Blockchain Chickens and Empathetic Tech Workers (with Xiaowei Wang)

Thank you for your wisdom which flows into us through us. The reading that we undertake today is for the joy and liberation of the sitter and the greater joy and liberation of all. Thank you you had me at open in the circle. That other voice you're hearing is Shaowei Wang. Right now, they're reading my tarot cards, an old tech of sorts. The cards can provide insights into our past, present, and future. And this reading hits pretty close to home.

My mother was a very spiritually curious person. I was baptized Catholic, but attended an Episcopal church from most of my childhood. As my mom explored her own spirituality, she just dragged me along with her to Buddhist temples to chant, to our living room where she consulted the Taoist teaching Book of Changes, to arenas for Native American pow wows, and to her computer where she would generate and read

my astrological chart with her own software. Because of all this history, I've always been open minded about the different paths we can take to find meaning and insights. So Tarot, that was an easy yes. Now shall weighs pulling three cards to help frame my current state of mind. So the middle card is the two of Pentacles, and so as you see it, it's this iconography of someone who is juggling, and in the back there's actually a lot

of water, so water meaning emotions. It's someone who you know, you kind of see them, and they're like a court jester almost. Um. So it's a sense of I'm juggling a lot, particularly in the material round, so just like money, job, things like that. And in the background is also this tidal wave of emotion, like things look fun and playful on the outside because I'm juggling for an audience, but in the back there's a lot of emotion that's being kind of damned up. I take that court jester or

comment as a compliment. Now, if you saw my Google calendar, you know how real the juggler image is to my life. Right now, I'm managing many commitments, including this podcast. I often consider the fact that I deal with difficult topics like race and democracy. I refer to what as handling hazardous material. It takes an emotional toll, and as practiced as I am at performing have it all togetherness, I'm often holding back a lot of emotions associated with my

chosen work. That emotional water in the background of the card. And on the other side, we have the Night of Swords, and we have the Three of Cups, But the Night of Sorts is someone who is just like has this energy that's just like, Oh, there's a problem, let's do something about it. How can we fix this immediately? There's this one side of me that's just in the material realm. As we're going through things, we have to fix it.

We have to get things done, we have to move on to the next thing, moving at like a million miles an hour. This is so me. I love to fix things. I literally fixed computers to help pay for college, and I'm always jumping to solutions in the face of almost any problem, even when the people around me don't want me to come up with a solution. And then on the other side is the very real side of when we're doing community work, when we're dealing with the

emotions of other people. That's a kind of slowness that is very much, you know, counter to the Night of Swords. Who's like about to Russian So at least from this terror reading. And I'm curious if any of this resonates with you, this notion of juggling between the two and the sense of like I just want to like fix it and do something about it. And then the other part that's, you know, slow down, you know, talk it through, talk about feelings. This is dead on, this is you, you

you got me. It's exactly where I am really and then a lot of who I am and how I present and what's going on to the surface. But the support I'm finding shall wait, that's this podcast, you know, like you also just read for how to Citizen, So thank you. That is one of the most potent ways of meeting a person that I've ever experienced. You have a bit of a gift, so thanks for sharing it. I know, I know, a tarot reading seems random but

tarot isn't just woo woo fortune telling. I love reading Tarot for others and I always view it as helping others hold space, or like holding up a mirror, if you will, And that's exactly what we're doing today, my guests. Shall Wei Wang is going to help us hold a mirror, not just to me, but to the entire tech industry. Shawi is not only a tower reader, but the lead steward of Logic School, an online school that empowers tech workers to transform the industry from within. They also wrote

the book called Blockchain Chicken Farm about tech in rural China. Cha. We spent a lot of time traveling in China and working in the tech industry themselves. Through these experiences, they learned a lot about how to transform the tech industry. And it may surprise you, but the solution is actually pretty low tech. Take time, take patients, move at the speed of trust and care. The act of talking to people and just being with them. That's the work, right,

