Interview: Xiaowei Wang on tech, China, writing through your emotions, & the power of community

Creatives in Tech Interview Series, Issue #1

This week, I’m introducing a new interview series on creatives working at the intersection of writing and tech. As a writer and UX researcher, I know firsthand how challenging it can be to balance both worlds, and also how rewarding. In this series, I’ll talk to fellow writers in tech to learn how they navigate these seemingly disparate career paths and passions, hear about their latest work, and what advice they have for other creatives in the field.

First up, we’ll hear from Xiaowei Wang, artist, writer, technologist, and Creative Director at Logic Magazine, author of the recently published Blockchain Chicken Farm, and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley.

Xiaowei Wang on tech and China, writing through your emotions, and the power of community

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

I'm that person who you're like, what do you do exactly? I think the quick summary and keywords would be “multicultural tech writing with nor Cal vibes.”

You’ve had a unique  journey into and through tech, in a variety of roles—engineering, design, teaching, writing—at startups as well as in academic environments. How did you first become interested in tech, and how would you describe your path into your current role?

I was really interested in ecology and the environment and went to design school for landscape architecture. I became more seriously invested in how design and engineering shape people's everyday experiences of not only their environment, but their understanding of what it means to live well. A lot of the tools used in designing spaces and parks are software, and I went down the rabbit hole of thinking through the limitations of software, and how the tools you use can restrict or shape what you end up designing for folks or how you think about the communities that you're designing for. So then I thought, I should become a software engineer to figure this out. It was kind of a long winding route, but I think those core values still guide me a lot in what I do.

Recently you’ve also taken up writing. How does writing fit in for you?

Maybe to the outside it doesn't look like it, but for me, it all relates. My work really moves from that place of values. Now that I've begun to shift more towards writing, I am thinking about how I want to write, whose voices I center, and the purpose of writing. There's one mode of writing where you're explaining things, and you say, here's this phenomenon—feel scared, or enlightened, or whatever. And then there's another mode of writing, which is giving people something—like a tool, or a way of being, understanding, or interacting in the world. And I'm drawn to that second mode because that's kind of like the feeling of making software: you're giving people this prosthetic or thing to mediate or see the world anew. And that feels really exciting.

I also write a lot about tech. I just finished a piece for Mozilla recently about inventing new Chinese characters to bypass automated censorship. It’s creativity versus human creativity versus the machine. 

Thinking about your experience, which cuts across both writing and tech, what feels more like “home” to you? Do you identify more with one side or the other? 

Right now, writer's not the first thing that I would list for myself, even though I wrote a book. I think of the term “writer,” especially growing up, as the lone, white male genius, or white female genius, penning things in her room by herself, very aristocratic, having mental breakdowns—and that's totally not what my life is like. 

I have been using the term “artist” because it’s broad. It encompasses everything and it's loose enough where people can pick and choose. If I'm getting paid to do a China tech talk that's more policy oriented, you can list I'm a PhD at Berkeley. Or if I'm doing something outside of that, you can list these other things. I've begun to sweat it a lot less. Y'all can describe me for your convenient purposes however you need. 

A peer mentor of mine, An Xiao Mina, said, you can do all these things, but also you need something for people to grasp on to. And it's not less of a reflection of yourself. It’s just helpful framing for others. It’s less about branding, because I have personal problems with that, and more just means that if someone needs to hire a researcher or writer who looks at tech in China with a more human oriented approach, they can think of me. Talking to mentors really helped me finesse that it’s more an approach to getting work than trying to brand myself to be a thought leader.

You recently wrote a book, Blockchain Chicken Farm. Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing, called it “A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism.” What is your book about, and why did you dedicate the last few years of your life to this project? 

It’s really a book that shows the unusual and surprising ways that we are deeply entangled between the U.S. and China, despite all narratives of separation or wanting to separate. I think that is really important, especially given all the anti-China sentiment, and especially looking at rural China. Going to rural China, seeing how all these things that were supposed to be bad for climate change, like manufacturing—and really looking at it on the ground—it's much more complex and nuanced the way that tech is changing people's lives in rural China. So I felt that I had to write this book. Especially after 2016, the way that people talked about the countryside—globally, not just in the U.S. but also across Europe—there was this idea that ‘the populists in the countryside don't know anything’. Looking at it, it's this longer, more complicated history of economic dispossession and a failure to equally provide services. 

So you felt this calling, really, to explore this topic. How did that calling turn into a book deal? 

I think this goes to the question of community, and the people who are going to support your work. Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel at Logic Magazine have been steeped in the New York publishing world for ages. And so they said, FSG (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) wants us to do this book series of four books. And at the time I had just written this very brief article for Logic, a fun piece, like ‘I was in rural China, it was great.’ And it had gotten a lot of clicks. And everyone at Logic said, ‘Oh, Xiaowei, you should just write a book on this.’ So I did. And without those connections, I definitely wouldn't have gotten my foot in the door at all. 

