups of your username and password. You cannot have an email sent to you to reset your password if you forgot it. You need to have the private key you are given access to when you signup. That’s it. That’s the only way to get into your account.
The same can be said about buying Tron coins, too. You should always choose a reliable cryptocurrency exchange platform (or a trustworthy payment middleman), and make sure that all of the security measures are in-check - only by doing so can you remain assured that no harm will come to your funds and assets in the purchasing process, and afterwards.
Just like any other digital asset, Tron can be exploited, and its security can be breached. That is a risk that you have to take in the age of digitization. You can follow basic security techniques like securing your private keys using a hardware wallet. Such techniques will increase your ability to protect your assets.
However, maybe you are your own biggest enemy when it comes to abusing TRX. Like other digital currencies, you can use it to do some pretty illegal stuff when it comes to tax evasion or illegal trading (although it should be known that Justin Sun’s TRX will be locked until 2021, so he cannot touch his supply like c-suite executives on Wall Street).
Like many other coins or really just assets in general, TRX can be used for the likes of hiding money or tax evasion. As a matter of fact, up to 36% of Bitcoin owners plan to commit tax fraud this year, according to an article by the Motley Fool.
As regulation on cryptocurrencies increases, there is less room for criminals to use cryptocurrency illegally. Concepts such as KYC (Know Your Customer) are becoming more prominent to identify and verify people using digital currency. KYC is good for the identification of asset owners, but in a way, KYC also benefits the owners themselves by reassuring them of the legitimacy of the platform they are using.
Insider trading can also take place with Tron just like it may occur for any other coin. Suspicion of insider trading is rampant in crypto. No unusual rumors concerning Tron and insider trading have surfaced barring the debunked rumor concerning Justin Sun taking a billion USD worth of TRX for himself.
Sun taking money for himself should not lead you to believe that Tron is a bad coin if you’re still trying to answer the question "what is Tron coin", though.
Across aspects through and through, TRX coin is solid. The technology and the personnel behind Tron come with little concern. The team is slowly being built with developers from Alibaba and other tech giants. Justin Sun is young, but that just means he is of the same generation that cryptocurrency is — he understands a
With an energetic young leader in Justin Sun, this coin is going places. The founder is one of the most well-connected people in crypto. The fact that he can call Jack Ma, the founder of the Ali Baba Group, as well as the founder of the World Wide Web, members of his inner circle shows how powerful he really is. Think of Justin Sun’s network when you answer the question "what is Tron coin?".
Have you ever heard the quote "show me who you surround yourself with, and I’ll show you who you are"? This quote applies to business mentorships, too. Justin Sun’s first-degree network, as well as his vision for the future of Tron, are powerful assets. This project is still very new, and I am terrifically excited to see what the future holds for Tron!
Now, if you've come to the conclusion that you'd like to purchase yourself some Tron coins, you should note that this should be done only on trustworthy cryptocurrency exchanges. For example, Binance is one such exchange - buying Tron here would look a little something like this:
Alternatively...
If you're not keen on buying Tron coins from a cryptocurrency exchange, you could actually purchase it via Simplex - a payment processing company. This way, you'll be able to buy your Tron coins with a credit or debit card, and be sure that your payment is secure and fast, too.
Also, don't forget to find a wallet to store your Tron coins in. Many users recommend the Ledger Nano S - it's surely one of the most secure cryptocurrency wallets out there!
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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.BOOKS IN REVIEW
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach advocates for the messy, imperfect power of being human: that an algorithm or data can never sum up who you are and will become; that technology, when harnessed properly, can one day serve open systems. It is also telling that one of Wang’s last case studies, concerning a group of countercultural nihilist Chinese
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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 approach that further enriches the wealthy few while occasionally rewarding the lucky striver. You could condemn her personal choices, but the space for a genuine alternative diminishes by the day.