that's the transformation. When we come back from the break, how a rural chicken farmer in China became a real life landing a sketch, Hello, challweg, How are you good. It's nice to meet you. By twin Day. Lovely to meet you. First off, I want to talk to you about your current work Logic School. Logic School is an organizing school for tech workers. Above all, it's really a community of twenty folks who get together every week and laugh and cry and learn from activists, artists, people who

are trying to think about changing tech and the tech industry. UM. As part of it, there were a series of final projects that came out from the cohort and it's been just such a joy and honor to serve as the lead steward of that school and see the work that people are doing. You say the Logic School is for tech workers, will qualify someone as a tech worker? We made the definition really broad on purpose, just to you know,

foster these incredible new connections. We had the gig worker to someone who used to work actually in government policy on tech um. It was a bit disillusioned, I don't know what that says about regulation UM. And that we also had you know, engineers, designers from some of the big companies. So it was really cool to see that

conversation unfold. When when I think of a school for tech workers The first thing that pops to mind is a place like General Assembly or at a place that kind of creates the classic image of a tech worker, like they pump out coders and engineers and developers and some version of those words, and the images typing long into the night. Maybe that scene from the Social network where everybody's like pounding beers and slamming keys. What is

your definition of tech worker and of tech work? I love that that is like a very good and marketing scheme on behalf of the tech industry where they're like, yeah, there's you know, fridge full of kombucha and you're just

like hacking, like it's mostly snacks, right exactly. I think for us at Logic School, you know, a tech worker can be someone who's doing community technology, so instead of working for a big company, they're thinking about like what's the infrastructure, what's the projects that respond to the needs of their local neighborhood. It can be someone who's beyond the like I'm so rational, I'm so logical image that we have um and really someone who has a lot

of care and thoughtfulness. You know, I think all of these ideas of what a tech worker looks like that's highly gendered, highly racialized, and you know has has a lot to do with capitalism. How does the school itself work? We met every week over zoom, had folks from Pittsburgh all the way to Texas in the Bay Area, and amazing guest lecturers come in like the Free Radicals, stop lap d spying coalition to Kadija abdu Rakhman, who's working

on child welfare in the New York City area. And yeah, just lots of dialogue and activities and feedback on each other's projects. I think one of the most important questions for us was, you know, who are your people, who's your community? Who do you see yourself building tech for? Right this sounds like the opposite of everything we've been

taught about the tech sector as a workplace. I think a lot of us are like, it's very logical, it's inhumane, it's non empathetic, it's profit seeking, it's overworked, and questions about empathy and community and power they're just not associated with tech generally. What was the impetus to create the Logic School in this way? It was exactly what you just said. I mean, there's very few spaces to talk about power, to talk about you know, how do we

be empathetic? I mean there's places like after work extracurriculars where you can learn how to be a better engineer, right, like, how do I do better JavaScript on the job? Like all these things, um, but logic school really response to that. There's no space where it's like, I'm a tech worker and I'm having kind of a crisis about what my company is doing. How do I bring in empathy into

the workplace. It was actually interesting because some people definitely try to bring in empathy from what they learned at logic School into the workplace and it got shut down. So I think it also says a lot about just the way the tech industry is structured and what they want to maintain. When you create this program, you invite these people in meeting every week, what do you want

them to leave with? Honestly, I think that as part of rethinking what school is, I think everyone came in with a different goal because that's also like very different than a job, right. A job is like we create this space for you to do one thing. We have these expectations of how you do on your job, and

you will be evaluated by every quarter. We had one person who worked at Twitter during the length of the President who I will not say his name, and you know, had a lot of just personal all these like traumas, right, and spent logic school processing through that and actually, you know, talking about trust and safety more broadly, we had another person who is actually building this incredible augmented reality app now in Pittsburgh and his whole app for his community

to like celebrate black life in Pittsburgh and to really counter these narratives of disappearance and gentrification. So it's a whole range of what people wanted out of it, but just trying to be like, hey, this this could be a different tech That's why we're here. You know, I've been frustrated myself at the lack of imagination and in some ways I've said, we've taken some of the most powerful machines that we've ever built and some of the smartest people that we've ever had, and applied it to

like shipping ads. It's a very underwhelming use of a superpower. I want to know more about you. You've been a tech worker. Yeah, so there was this moment where I was working in tech and it was and Trump got elected and like all tech companies in the Bay Area.

