Sometimes one ends up reviewing the book one read rather than the one that was written. Lin Zhang’s The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy is more sociology than tech, more labor theory than business. But it is also a granular, grass-roots, bottom-up view of the past couple of decades of the development of China’s digital landscape. As such, she provides color and detail to the developments that have been covered in a far more generalized and ad hoc way as business stories.

The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, Lin Zhang (Columbia University Press, March 2023)
The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, Lin Zhang (Columbia University Press, March 2023)

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. Problematizing worldwide euphoria about digital entrepreneurship while complicating the dichotomy of “China threat vs. China model”, The Labor of Reinvention attends to the everyday labor of digital-centered entrepreneurial reinvention vis-à-vis China’s national remaking amid global technological transformations and changing geopolitical currents.

Problems arising from the Internet are generally thought of in terms of misinformation, violation of privacy, addiction to gadgets, depression brought on by social media, and manipulation of personal data for advertising and political ends by the Big Tech. In Asia, these problems take on even graver proportions as governments play a greater role in regulating access to the content available on the web. 

In India, caste can determine power and privilege. Indian fiction captures the nature of this power and privilege in different ways. Some novels depict the characters belonging to lower castes (Dalits) as victims (for instance, Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchables, one of the early classics of Indian English fiction) and some as villains in the sense of anti-heroes (the 2008 Booker winner Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger).

It is an accident of history that most information technology, from Morse Code to the Internet, was developed in and for English-speaking countries. English, with just 26 letters and no accents or diacritical marks, means that everything from keyboards to displays to internal character codings are simple, deceptively so, because almost no other language makes life that easy. As a result, developers adopted solutions which have bedeviled information technology in other languages ever since. If developers are being honest, they would probably admit that solutions for languages from French and Russian to Arabic and Thai are (to use the technical term) kludged-up versions of products first designed for English. 

 We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law, Simon Chesterman (Oxford University Press, September 2021)

We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law
, Simon Chesterman (Cambridge University Press, September 2021)

Should we regulate artificial intelligence? Can we? From self-driving cars and high-speed trading to algorithmic decision-making, the way we live, work, and play is increasingly dependent on AI systems that operate with diminishing human intervention. These fast, autonomous, and opaque machines offer great benefits—and pose significant risks.

“China’s new global status as a rising technology power”, as the editors of this new study put it, has increasingly engendered alarmed, if not alarmist, rhetoric by Western politicians and commentators. The combined response of Innovation and China’s Global Emergence, a new collection of academic essays that attempts a ground-up review of the issue, might be summarized as “take a breath”.

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.