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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Build in blockchain A KMPARDS Initiative for Extending Blockchain Education to Schools/Colleges 3 min readKMPARDS, the founding organization behind platform, has been forming active partnerships with …
schools, colleges and educational institutions across India for extending affordable and career-oriented blockchain education for engineering college students and
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stock-to-flow and halving not bullish for Bitcoin, claims report SHARES VIEWS ADVERTISEMENT2020 has been a turbulent year for Bitcoin and the aggregated cryptocurrency market, with bulls having firm …
control over the benchmark digital asset throughout all of January and most of February, before losing their strength to sellers in March. This heightened volatility has occurred against a backdrop of bearishness within the global economy, which – like Bitcoin – peaked in February before the lethal COVID-19 virus began rapidly spreading, leading many economies to reach a virtual standstill. var jnews_module_37117_0_5e8621b30e1d2=; The pressure created by this pandemic has proven to be devastating for nearly all major global markets, with some benchmark stock indices seeing single-month losses in March of nearly the same size as those incurred during previous depressions.The crypto market – despite previous
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or Bitcoin · Adoption Beware of false
year for Bitcoin and the aggregated cryptocurrency market, with bulls having firm control over the benchmark digital asset throughout all of January and most of February, before losing their strength to sellers in March. This heightened volatility has occurred against a backdrop of bearishness within the global economy, which – like Bitcoin – peaked in February before the lethal COVID-19 virus began rapidly spreading, leading many economies to reach a virtual standstill. The pressure created by this pandemic has proven to be devastating for nearly all major global markets, with some benchmark stock indices seeing single-month losses in March of nearly the same size as those incurred during previous depressions. The crypto market – despite previous
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Bitcoin, altcoins, and global equities have all seen some intense bearishness today, which has primarily stemmed at least in the case of the traditional markets from fears surrounding the rapid …
spread of the Coronavirus across the globe.The fact that this selloff has transcended just the traditional markets and has had impacts on niche markets, like crypto, has led some analysts to note that Bitcoin and altcoins may, for the time being, correlated to the US equities market.Despite this, one analyst is noting that the crypto markets intense selloff today is not rooted in that seen by the US stock market, but rather from its status as an emerging market that is driven primarily by investors emotions rather than fundamental developments.Bitcoins Safe Haven Asset
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Bitcoin, altcoins, and global equities have all seen some intense bearishness today, which has primarily stemmed at least in the case of the traditional markets from fears surrounding the rapid …
spread of the Coronavirus across the globe.The fact that this selloff has transcended just the traditional markets and has had impacts on niche markets, like crypto, has led some analysts to note that Bitcoin and altcoins may, for the time being, correlated to the US equities market.Despite this, one analyst is noting that the crypto markets intense selloff today is not rooted in that seen by the US stock market, but rather from its status as an emerging market that is driven primarily by investors emotions rather than fundamental developments.Bitcoins Safe Haven Asset
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or Bitcoin · Coinbase · Adoption Crypto payments gaining momentum: Coinbase Commerce garners massive utilization from consumers and merchants March 30, 2020 at 2:00 pm UTC · 2 min read Bitcoin’s …
relative
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Bitcoin newsCryptocurrency newsTwo different books published under name have recently appeared on .According to Amazon, both of the books Wave and Ripple Design Book and The Official Bitcoin Coloring …
Book are scheduled for release on June 28. The profile of the author makes it clear that he indeed claims to be the same Satoshi Nakamoto who created bitcoin (BTC):Satoshi Nakamoto is the renowned inventor of Bitcoin.The authors profile also states that 100% of his book royalties to support STEM and environmental education programs serving underprivileged
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Bitcoin’s GravityHow idea-value feedback loops are pulling people inGigiMay 1, 2019·17 min readThis article is also available on dergigi.com and thanks to the Cryptoconomy Podcast, there is also an …