At the time, you know, the CEO gives kind of a little speech about like, this terrible thing has happened, and now we have to realize that what we do every day at our company is changing the world and improving the world, and we still have to do it. And it's actually fighting against like Trump and all of what this like right wing is um is doing. I'm all fired up in tingling and stuff. Okay, braveheart speech, right. Yeah.

At the same time, I was sitting there and I was like, but our company is funded by like Dared Kushner's brother, all these threads of funding. You know, it's every quarter the venture capitalists who fund the company, they come in and there's always this kind of standoff, right like they're like, we need to see returns. This is how you should change your business plan, this is how

you should run your company. And then it trickles down to us, like the engineers working day to day, it's like, oh, that thing you were working on, actually it doesn't matter anymore.

We're like pivoting to this new thing. And so just realizing one this kind of culture of not care but really bottom line returns, and then too the idea that we're doing something to better the world, to change the world, and yet you know, our work was really making making other people rich essentially UM and not helping communities directly. That I think gave me a sense of disillusionment. I'd love to UM know a bit more about your path.

And I know you've written a book whose title just makes me crack up every time I hear it, Blockchain Chicken Farm. What experiences did you have in tech that led you to rural China to write a book called block Change Chicken for? My friend Jason came up with that title, and I was just like so snappy. You know. There was also a lot of anti China of rhetoric

at the time. They're still continues to be, but just this idea that there's this foreign power battle of the civilization stuff going on UM, and I really wanted to, you know, question that idea that it's like, you know, US versus China, and China is this foreign place that's so different and scary. And I think the approach I really wanted to take was to humanize UM and to tell these stories on the ground of folks in rural China. It made sense to me also because we really ignore

the rural um. I mean not just in the US, but also in China, where it's just like we paint these pictures in broad strokes of like what country side people are like, and then it's actually way more complicated and it connects to like a global story too, about you know, agriculture, economics, all these like big picture systems complicate China for me with the sites, the smells, the sounds, the tastes that you experience that we miss out on when we over generalize. I mean, I miss it so

much because I haven't been able to travel. So I'm sorry if I get like nostalgic or emotional, I will open a circle for you to have these feelings. Oh, you know, my time in real China, there were villages that I would go to um several times, like twice a year, and it felt like a sense of returning home. Whenever you get to a village, it's this really beautiful thing where the first thing they ask is have you

eaten yet? And there's just such a priority and value placed on food, especially you know for rural places where a lot of the times, you know there might be famine, there might not be enough to eat, and so people present you with this like bowl of rice and sometimes there's little dots on it in the rice because of insects that have eaten the rice. And it just is this feeling of like, oh, like you're literally giving me food from your own grain store and feeling really touched

by that. What misunderstandings do you think people like us have us in the US and the West in general. What misunderstandings do we have about tech in China? I would say the biggest misunderstanding that I've seen, I mean, especially in relation to this anti China stuff, is that like China is they're stealing everything right um, and that there is absolutely zero freedom that you know, somehow the people of China are complicit in what its government does,

you know? And when you're in rural China, which is still like the population, folks are just living day to day, trying to get by, making money, harvesting their crops, thinking about their kids in their next generation and how they're going to pay the school bills. Sounds very relatable. You know what they sound like? Shall we? They sound like people exactly. We've gotten to a point where it's hard to see beyond certain narratives. We we got to get to the title and and how your book landed on

blockchain Chicken farm. The book is full of store words of people from the rural parts of China. What's the story that led to this title Chinese economic development? It happened really fast, in the span of like twenty thirty years. So when you have gross that fast, things are going to happen. The block chain chickens really came out of this one small farmer in Guido Province where he was raising free range chickens, and no one believed him that

they were free range. There's such distrust. So he said, I've got these free range chickens. They're like, you're lying, prove it. So he was like some county official came in was like, well, you should put these chickens on the block chain. Paul is right there. That's just not a normal government response, you know, Like I just I can't imagine like my DMV manager or some FDA official here in the US like you should put this livestock

