so
what you're seeing here
are pearl ponds
in rural judeang
and on the day that i visited the owner
of these ponds was surprised that anyone
outside of her town let alone the pearl
farming business would want to know more
about these ponds
70 percent
of the world's pearls are cultured and
produced here
and so each of these mussels they
contain 40 to 50 pearls and the higher
end ones are taken out
sold as jewelry and the lower end pearls
are actually extracted put into smaller
oysters vacuum sealed preserved in
formaldehyde and shipped off all the way
to places like rural indiana
for online pearl parties where thousands
of people sit watching these oysters
being cracked open in real time
online pearl parties are truly an
internet-enabled phenomena growing out
of platforms like facebook and instagram
because on the internet no one can tell
just how bad these oysters smell
when we think of tech we often think of
cities places like san francisco or
shenzhen where tech is built
and visibly part of everyday life
rarely do we think of the countryside
and when we do it's as a place that's
lacking tech that's lacking digital
media literacy
and we see the rural as backward
yet
the pearl producing towns of jujung
and
places in rural indiana where online
pearl parties flourish they don't just
exist as an afterthought waiting to
become cities one day
as online pearl parties show rural china
and rural america are connected in
unexpected ways and these connections
need to be more than ones of economic
growth
there's numerous stories like this
whether it's rural families
manufacturing for online lifestyle
brands in the us
or
influencers in rural china cashing in by
making live stream videos of themselves
pulling noodles eating chili peppers
picking tea and my favorite hunting
bamboo rats
there's whole pockets of e-commerce
whether on amazon or taobao that are
sourced from rural manufacturers in
china made by families
so this one family workshop that i
visited was fairly typical with a
husband and wife making halloween
costumes for export
while the 90 year old matriarch looked
on sifting through plastic packaging for
shipping
and across the u.s and china i've seen
similar dynamics rural areas becoming
home to data centers e-commerce
warehouses rare earth mines
and
also top-down entrepreneurship
initiatives like this free-range chicken
farmer that i met who is using chicken
biometrics tracking and blockchain
to improve supply chain transparency
at a larger scale rural areas are
connected through global market forces
whether it's soybeans grown in brazil
shipped all the way to industrial hog
farms in southern china
or
america's biggest pork player smithfield
being acquired by a chinese pork company
and even the process of hog farming
itself is becoming high tech
netiz one of the world's largest online
gaming companies now has its own hog
farms and alibaba the internet giant
is now partnering with farms to use ai
and computer vision in order to create a
highly optimized pig
because the idea being ai and computer
vision will help scale up pork
production to an unprecedented level
meeting the demands of a rising middle
class
so what happens when tech and the
countryside intersect
well
in my travels i've talked to owners of
large farms who see their work as one of
inputs outputs land value and land
ownership
i've also talked to small farmers who
frame their work as one of ecology and
stewardship
that their land is a place of relations
it's exactly this ecological framing
that reminds us that to see and
understand the countryside is a crucial
part of moving towards a more livable
future for everyone
because the tech that we
imagine as urbanites to be solutions
things like online coding classes for
farmers
or
you know
factory work in cities all of these are
still framed
as one-way relationships with tech
supposedly benefiting rural areas
but when we think of something like ai
farming pigs at an unprecedented scale
or small farmers turning their land into
pearl ponds it's not because tech has
found a solution these small farmers
turn their land into proponents because
they can't compete at a global scale
against industrial farms who are using
automation chemicals and pesticides
so tracing these moments in rural tech
reveal how so much
of the technology we do build centers
our consumption and our entertainment in
cities
besides
some of the most thoughtful careful
innovation is not happening in a place
like silicon valley or san francisco
but in places outside of it
like yangguong a rice farming village
four hours outside of guangzhou
for years the local agricultural bureau
had worked with farmers to implement
chemical fertilizers chemical pesticides
industrial farm machinery and so they
did this and they noticed a decline in
their soil quality under these modern
protocols
so the villagers took things into their
own hands
so they do rice farming and rice farming
is mountain terraced so it's a form of
natural irrigation with water flowing
from top to bottom
the village changed their governance
structure so that stewardship of the
rice paddies would change every few
years via a lottery system which also
meant you wouldn't have contiguous
patties
so if you sprayed pesticides or damned
off water at the top
you might be affecting yours or your
neighbor's patty lower down
they also started practicing organic
farming
and building their own farm machinery
with the help of local blacksmiths
they also started selling their rice
online
and while
tech helped this village steward their
land it was really people not tech at
the helm of decision making
and so it's exactly this approach
without boundaries without ambitions to
scale that reminds us
of the humility in innovation its
ability to change political and social
structures
we have to see the tech that we build as
affecting a set of relations ecologies
and environments
because innovation in this village
is literally an ecosystem
one that doesn't scale across thousands
of users but across the spectrum of time
regenerating the soil and community ties
from one planting season to the next
and for that you don't need a legion of
engineers millions of users or vc
funding
thank you
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