PositiveThe NationXiaowei 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 ... Discussions about tech, Wang writes, are often \'caught in a long list of binaries\' ... 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 youth known as shehui ren, those who believe they cannot advance to the \'upper-middle-class life promised to them in advertisements\' and who reject conventional values of jobs, marriages, and families, turn to live-streaming platforms and lifestyles that valorize the hustle ... 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.