on the blockchain. What does that even mean. So there's all these small tech companies in China who I think just wat government contracts, and the one company offered this product that was like, you know, the blockchain is this ledger um so record keeping system that can't change or falsify, right, so you could say, like the chicken is a pent free range, and then it got sent to this slaughterhouse and it was slaughtered on X y Z date and now it's at your doorstep um. And these chickens were

heavily tracked. It was really wild, like it's like a giant chicken surveillance network. Yes, there was actually a dashboard where you could watch the chickens through cameras. This is weirdly dystopic and hilarious and progressive all at the same time. I know, right, it's like, oh, you could definitely see that Portlandia sketch where they're like this chicken has been massage and here's a picture of it. Here is the chicken you'll get joined tonight. This is fantastic. Absolutely. His

name was Colin. So farmer needs people to believe that his chickens are free range. County officials like, I know, we prove it with the blockchain. Put these chickens on the block chain. Did it work? Did it help the farmer when he had this distributed certification through the blockchain ledger. So I will say that it really did work. He sold all of his chickens. Um the chickens each had this gnarly chicken fitbit is like this bracelet. Stop you're

killing me. So they had a chicken okay, yeah, and the tracker had a QR code. But when they slaughtered the chicken, they actually keep the tracker on. So you can buy the chicken online. And so when you get the chicken, it's like this dead chicken, but it still has this wrist thing attached to it. It's really a site. So the chickens got a little chicken apple watch, you know, which is like tracking its health. Does the person who buys the chicken do they read that little tracker themselves

to kind of inspect it. Yeah, they can scan the QR code and then read about it. So there's like a picture of the chicken, how much the chicken waight at birth, how many steps it took, because there's like a phenomena like all the chicken got it sent thousand steps in let's eat. So this is what you've just done, as you've brought a Portlandia sketch to life. The truth

is stranger than fiction. Oh so this sounds like a victory farmer gets people to believe his chickens are free range because he's got the blockchain proof, sells out of his chickens and now is like the biggest farmer in rural China. What's how does this story proceed? Um? Sadly, I think that this is another one of those situations when we say, like we're building tech to quote unquote improve people's lives. It's like, well, who for who you know?

Who do you count as your people and your community? And this farmer was kind of abandoned by that tech company and for the next season he's he's good at raising chickens and thinking about chicken life. Um, he's not a programmer. And when I asked him, you know, how do you feel about blockchain? He was like, what's blockchain? Um, which, to be honest, is a question that I think most

of us would ask, right, like what's black chain? But there was really a sense that he became like dependent on this very opaque product that he had no control over, and when they pivot and when it becomes about profit the bottom line, they had to move on to other projects. How else have you seen tech companies exploiting folks in world China, I would say with the e commerce villages, Um, that was really fascinating because you know, the tech companies

they say, hey, we're providing livelihoods to the countryside. You know, now you can work from anywhere and manufacture Halloween costumes or you know, wooden block toys for taboo. And it sounds great. I mean it really does. You can stay, you can work from home. Where have I heard this before? Continue and work from home is going to be like the mantra of our century. And yeah, so these folks they would be, you know, basically making Halloween costumes out

of their home workshops. Um. I saw old people like their grandparents and uh, you know great aunts like helping with the manufacturing and the packaging and the shipping. So it was really a family business or you know, some people might call it like family self exploitation. Um. There was definitely this like rosy scene that the official government line was trying to paint like this is poverty alleviation,

it's giving people like digital literacy skills. But then when I actually started talking to some folks that are like, this is like a scam, and we know it and we're just trying to like get it while it's good and make money while we can. So they were saying that the sellers, if you're selling on the platform, you

have to pay fees, you have to buy ads. It's like a race to the bottom to try and cut costs, and you're just making cheaper and cheaper items, um that are really flimsy, that are like you use it once and it falls apart. But they're like, this is just all part of the game and in a few years this might not work, but we're going to get rich while we can. And so it was interesting, you know, to to see just like again this reliance on a platform and how much control that e commerce platforms had

