by Xiaowei Wang
3. When AI Farms Pigs
1. 付永军, “痛心 | 洋猪入侵中国30年: 正在爆发一场生态灾难, 31种土猪已濒临灭绝!,” 原乡味觉, December 6, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20191231224046/https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/auURR08y2mIW6cc91exKlQ; Vincent ter Beek, “ASF China: Kitchen Waste Blamed; Outbreaks in the South,” Pig Progress, October 29, 2018, http://web.archive.org/web/20191231224754/https://www.pigprogress.net/Health/Articles/2018/10/ASF-China-Kitchen-waste-blamed-outbreaks-in-the-south-352451E/; Ann Hess, “ASF Prevention: Should Meat Be Removed from Garbage Feeding?,” National Hog Farmer, November 2, 2018, http://web.archive.org/web/20181102201534/https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/business/asf-prevention-should-meat-be-removed-garbage-feeding.
2. “Chinese Tech Companies Get into Farming,” The Economist, October 27, 2018, http://www.economist.com/business/2018/10/27/chinese-tech-companies-get-into-farming.
3. Dipendra Thapaliya, Blake M. Hanson, Ashley Kates, Cassandra A. Klostermann, Rajeshwari Nair, Shylo E. Wardyn, and Tara C. Smith, “Zoonotic Diseases of Swine: Food-Borne and Occupational Aspects of Infection,” in Zoonoses—Infections Affecting Humans and Animals, ed. Andreas Sing (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015), 23–68.
4. Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, “The Metamorphosis,” The Atlantic, August 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-kissinger-the-metamorphosis-ai/592771/.
5. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
6. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2008), 106.
7. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 2007).
8. Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739.
9. Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.”
10. Rodrigo Ochigame, “The Invention of Ethical AI,” The Intercept, December 20, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/.
11. James Boggs, “Blacks in the Cities: Agenda for the 70s,” The Black Scholar 4, no. 3 (November 1972): 50–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.1972.11431284.
4. Buffet Life
1. 程盟超, “这块屏幕可能改变命运,” 中国青年报 (China Youth Daily), December 18, 2018, http://web.archive.org/web/20190329013258/https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/l4f4r2d7bw06mqBstJL-mA.
5. Made in China
1. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011).
2. Buck Gee and Denise Peck, “Asian Americans Are the Least Likely Group in the U.S. to Be Promoted to Management,” Harvard Business Review, May 31, 2018, http://web.archive.org/web/20200107032025/https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely-group-in-the-u-s-to-be-promoted-to-management.
Analyses of intellectual property and law as ways to control culture are plentiful, including Lawrence Lessig’s work. Susan Sell, “Intellectual Property and Public Policy in Historical Perspective: Contestation and Settlement,” Loyola of Los Angeles Review 38 (Fall 2004), http://web.archive.org/web/20200108180433/http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2452&context=llr; William W. Fisher III, “The Growth of Intellectual Property: A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States,” Eigentumskulturen im Vergleich (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 265–91, http://web.archive.org/web/20181116052143/https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/history.html.
6. “No One Can Predict the Future”
1. For a good read on this, see Zhang Xi, “‘Cake Uncles’: Formation of a Criminal Town in Rural China,” Crime and the Chinese Dream, ed. Børge Bakken (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018).
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 5–29.
3. Zara Rahman, “Can Data Ever Know Who We Really Are?” Deep Dives, May 16, 2019, http://web.archive.org/web/20190528233256/https://deepdives.in/can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are-a0dbfb5a87a0.
4. For more, including a fairly fascinating takedown of some common health “data,” see Philip B. Stark, “Quantifauxcation” (PowerPoint presentation, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, January 19, 2015), https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Seminars/fauxIspra15.htm.
5. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019).
6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Penguin Classics, 2019).
7. Gone Shopping in the Mountain Stronghold
1. See Melinda Cooper, Family Values (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017), for an in-depth analysis of how traditional family values work in a neoliberal era.
2. Lauren Berlant, “Lauren Berlant on Her Book Cruel Optimism,” Rorotoko, June 4, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20190617083541/http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel_optimism/.
3. Agence France-Presse, “How China’s Young People Became Addicted to Debt,” South China Morning Post, May 28, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20180114200736/http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2096019/how-chinas-young-people-became-addicted-debt.
4. “China’s Moon Mission Sees First Seeds Sprout,” BBC News, January 15, 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46873526.
5. Chang’e is the Chinese goddess of the moon.
8. Welcome to My Pearl Party
1. 薇 宋, “The Annual Debate on Heating in China,” China Daily, http://web.archive.org/web/20191111090652/http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-01/30/content_19449162.htm.
2. Zhuang Pinghui, “As Winter Grips Rural China, Who’s Really Paying the Price for Beijing’s Clean Air Plan?,” South China Morning Post, January 24, 2019, http://web.archive.org/web/20191221164917/https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2182521/winter-grips-rural-china-whos-really-paying-price-beijings-clean.
