Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang

Author:Xiaowei Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5.

Naomi Wu is a cyborg. On a rainy day, I am scheduled to meet her at the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab. I am extremely nervous because I want Naomi Wu to like me.

There are Asian women in STEM, and then there’s Naomi Wu—she’s brilliant, but even more remarkable is her fearlessness in letting her brilliance be admired. Naomi was born human, but she is a self-proclaimed cyborg, a definition made obvious when you watch her videos. She’s forthcoming about her cyborg body modifications, including breast implants that light up when she dons a special corset she’s designed and built.

Her videos are energetic and witty. Some cover her projects and are instructional, showcasing her engineering prowess to an international audience: a Wi-Fi mini drone inspired by Neuromancer; a DIY retro Game Boy kit. Other videos show real-life Shenzhen on the ground, as she visits makerspaces and electronics markets.

While Asian women make up a huge portion of engineering professions in the United States, they are often left out of management and leadership roles. In fact, being Asian creates a disadvantage to becoming a leader in tech—Asians are the group least likely to be promoted from individual contributor (i.e., an engineer) to management.2 This data point should not be taken as a cry of inequity for Asian Americans—it’s instead reflective of systemic ways that racial categories work under capitalism in the United States. Asians are presented as soft-spoken, hardworking, and quiet, the “model minority,” something that has always sent an alarming message to me: that you can have restricted success if you just comply with the rules, even if the rules are problematic. In a harsher light, these characteristics also signal obedience and acquiescence, characteristics that seem innate to the mindless drone workers I imagined in my uncle’s factory.

In the United States, Asians are rarely seen as innovative. Because, after all, to be innovative is to be bold, daring, and brash. Within popular tech discourse, these qualities are more often ascribed to Western white men—heroic inventors with astonishing capacities, like John Galt from Atlas Shrugged. The more time I spend with Naomi, I realize: How often is it that a person of color is said to be innovating? How often in the United States do we hear about any other country innovating, especially a non-Western country?

In person, Naomi is down-to-earth and just as energetic as in her videos. She’s taller than I expected. Her humility is startling—even though she has hundreds of videos with numerous original projects, she still refers to herself as a DIY tech enthusiast.

And I am struck by her relationship to machines, and to her own body. In the same way hardware can have different enclosures, she says, she sees her own body as an enclosure. She performs body modification because she believes “you have to give the computer what it wants.” She anticipates a world of computer vision algorithms on video platforms that increase rankings based on the content of the video, with platforms placing “attractive women” first in search results.

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