over sellers. We have the same story in the United States and in other Western countries. Um. We've been talked about it on this podcast about Amazon, uh, mostly in the US and how this race to the bottom. So the idea that the same stories playing out on the literal other side of the world in communities we don't identify with because we don't take time to know about them. It's really upsetting, um and not that surprising. When I

pause to think about it, I will say. I also saw other small villages that were enacting totally ambitious projects. For example, I visited this um rice farming village, Rice Harmony. That's that sounds great, Rice Harmony, I like that. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely. Their vibe is like, you know, very community oriented, and they were really trying to push against top down initiatives um and reliance on like whether it's one technology or like one government policy. Yeah, so this other way

is um definitely a little bit more difficult. After the break, we go to Rice Harmony Village. So shall we tell me about the Rice Harmony Village project? And what about it is so different. So rice farming is in this region, it's terraced and so each farmer has their own little patty and the water flows from the top to the bottom,

and it's this kind of natural irrigation. And so for a long time they were using high scale, up, high yield tactics like pesticides and fertilizers and really quote unquote modern agriculture, and they were noticing that, you know, there was a decline in their soil, decline in just like their crops and like the nutrition content of the rice.

And so they started to do this lottery system where you wouldn't have contiguous patty, so you might have one patty at the top, you might have one patty at the bottom, have a different neighbor every five years, and so as a result of this, you are really materially interconnected to others. Like you know, if you spray pesticides or dam off water, you're going to affect your neighbors,

but you also might be affecting like yourself. And it's through this system that they decided to do organic regenerative farming, which does not really quote unquotes gale up right. It's all about like thinking about scale across time and different generations and like the soil, you know, twenty years from now, rather than like how are we going to make as much rice as possible this next year? Yeah, why were

they using the pesticides in the first place? It was really about yield, right, Like it's just this form of UM having granular control over your yield. If you're like, I see what you did there, granular control. Glad you appreciated that the lottery system sounds like a super creative way to engineer UM community and interconnectedness, Because if I'm just looking out for myself. I don't only care about the runoff, but if my lots are no longer contiguous,

then my interest is in the runoff two. And so I'm forced to care about my neighbor. I'm basically I am my name her. That's kind of mind blowing. How did they come up with that system? It was a really beautiful system. And when they were telling me about it, I didn't expect it to go there, but they were saying that for a long time. It really came out of their practices of helping each other harvest every year.

It was always like, oh, my family is harvesting the rice in my patty, but also like the neighbors are helping to and we're just all sharing everything. We're sharing you know, equipment, we're sharing labor. We're like helping each other out. And so the patty lottery system really stemmed out of that um this kind of longer, longer community practice. And you know, they made it very clear to me

that it was not easy. They'd like showed me photos and they'd be like, yeah, that guy he always like, you know, we have meetings to talk about this system and the lottery and who's doing what and that guy's always like stirring up trouble, and that lady she's never satisfide. And our community meetings they take like hours and no one likes going to them, but we all show up. You know, it's scale interpreted differently, small scale on purpose. A lot of us are just accepted what's delivered to

us by the massive commercial interests. But in your Rice Harmony village example, they developed their own tools at their own lower tech which suited their needs. Honestly, we need to question the tools that we are given and really push our imaginations. We've used like the most incredible tech to now sell ads, and I think just like thinking about what we're doing with these tools, like through the span of time and not just the immediate one year

five year return. That's that's really key. How did your experiences in rural China shape your views of tech and of tech work and tech organizing. You seem to believe something a little differently on the other side of that

experience than you did before. In seeing places like Rice Harmony, where the conversations are difficult, they take hours, there's a kind of patience the villagers would be telling me like, oh yeah, sometimes we get into fights and like, you know, we let it simmer and we pick it up the

next day. I think it really countered my you know approach to organizing as well, where it's like, you know, let things be unresolved, you know, don't push the conversation, take time, take patience, move at the speed of trust and care rather than I need to like get these ten sign ups for the union, right, and that also you know, seeing right places like rice harmony. It's like the act of talking to people and just being with them.