version available:Bitcoin is different things to different people. Whatever it might be to you, it is undoubtedly an opinionated and polarizing phenomenon. There are certain ideas embedded in the essence of Bitcoin, and you might be intrigued by some or all of them.The invention of Bitcoin, and its underlying blockchain, which is so widely misunderstood, spawned many projects, networks, and communities. Some of these networks are in direct competition, which has resulted in endless conflicts and lots of debate. The root of these conflicts is ideological in nature: disagreement about how the world is and how it should be — a disagreement about ideas.The following is an attempt to explain some of the reasons behind this polarization, explore the underlying dynamics in more detail, and illustrate why an increasing number of people seem to be gravitating towards Bitcoin.Agreeing on a Set of IdeasThe goal of the Bitcoin network is to reach consensus, a general agreement on the state of the system. Bitcoin’s breakthrough innovation was utilizing unforgeable costliness to reach global consensus without relying on a central authority.Bitcoin can be understood as a game that anyone can join. Like all games, it can only be played if it has rules, certain ideas which are internally consistent. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a game; it would be chaos.Bitcoin’s consensus rules are just that: a set of ideas, codified into validation rules, acted out by nodes on the network. Changing this core set of ideas is akin to changing what Bitcoin is, and the decentralized nature of the network makes changing them extremely difficult. There is no central authority to dictate changes, making unanimous adoption of a new set of ideas virtually impossible. Anyone who changes the rules, even if he thinks such a change is for the better, will start to play a different game, with only those who join him.As Bitcoin’s creator famously said: the nature of Bitcoin is such that once the first version was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.Undoubtedly, Satoshi had certain ideas in mind when he created Bitcoin. Many of these ideas are articulated in his writing, and even in the genesis block. Most importantly, however, his core ideas are codified in Bitcoin’s consensus rules:fixed supplyno central point of failureno possibility of confiscation or censorshipeverything can be validated by everyone at all timesThis set of ideas is embedded in the rules of the network, and you have to adopt them to participate. In essence, a network like Bitcoin encodes a social contract in its software: ideas which are shared by everyone on the network.Spreading ideasAll great things start small, and Bitcoin was no exception. In the beginning, it was one node, one piece of software, one person, one set of ideas. On 31 October 2008, the Bitcoin whitepaper was published. Two months later, on 3 January 2009, the genesis block was mined.It took only two days until a second person was intrigued enough to join the network. Hal Finney ran the software, connected to Satoshi’s node, and the Bitcoin network was born. Soon, other people picked up on the idea, ran the software, and set up their nodes to join the network. The rest, as they say, is history.The Bitcoin network is a complex piece of machinery. The constituents of the network — part technology, part biology — make it inherently difficult to describe and understand. While the following doesn’t claim to be a complete description of the system by any means, I think it’s helpful to focus on some constituents in more detail. In particular, I want to focus on the following four: ideas, people, code, and nodes.Bitcoin’s ingredients: two parts software, two parts hardware.On the physical layer, the network is made up of interconnecting nodes. Bitcoin’s consensus rules are embodied in its software, i.e. the code which is running on its nodes. Ultimately, people are choosing which software to run, a decision which is shaped by the set of ideas they hold.The possibility of running self-sovereign nodes is part of the reason why Bitcoin’s consensus rules are so hard to change. As mentioned above, there is no central authority, no entity to trust. Changes have to be adopted voluntarily by everyone. People are free to run any version of the software, be it out of conviction, laziness, or contempt.Bitcoin is a system “based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,” to quote the whitepaper. The implication is that you are the authority and you have to verify everything for yourself from scratch. Out of this, consensus emerges.As soon as consensus is reached on the network, value comes into play. That bitcoins — or any monies, for that matter — have value, is in itself an idea that people need to be convinced of.For Bitcoin, this process took almost 500 days. When the network was in its infancy, bitcoins weren’t worth anything. They were mined and sent back and forth between curious cypherpunks. However, the moment Laszlo exchanged 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, Bitcoin went from zero to one. In an instant, the network became valuable in a