by Xiaowei Wang
Farmer Jiang has more buyers for his free-range chickens now that they are blockchain free-range chickens. But in switching to blockchain, the farmer’s overhead has increased significantly, with the cost of the ankle bracelets and the technical infrastructure. By the end of the process, Farmer Jiang makes RMB 100 (US$14) on each chicken, not accounting for costs.
Still, Jiang is optimistic. He’s no longer a stranger to the process of raising surveilled chickens. With the slow influx of money to the village, a postsecondary vocational school is being built. Other projects like a “smart mushroom tent” have arrived, sponsored by the state-owned liquor company, Kweichow Moutai. The watering and the temperature and humidity of the tent are controlled automatically by a system of sensors, producing cremini and shiitake mushrooms on logs.
As we sit in his house, with our feet around the hearth, Farmer Jiang starts gathering up oranges and putting them into a plastic bag. He admits that it’s not easy for this area of Guizhou to develop economically. It’s the geography, he says. It’s remote, it’s mountainous. The terrain makes it difficult to farm certain crops. But precisely because it is remote, it boasts a pollution-free environment, with fresh air and clean soil. The problem is, the villagers don’t quite know how to put a dollar value on that. I tell him, I’m not sure anyone does.
As Ren and I leave, Farmer Jiang hands us the big plastic bag of oranges. “Take these! I grew these myself for my family! They’re organically farmed. I used the GoGoChicken poop as fertilizer.”
In the car, driving through the small mountain paths back to the bus stop, I ask Ren, “So, what do you think of qukuailian [blockchain, 区块链]?” Although we’ve seen the GoGoChicken farm, I haven’t explicitly brought up blockchain at all during my visit.
“Blockchain? What’s blockchain?” asks Ren.
7.
Onstage at the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco, the founder of the Lightning Network, a protocol layer that sits on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain, is speaking into the microphone. The Decentralized Web Summit is host to an eclectic assortment of people, a caricature of the Bay Area’s tech scene.
The speaker is reed thin and bespectacled, and both of his hands firmly grasp the sides of the podium. His shoulders are slightly slouched. The audience sits rapt, eagerly waiting to hear what he has to say.
“Life is ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ right?” He pauses, then talks about Usenet, a distributed message board system. He attributes the demise of Usenet to what he calls bad actors—essentially, jerks. He continues, “That’s always been the problem with society. Society has always had the issue of assholes ruining it for everybody.”
The sentiment he shares is common among cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts—a cynical view of human nature, where people are selfish and untrustworthy. The idea that life is “nasty, brutish, and short” comes from the political and moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that a strong, authoritarian government is needed to curb the selfish instinct that lives in all of us. A few hundred years later, the “tragedy of the commons” concept would solidify Hobbes’s thinking as scientific. Many crypto and blockchain enthusiasts will cite this concept often and candidly.
The concept of the tragedy of the commons was popularized in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who also argued that the overpopulation of the earth would lead to disaster because of finite resources. Hardin’s tragedy of the commons was the condition where individual users, motivated by their own self-interest, ruin a shared resource system for everyone. Hardin gave the example of herders who, caring only about the survival of their own herds, destroyed pastures by overgrazing common land.
Like his theories on overpopulation, Hardin’s tragedy of the commons was later exposed as deeply problematic, as politics disguised as science. His scientific ideas stemmed from his racist, eugenicist beliefs as a white nationalist, and many of the groups he saw as unable to manage shared resources were in non-Western countries.5
And setting aside Hardin’s political ideologies, the tragedy of the commons theory is just plain wrong. The concept was disproved with in-depth data and careful science in 1990 by Elinor Ostrom, who would be awarded a Nobel Prize for her work.
However, since Hardin was an ecologist, the tragedy of the commons became naturalized, seen as neutral science rather than political belief. In reality, Hardin’s ideas were based on terrifying assumptions, a world in which human nature and natural resources were static, finite, and fixed.
Despite Ostrom’s work, the belief in innate human selfishness in a world of scarcity had become ingrained outside of ecology—in fields like information science and economics.6 This belief in selfishness and scarcity is one of the core ideologies that gave rise to blockchain.
Although blockchain has become synonymous with Bitcoin, they are not quite the same. Bitcoin is one use of blockchain, but it remains separate from blockchain technology. Some have used a biological analogy to illustrate the difference: if blockchain is DNA, Bitcoin is a distinct species. Blockchain is a special kind of distributed record-keeping system that uses cryptography to prevent records from being falsified, eliminating the need to trust a centralized authority to verify records.