That's the work, right, that's the transformation. Like whatever happens, whether you win or lose the campaign, it's really about just creating that kind of relation that is that is powerful. Mm hmm yeah, instead of move fast and break things, you know, move slower and build things. It's like trust like relationships the stem brain of science, tech, engineering math. I think there's a little bit of a stereotype to it, in the same way that we have some stereotypes about

rural China. But there is a pressure out of so many of these products that most of us use for efficiency. It's like how do I avoid discomfort? We pay for it in some way or the other. It may feel faster and more efficient, but there's a cost on the back end. Like you said, move at the speed of trust. Uh, there's something else to be gained by that. That's so powerful. Thank you. I love your framing of it as this avoidance of discomfort. It speaks to really power to write

like who gets to decide? Well, this is the new experience that everyone in the world should have. So how does your work at the largest school address some of the types of exploitation you were seeing firsthand in rural China. Yeah, so in in a few ways. I feel like there's one threat of Logic School, which is about what are

the ways that we can change industry from the inside. So, you know, there are folks um at Amazon, like Amazonians for Climate Justice, UM, people who are organizing and trying to really think about these things, right, and it's like, no, we're gonna build tech that is different. UM. So it's more of the like you know, Rice Harmony stance where it's like, well, you know, forget about everything else, We're just going to go our own way. And I think

both approaches are urgent and much needed right now. Right UM and Logic School it's really about like cultivate dating, nurturing, and like thinking through these different threads and also supporting folks who are doing this on the ground right now. I'm really glad that your answer to like should we reform from within or build something new out is both? So so let's push your imagination. You've done your first cohort with Logic School, when you've had your inaugural class,

what comes next? What's your vision for where this this school goes, and this experience goes. And I feel like out of the first cohort of Logic School, seeing people organize do these incredible projects, It's like, how can we continue to support the first cohort but also future cohorts on like doing these projects that they do want to carry out in the world right so that they're not like can I quit my tech job and pursue what

I'm actually passionate about and is meaningful and impactful. I think there needs to be a huge amount of culture shift, and I think that is happening. Whenever I talked to new grads from you know, computer science programs, I'm like, wow, you are like so aware, you are so thoughtful, You like know more about radical history than like some professors

I've spoken to like, yes, I love that. UM. So I guess in that sense, I feel optimistic about the culture shifts that are coming and then regulation of what what we currently are facing in the US at least is there a place in those two or maybe something you haven't identified the regulation the culture shift? What is Logic schools role in getting us there? I feel like

it's definitely in the culture shift area. But I also think creating these open, expansive spaces for folks to dream about, you know, a better tech industry or better tech UM that is to me really urgent because we don't have a lot of spaces to do that. Right. Even if you do, like a startup incubator, we're like, we're gonna build better tech. It's like, what's the bottom line? What's your pitch deck? UM? And Logic School is really about creating that expansive space and to dream to rest. We

really care about rest at Logic School. UM to have that fire going for reflection, fire for reflection. It's the anti hustle propaganda and in a great spirit of a new type of energy that I would also love to see. We call the show how to citizen. Citizen is a verb to us not a legal status to be weaponized against certain communities. And when you interpret this word as a verb, what does it mean to you, two citizen?

It's about showing up. It's about really showing up. I think it also requires a degree of listening, um, you know, and compassion, right, And so I think of this like listen to understand the ways that you're sharing space, the ways that your decisions affect and inform and change conditions for others. So I think we use the word show up like really casually, but to do it and to really, like,

you know, citizens, that's difficult, right. I want you to picture a motivated, fired up person ready to show up, and they're like, oh, blockchain, chickens, rice, living in harmony, tech workers with empathy, put me in coach, What can