The book is not told from a distance— it includes your voice and experience as a character. Why was it important to do that? 

There's this whole realm of tech writing that’s very much at a distance. There's a lot of ‘Americans in XYZ place’ books written, and, especially in the tradition of more policy or tech oriented books, all of those books follow an expert, usually a white man, who goes to this foreign country. I'm this person, I view this trend that's happening, and ‘everything's bad’ is usually the conclusion. Oftentimes the author doesn't even enter the picture. I hate to say it, but it's a bit of a delusional view of the world to say: here are the trends, just accept them, accept all these things I'm saying as future fact. And also, the author who wrote this has nothing invested in it—not morally, not economically—just ignore that. 

Even now, the bad reviews that I get for my book say, ‘this wasn't the business book that I thought it was, why is the author in it so much? It's not giving me the hot trends and insights into tech and China.’ And that is all in the sphere of receiving a performance from the people you're interviewing. If I am doing research in China and my friend is there, who's not Chinese, they are given a performance, and everyone's so nice to them. For me, people think I must be from Hong Kong or something, so I'm just not given that performance. And I think it's super important to acknowledge that. I really tried with my book to push it more towards the poetic, and bring in some framing to help people. 

What was the actual experience of writing a book like for you?

It was sometimes really lovely when the flow's going. But other times it's like there's a giant rock and you're chipping at it with this tiny, tiny chisel. And you think, maybe I should just give up, I don't know. How did people do this? And then oscillating between, ‘Oh my God, what if everyone reads this?’ And, ‘Oh my God, what if no one reads this?’ It's a pretty weird process. 

Writing is sometimes really lovely when the flow's going. But other times it's like there's a giant rock and you're chipping at it with this tiny, tiny chisel. 

I think the hardest part was getting over myself. I had to go to a lot of therapy. It was weirdly emotional. Getting stuck in a random village in rural China for the night—that was actually totally fine, if not amusing, and happened a lot. But yeah, the emotional stuff. Wow.

What’s one thing that you learned about yourself in the writing process?

I learned that feeling like other people want to know what I have to say is not a natural feeling for me. My natural tendency is to think: don’t look at me, no one wants to hear from me, why would anyone read this? Through therapy I was able to shift that mindset. I mean, for some people it just comes naturally. It's really crazy.

In addition to writing your book, you are also the Creative Director for Logic. How does your work at Logic fit in?

The great part about running a magazine is that we get to meet interesting people. We commission writers to write and do research. We actually don’t pay ourselves—it’s very much a passion project. It’s great because it’s cultivating this intellectual community that I get to be part of while enabling other channels of output on the ground to exist. 

The community part is so key and I wish that someone had told me that starting off, but no one tells you that. Even if you go to school for a creative degree, they never say: Actually the most important thing is not the work that you're making. The most important thing is the community that you want to be part of. And who's going to be your friend after you graduate. 

The most important thing is not the work that you're making. The most important thing is the community that you want to be part of. 

Why is community so important?

It's really the people who are going to give you feedback and amplify, critique, support your work. At school you watch one film and it's the classic film; there’s a universality to it. And then you think, I'm going to make a film; it’s going to be part of the canon and speak to everyone. And then later on you realize the most powerful works were made with a specific audience or community in mind. And it had context to it. 

I get emails from younger folks who want to know how I got to where I am and how I make money. And the first thing that I noticed is they say, Oh, well I really want to have more time for my art. And I say, okay, well say you're making art. Where do you get feedback from? And they're kind of stumped, and say, well, I'm just going to make it and it's going to be good. Or, I'm going to post it on Instagram and I'll get some likes. But thinking about what is that sustainable community that you're building is really important.

What advice do you have for other artists in tech occupying this interdisciplinary space?

I think people enter it for a lot of different reasons. But I think what it comes down to is think about what you want to learn rather than ‘what am I good at?’. I see a lot of people who become so obsessed with ‘what am I good at?’, that it can be difficult to move on from there, or to have more of a growth mindset.

What’s next for you?

I've been parsing through research on herbalism. This is related to ecology—herbalism, land, thinking through notions of the body, especially as it's shaped by medical tech. I would love to write more about it, but haven't figured out the venue. I think it will be a book, but a much different book. Hopefully more collaborative. That's the other weird thing about writing a book—I realized I was interviewing all these people and that this wouldn't have happened without them, but at the same time, I'm still the author. 

You want to give your collaborators a greater voice.

Yes, exactly that, but people are like, ‘this is not the way the industry works’. Maybe that’s too norCal and hippy [laughs].

Xiaowei Wang is the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm & Other Stories, now available at a bookstore near you. They are also the brains behind the recently launched Logic School, an online, experimental school for tech workers designed to cultivate community and critical thinking to transform the tech industry. 

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