For example, since food-safety inspection records in China are subject to falsification, instead of there being one canonical record owned by one organization that could be tampered with, a number of records could exist. These records could be distributed among many people: the farmer, the local inspection bureau, the end consumer. If these records are coordinated and kept in sync through a system, people could trust this distributed system rather than a central government authority to deem food safe. If one bad actor at the local inspection bureau did try to fudge the register, the system would reject the change, making it nearly impossible to falsify a record. The special thing about this system is that the distributed record keepers wouldn’t have to trust one another; they may never even have to interact with each other, instead letting the technology mediate. This system of coordination and enforcement is blockchain—immutable, tamperproof records that have a range of mechanisms built in to prevent bad actors. To me, this system sounds ideal at first blush. But the technical implementation of such a system creates a different reality.
In blockchain, a set of records is called a block. Multiple computers, or nodes, hold a list of prior records. Each block of records is mathematically chained to the previous block of records. In order to link the blocks, a “hashing function” has to be performed by computers: guessing random numbers to solve a math problem, a task that requires enormous amounts of computing power and electricity.
After this hashing function, blocks are then on the blockchain, and this is transmitted to all the other computers on the network. Since the blocks are all mathematically chained together, to falsify a record would mean having to redo all the work for subsequent blocks on the chain, requiring so much electricity and resources that falsification is disincentivized.
Bitcoin arrived in 2008, at the beginning of a global financial crisis. At the time, a paper was circulated online, written by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto, proposing a peer-to-peer currency. The paper outlined this peer-to-peer currency, or Bitcoin, as Nakamoto called it. Instead of a central bank verifying transactions and preventing double spending, Nakamoto proposed the system of blockchain to verify and keep records of transactions. Bitcoin would be the incentive for people with computers to verify and put blocks on the blockchain. This is the core of the Bitcoin blockchain. It leads with the idea that bad actors are intrinsic in a system, and to prevent their actions, enormous amounts of electricity must be spent on preventing them through hashing functions.
The first block on the Bitcoin blockchain was created along with the text “THE TIMES 03/JAN/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”—the anti-centralization message of Bitcoin coming through loud and clear. And since 2008, the cryptocurrency and blockchain space has blossomed beyond Bitcoin
into other currencies and other blockchains, currencies like Ethereum and EOS, all with slightly different consensus algorithms—ways of ensuring that individual computers, or nodes, have records that agree with each other.
Hardin’s original essay in 1968 used the example of the medieval commons, a place where peasants grazed their cows. According to Hardin, the ungoverned nature of the commons led to overgrazing, which is why the commons had to eventually be enclosed and privatized. Yet Hardin was also wrong about this history—the commons model had actually thrived in Europe for hundreds of years. The mismanagement of the commons by peasants was a lie, an excuse made up by powerful landowners who wanted to seize and control these spaces.
During a long conversation with a Chinese blockchain engineer, I learn that the core belief of a government like China’s is steeped in what is termed “patriarchal authoritarianism”: its citizens cannot be trusted, so the government needs to control them. Citizens must trust that the predominantly male-led government has their best interests at heart. The government expects its citizens to believe that the system works, without question, by instilling fear that without it a few bad actors would ruin things for everyone. And so the story of blockchain in China seems like a game of pick your poison: Who do you trust more, the machine or the government?
Blockchain, like an authoritarian regime, uses a parallel logic: people cannot be trusted in a free market, and bad actors are intrinsic to a social system. In order to mediate trust, a technical infrastructure is better than a government; governments are made up of fallible people, whereas technical infrastructure works automatically. Instead of the government moderating trust, blockchain does so with machines.
At the Decentralized Web Summit, I attend a few technical sessions, rooms filled with blockchain developers who hold an enormous amount of power through the technical decisions they make. In the blockchain space, technical problems and challenges are intrinsically linked to governance issues. For example, certain vulnerabilities within blockchains in the past have led to further technical decisions, decisions that have threatened the idea that blockchain should be immutable in the first place. Code and law become conflated in the blockchain.
And that leads to a widespread belief that the blockchain should be governed by the community of developers around it. In recent years, the community has become increasingly well funded by venture capital, with millions of dollars being doled out to blockchain projects that only further solidify the political system we live in. When I look around at the community present at the conference, most of the developers are white and male. This community does not include people like Ren and Jiang. One speaker at the conference, Karissa McKelvey of Digital Democracy, puts it, “Blockchain governance is not unbiased or neutral. It’s just shifting bureaucratic roles to more technical roles. At some point, you have to trust someone.” Given the demographics of those in the technical roles, McKelvey bluntly says, “You might even say it’s colonialism.”
A system of record keeping used to be textual, readable, and understandable to everyone. The technical component behind it was as simple as paper and pencil. That system was prone to falsification, but it was widely legible. Under governance by blockchain, records are tamperproof, but the technical systems are legible only to a select few. Even exploring transactions on a blockchain requires some amount of technical knowledge and access. The technology of record keeping has become increasingly more complex. This complexity requires trust and faith in the code—and trust in those who write it. For those of us who don’t understand the code, trusting a record written in natural language on a piece of paper seems at the very least a lot clearer.