tangible way.Ever since this moment, the following idea-value feedback loop is at play:Bitcoin’s set of ideas — its value proposition — is attracting people.Those people freely choose which code to run.The selected code runs on individual nodes, dictating their behavior.Nodes join the network, connecting to peers who share their ideas.The network reaches consensus, enabling agreement on who owns what.The value, in turn, reinforces the set of ideas defined by its consensus rules: the embodiment of its value proposition.Idea-value feedback loop.This idea-value feedback loop, the re-enforcement of ideas through value creation, is the mechanism behind Bitcoin’s gravity. Everything in this cycle influences everything else — whether it is software, hardware, or wetware. This loop is what ultimately captures people, and since Bitcoin’s core set of ideas is virtually fixed, it has some surprising effects on the sets of ideas held by people.Bitcoin’s Gravity WellAs we have seen above, Bitcoin is an opinionated piece of software, creating an opinionated network. The result of an opinionated network is that it attracts opinionated people.Arguably, most early adopters of Bitcoin shared its core set of ideas. As Dan Held points out in Planting Bitcoin, Satoshi carefully chose the initial group of people: cryptographers and cypherpunks, who understood the technical components Bitcoin is made of.There are many paths which might bring you close to Bitcoin’s gravitational pull: you might have an interest in cryptography, information security, or financial technologies. You may hold certain political or economic beliefs. You might be a gold bug, free speech advocate, or a speculator. You may need to use Bitcoin out of necessity. Whatever the reasons for your initial contact with Bitcoin, there is a certain probability that you are pulled in. Satoshi alluded to this multi-dimensional attractiveness in one of his emails to the cryptography mailing list.One way to illustrate this is by visualizing a landscape of ideas. Since the number of all possible ideas is basically infinite, we will have to focus on a small subset. And since we are talking about Bitcoin, we will focus on the small universe of ideas spawned by asking the question of what Bitcoin is.“What is Bitcoin?”Ask three strangers what Bitcoin is, and you will probably get three very different answers. Any answer is necessarily shaped by past experience, political and economic beliefs, and an individual understanding of the world. Your personal set of ideas, your world view, defines where you are on the landscape of ideas.The landscape has sets of ideas which clump together:
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Image: Blockchain illustrated – courtesy Simply Explained – Savjee You Tube channelLet me say upfront that I have stayed clear of the exuberance and hype over cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and the …
over 2,000 others called “altcoins” currently listed on CoinMarketCap.com and others listed on other sites. Also, I have never owned nor traded any cryptocurrencies.On the other hand, I recognise the value and potential uses of blockchain technology, originally described by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta in 1991, as a means to cryptographically secure a chain of blocks to timestamp digital documents so they cannot be backdated or tampered with.Blockchain technology remained mostly unused until 2009 when “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the mysterious individual or group which developed Bitcoin and adapted blockchain technology coupled with “Satoshi’s” proof-of-work data to create a secure, distributed, robust, digital ledger used to record all Bitcoin transactions, which makes detection of any compromised blocks easy and makes it extremely difficult for hackers, even with the most powerful and fast computers to compromise all the distributed blocks across the network of participating computers.Would it shock readers when I say that the primary objectives behind Bitcoin and the altcoins are socio-political and that these have similarities with those of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s?The quest to create alternatives to established lifestyles, societies, economic relationships, cultures, mores and so forth is as old as civilisation.Aside from their outward manifestations such long hair, tie dyed clothing, permissive attitudes towards sex, consumption of marijuana and LSD and so forth, the core of the hippie movement was to create a communitarian, environmentally sustainable mode of living close nature based upon cooperation, sharing and democratic communal living, adoption of eastern religions, New Age, mysticism and other spiritual beliefs; all as an alternative in opposition to the “establishment” values and mode of existence of mainstream society of their time.A similar countercultural movement which preceded the hippies of the 1960s was the Wandervogel (Wandering Free Spirits or Wandering Birds) movement in Germany from around the end of the 1800s to the early 1900s up until the time of Nazi Germany before World War II.This movement arose along with the opposition amongst farmers, rural people, the landed aristocracy, nobility, artists, intellectuals and others to the rise of industrialisation in Germany at the time, and it was during this period that the “Green” movement started in Germany, leading up to the environmental movements today.It’s believed that the Wandervogel movement in Germany influenced the hippie movement in North America and Europe in the 1960s, and whilst the hippies are very much off the public’s radar screen today, besides some surviving hippie communes and individuals living an alternative lifestyle; however the alternative hippie spirit and ethos of the 1960s continues even until today, amongst countercultural