I do? You know? There's this great phrase from Buddhism, clean the temple, so that you can actually sit get yourself health and your home and your family and where you're coming from right before you're like, I'm going to go to the temple and like talk to other people now. So I feel like that's been my work for a few years. It's just like cleaning the temple and then

from there. You know, if there's an organization that you want to be organizing with, email them, show up and listen and be patient and be willing to have the

you know, difficult conversations. Very lastly, like have empathy. I've noticed that sometimes even in communities where we're like trying to organize or do different initiatives and we feel like we're bettering the world in some way, it can be really easy to be like we just want to win, Like we can't trample over people's feelings, having a live joy, you know, take care of each other movement, like I think,

at the heart of it, that's the work. I'm so happy to hear that the industry and a capital T capital I the tech industry has done a really good job of selling a narrative of what tech is and who a tech worker is and what he most likely looks like, and then the media amplifies that. So the public mind around what tech even is, it's very narrowly oriented. And so if we can contribute to shifting that mindset, expanding that imagination, will be better off. And we're certainly

better off for having spoken with you. So thank you so much, Shaowei Wang tarot reader, philosopher, professor, activist, organizer, blockchain chicken farmer, advocate keeping it real. Appreciate you, Thank you very tin day. I appreciate you. Thank you for

having me by. Now we're all well aware that technolog lergy can and often is used to take advantage of people, but it can also help us to connect, to empathize with one another, to strengthen the bonds of trust and transparency that we so deeply crave in our communities, and to accomplish that bigger ain't always better. I would argue,

in fact, that it's it's rarely better. Shawegh is redefining what it means to be a tech worker, that the world at tech doesn't have to be all hoodies and energy drinks, that it can be, like a tarot reading, a place that opens up a space to listen to others and to hold up a mirror to ourselves, because the truth is, the world is just one big rice harmony village, and what we do in our communities trickles

down to impact others. Whether those impacts are good or bad, that's up to us and the way we choose to use tech. It can isolate or it can unite. When the ever evolving world of technology tells us to move fast and break things, we've got to be the ones to slow down and listen, to show up, to step back and open the circle. Next time, for our final episode, we're asking an important question, how do we bridge the

digital divide so that everyone can citizen. I'll be honest with you, I was so overwhelmed because I did not have that level of connection to technology, and just the phone ringing and trying to text and people calling and pictures popping up, and I felt some anxiety and I didn't expect that. And now it is time for some actions. No tarot reading required. A lot of which you're about to hear comes directly from shall weigh so extra appreciation to them for giving me things to give you to do.

The first is an internal reflection. Think of what consent and care means to you, and think of what consent ful and careful tech would look like, would function like, would feel like, What relationships would be strengthened by that kind of tech? What might be shadowed? Next, let's get informed about tech critiques and some better ways of doing things with tech. Read about platform co ops. We have a link to a great explainer in the show notes.

These are digital platforms think of like a ride share or delivery service, but they're collectively owned and governed by the people who depend on and participate in them, not just a handful of investors looking to turn their one million into ten million. Also follow the work of the Gig Workers Collective. This is a group that shines a light on and advocates for people who work at the other end of our smartphone taps and swipes. It really

humanizes their experience. And most of us don't work in that part of the economy, but we all engage with it. So let's have more information about the impact of that engagement. Speaking of engagement, here's some ways to step it up a notch and publicly participate. Support community Internet and technology groups. These are organizations like the Detroit Community Technology Project, NYC MESH Oakland MESH. They provide local internet access, tech training

and tools by of and for the people. It's democratic technology and check out this one uh The Tech Worker Handbook by Ifoma a Zoma. This is a collection of resources to better prepare and support tech workers who are considering whether they should speak out on issues that are in the public interest, like should they whistle blow? You know what I'm saying, So recommend this to a tech worker near you, but please do them and our general freedom of favor, don't send it to their work email. Right,

Let's be smart about that now. Look, We've got links to all of this and more at how do Citizen dot com and in the episode show notes as usual. Check us out on Instagram at how the Citizen tag us in your posts about this episode? How did Shaowei make you feel? Do you want them to do your tarot? Hashtag how the Citizen? And let us know how this one hates you? Stay tuned and keep citizen. How Do Citizen? With barituone Day is a production of I Heart Radio

Podcasts and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are Me Barrett tune Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusa. Our senior producer is Tamika Adams, our producer is Ali Kilts, and our assistant producer is Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cohen is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Laie is our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional original music for season two from Andrew Clausen, additional

production help from Arwin Nicks. This episode was produced and sound designed by Matthew Laie. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at dust Light Productions.