We trust all sorts of technical systems every day without having to read their code. The software that flies our planes, runs our city trains. Like a lot of emerging technologies, blockchain is beholden only to its makers, and to a handful of well-funded companies. The conventional answer to this is to suggest government regulation of software, as is the case with airplane and train software. Yet the political ethos of blockchain is precisely about taking power away from a central authority like the government. And deep down, I find that sentiment admirable. However, blockchain has yet to answer the question: If it takes power away from a central authority, can it truly put power back in the hands of the people, and not just a select group of people? Will it serve as an infrastructure that amplifies trust, rather than increasing both mistrust and a singular reliance on technical infrastructure? Will it provide ways to materially organize and enrich a community, rather than further accelerating financial systems that serve a select few? Can the community expand and diversify itself, so that it does not reproduce the system of power and patriarchy that it is attempting to dismantle?
I wander through the Decentralized Web Summit, sipping a grapefruit LaCroix and peering into rooms illuminated by neon lights. Years ago, I would have gotten an enormous thrill from this conference: the light-filled rooms, the eccentric but well-dressed audience who jet around from Berlin to San Francisco with casual, glittering affluence, after-parties with good drugs at plush lofts, and most of all, the way changing the world seems to be just a keystroke away. A few people here are “blockchain bros,” young men hyped on internet culture and the promise of blockchain. Some of them are ready to pitch their companies at any given moment. More recently, popular support for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has oscillated between feverish excitement and wariness about its electricity consumption—it requires more electricity annually than Switzerland. By creating a system based on the assumption that humans are destructive and selfish, you only end up making those assumptions reality: a self-fulfilling prophecy. It serves as a reminder of the physical, material relationships that bind our world together.
There is some debate about whether blockchain and crypto are here to stay, whether the technology is actually able to do all the things it says it will do. I think of the melamine-milk scandal, and whether blockchain would have helped in that situation. The contamination came from farmers, driven by economic pressures. Blockchain wouldn’t have helped prevent falsification, but it would have made the milk more expensive. Under authoritarianism, which benefits from holding expertise within its realm of power, and under an economic system that thrives off inequality in creating a market, of course blockchain is here to stay. It creates another layer of inequality, another incentive to make food a commodity.
That is the intrinsic flaw, the infuriating circular logic. We operate under game theory conditions, under market forces, under the belief that we will lie to each other because someone else has more, and we have more to gain. And so we create solutions that further exacerbate this inequality. This is what happens when resources like food are treated as commodities to be bought and sold, to make money from, instead of as a basic human right.
In some of the projects being discussed in rooms at the Decentralized Web Summit, the utopian language makes me cringe. Other projects give me significantly more hope. A decentralized web does not necessarily mean blockchain; it can include other tools that promote shared, community management in a legible way. These projects, many of which are alternatives to blockchain, feel exciting, almost utopian.
The truth is, we all want some kind of utopia, even if utopia is, by definition, not a place. We want a way for things to get better, to get perfect. What many of us are feeling right now, what we see, is that the existing economic systems don’t serve us.
As I run into friends at the conference and we discuss the talks we’ve attended, I know that I too want things to get better, and that I hold hope for technology to help us fix things—I remain, in some ways, an unabashed techno-optimist.
During lunch, I sit in a sunlit room, eating a chicken sandwich. This is where my travels get weird. For all our models of what will happen in a decentralized age, for all our incredible new technologies, we still cling to fictions about human nature. We have sequenced the human genome and we believe that humans can evolve, become ever more advanced.
Yet, instead of designing technology that fosters and cultivates communal behaviors of trust, we still design technology that assumes scarcity and cultivates selfishness. This coercive design relies on a view of human nature that comes from a Hobbesian era when people barely had running water, a fictional, universal view of humanity that has been disproved over and over by research.
I think back to a different lunch, to my lunch with Ren before I visited the blockchain chicken farm. It was, ironically, a vegetarian meal at a small restaurant in the village. A large digital clock with the printed words COMPUTER ETERNITY TIME hung above us, red LCD numbers changing every minute as if it were showing an inevitable count toward fictional progress. I wonder: Who must agree to live in fictions that someone else wrote, and who has the power to write fictions for the rest of us? And if anyone can write fictions, why can’t we write new ones?
3
When AI Farms Pigs
1.
It is November 2018. In the city of Guangzhou, African swine fever still feels distant. I’m in the city visiting my aunt and uncle, enjoying the swimming pool in their luxury apartment complex and loading up on imported Australian trail mix before I head back to the countryside. Along the balconies of people’s high-rise apartments are slabs of meat, tied with string. The slabs sway next to shirts and sheets left out to dry. Late autumn means it’s time to make lap yuk, preserved pork, a southern Chinese specialty. A piece of raw pork belly is soaked in a blend of rice wine, salt, soy sauce, and spices, then hung out to cure in the damp, cold autumn air. The fat becomes translucent and imparts a savory-sweet taste to any stir-fried vegetable dish. A relative of mine explains that only southern China can make preserved pork like this. The secret is the native, natural spores and bacteria in the wind.