3. Peter Yang, “A Primer on China’s Live Streaming Market,” Hacker Noon, July 21, 2018, https://hackernoon.com/a-primer-on-chinas-live-streaming-market-352409ad2c0b.
4. Zhang Bo, “The Performers Behind China’s Much-Derided Livestreaming App,” Sixth Tone, December 21, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20191023080549/http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001437/the-performers-behind-chinas-much-derided-livestreaming-app.
5. 董志成, “Streaming out of Shanty Towns for Bigger Dreams,” China Daily, http://web.archive.org/web/20190220043533/www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2018-12/21/content_37415794.htm.
6. Shan Jie, “Chinese Video App Removes Peppa Pig, Now a Subculture Icon in China,” Global Times, April 30, 2018, http://web.archive.org/web/20190102130006/www.globaltimes.cn/content/1100136.shtml.
7. An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). For an academic study on this, see Damian J. Ruck, Luke J. Matthews, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin D. Atkinson, and R. Alexander Bentley, “The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies,” Nature Human Behaviour (December 2019), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0769-1.
Acknowledgments
This book’s journey has been marked by so much kindness and compassion, from people and places too numerous to name. Any omission in this list is purely accidental.
Thank you, Logic family: Alex Bl
asdel, Celine Nguyen, Christa Hartsock, Jen Kagan, Jim Fingal, and especially Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel. Thank you, Emily Bell, Jackson Howard, Rebecca Caine, and everyone at FSG Originals for bringing this book to life.
I am enormously grateful to the interviewees who spoke with me and the communities that welcomed me; thank you for your insights and candor. For reading drafts and giving generous feedback and encouragement, thank you: Carl Tashian, Martabel Wasserman, Jane Henderson, Siyu Song, Alexander Arroyo, Dorothy Santos, Josh Feola, and especially my sister, Jen Wang. Thank you, Maya Rudolph, for your commitment to adventure. An enormous thanks to Yang Yuting for all your assistance in arranging interviews, and for your critical astonishment at the state of rural America. For conversations and support that have influenced this book’s trajectory, thank you: Abigail de Kosnik, David Li, Joyce Lee, Hetty McKinnon, LinYee Yuan, Sharad Chari, Jovan Lewis, Hallie Chen, Sam Culp, Kira Simon-Kennedy, Pinghui Xiao, An Xiao Mina, Jason Li (who came up with the title!), Nicole Lavelle and Charlie Macquarie of Place Talks, Meg and Rick Prelinger, Shane Slattery-Quintanilla, Xinran Yuan, Angel Chen, Alex Chow, Jordan Maseng for the noodles, Deren Guler, Bing Bin, Grace Zhou, Leafan Rosen, Alatanwula for the horses, and Shazeda Ahmed for Christmas in Hangzhou. Thanks to everyone at B4BEL4B Gallery, World Wide West, Andres Colmenares and Lucy Black-Swan, and the Miracle Swimming group at North Beach Pool. I am grateful to the community of Zhaoxing, Guizhou, for much-needed ghost visitations and witchcraft during writing. Thank you to my former coworkers at Mapbox, where parts of this book started to percolate—particularly to Amy Lee Walton, who encouraged me to write more, Vanessa Frontiero, and Jake Pruitt. And thank you, Helen Mirra, for your wisdom and walks, which teach me to “let go, let go, let go.”
This book would not be possible without my aunt and uncle, Victor Wang and Jacqueline Chen, who gave me their unwavering support and a home in Guangzhou. Thank you to my mother, who continues to diligently feed people in the middle of a global pandemic, and to my grandmother, who remains ever present in my life. And Ian Pearce: I am always grateful for your patience, support, and endless good humor.
The intellectual and spiritual influences of this book are many. Yet it all began with the cookbooks and food writings of Buwei Chao, M.F.K. Fisher, Jessica B. Harris, Mary Sia, and Alice B. Toklas. I am still studying and practicing all your recipes.
About the Author
Xiaowei Wang is an artist, a writer, and a coder. They are the creative director at Logic magazine, and their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Award and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and other outlets. They are working toward a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, where they are a part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship program in Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. Ghosts in the Machine
Recipe: How to Feed an AI
2. On a Blockchain Chicken Farm in the Middle of Nowhere
3. When AI Farms Pigs
4. Buffet Life
Recipe: How to Eat Yourself
5. Made in China
6. “No One Can Predict the Future”
7. Gone Shopping in the Mountain Stronghold
Recipe: How to Eat the World
8. Welcome to My Pearl Party
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
FSG Originals × Logic
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Xiaowei Wang
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: Poem from the Alibaba office © Alibaba Cloud, written by Alibaba Cloud engineers.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72125-1
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