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Things are settling in on the third day of Blockchain Week.Tuesday saw Nym’s Harry Halpin give an in-depth demonstration on how to shield your transactions, while Vitalik Buterin he made the …
previous day. Here’s what my colleague Nikhilesh De watching for throughout the day: 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. ET Oxford: From Cyber Security to Cyber Future - WorkshopDavid Shrier, Oxford futurist, breaks down the interconnections between cyber-worlds, data privacy and crypto. 10:00 - 1:00 p.m. Is Crypto Ready for the Travel Rule?A star-studded panel discusses the FATF’s Travel Rule, a financial regulation that could reshape the direction of the crypto industry. Amy Davine Kim of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, Noah Perlman of Gemini and Jeff Horowitz of Coinbase, among others, are scheduled to make an appearance. 11:30 - 1:00 p.m. First Principles for a Decentralized Future Hosted by World Economic Forum, this program featuring Clovyr’s Amber Baldet, Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf and the inimitable Meltem Demirors, and many more, will examine how the cryptographic tools being built today can preserve their underlying values. 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Financial Exclusion: Does Crypto Fix This?One of the chief use cases of crypto is to provide financial infrastructure for emerging markets and those excluded from the banking system. Carlos Acevedo, Karen Bhatia, Susan Oh and Tyrone Ross – all currently testing blockchain for social solutions in New York City – will ask and answer the question: Can crypto bank the unbanked? 2:00 - 4:30 p.m. DeFi Risk and Regulation WorkshopCrypto lawyers, builders and founders dive into the regulatory schemes that may affect the nascent DeFi industry. 5:00 - 5:55 p.m. Don't Bank on the Banks: Borrowing and Saving With CryptoGreg DiPrisco, head of business development at the Maker Foundation, will demonstrate how the interconnected world of DeFi can replace and improve upon traditional banking. 6:00 - 7:00 p.m. Research Hub: Crypto Research Happy HourJoin CoinDesk Research’s happy hour to close out the third full day of Consensus: Distributed. The CoinDesk 50 is an annual list celebrating the movers and shakers of the crypto industry. We've already highlighted , , , , , and the , and will continue to announce five new names a day until the end of Blockchain Week. Today we look at why Bitcoin is still king. You can read the Bitcoin Is KingWith so many cryptocurrencies and “blockchain solutions” it’s remarkable, yet unavoidably clear, that Bitcoin is still the most exciting project to watch in this space. This cryptocurrency project isn’t run by a group of
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Bitcoin was up over 20% year-to-date Thursday morning. Knowledge means that the current worth rise is being pushed by U.S. buyers shopping for bitcoin on spot and derivatives exchanges. In the …
meantime, there at the moment are extra “whales” swimming on this international sea than since mid-2019. And Bitcoin custodial startups are reporting an uptick in customers. You are studying Blockchain Bites, the day by day roundup of probably the most pivotal tales in blockchain and crypto information, and why they’re important. You possibly can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters right here. It is suspected that a lot of this exercise is pushed by the approaching halving occasion, which for some sober minds, is nothing greater than an act of arithmetic. Here is the story: American ConsumersKnowledge signifies American consumers are fueling Bitcoin’s rally. On U.S. exchanges, spot premiums are displaying stronger buy-side strain relative to different markets. Additional, exchanges licensed to supply bitcoin futures to American buyers are rallying whereas their unlicensed opponents aren’t. Su Zhu, CEO of Three Arrows Capital, mentioned American buyers “ought to give us a powerful base on condition that U.S. tax coverage means no one sells spot for small income.” Name Me Ishmael, Is That A Whale?The variety of Bitcoin addresses holding greater than 10,000 cash rose to the best stage since mid-2019. These 111 so-called whales contribute to the bullish
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