The base color of nine hundred million people

1. The base color of the county town

Last year a WeChat post went viral. The gist was:

Sex and mahjong are the base color of more than 2,000 county towns in China.

Sounds crude on the surface. Think about it for a second and it's more or less right. Close to nine hundred million people are living in towns like that, busy with the basics of being alive, busy getting through the day. No grand narratives, no "tracks" and no "tailwinds". Days are just days.

The feeling is especially strong when I go home for Chinese New Year. There are more mahjong parlors than milk-tea shops on the street. After dinner, entertainment is finding three other people for a table. The grown-ups talk about whose kid passed the civil-service exam, whose family just built a new house, whose business isn't doing as well this year. The same topics circle around year after year, but for them, that is the full weight of life.

2. What is AI

If you grab someone at random in a county town and ask "what is AI", you'll probably get one of these:

• The civil-servant: "Oh, heard of it. Not allowed to use it at work."
• The small-business owner: "Don't need that thing. I'm not writing papers."
• The slightly more curious one: "Doubao I know, it's the search thing right?"

Tell him about GPT-4, Claude, Midjourney, and he looks at you like you're speaking an alien language. Tell him Seedance 2.0 can generate video now and he'll politely nod, then ask "can it help me do my accounts?"

It's not that they're stupid. It's that this stuff is too far from their lives. They don't need an AI to organize their notes, don't need a cyberpunk-style image, don't need a large model to write a polite English email for them. What they need is for their kid's tuition to stop going up, for business to be a little better than last year, and to win a hundred bucks at mahjong.

3. Two parallel worlds

Those of us in tech scroll Hacker News and Product Hunt every day, talk about when AGI is coming, which model just topped the leaderboard. We live inside a bubble of extreme information density and assume the whole world is paying attention to AI, that anyone not using it is falling behind.

Go back to a county town and you see it: between this bubble and the daily lives of nine hundred million people, there's an invisible wall.

It's not just the digital divide. The digital divide is "can't use it". County towns are mostly "don't need to use it". The infrastructure is fine. The need itself isn't there. It's hard to explain to an aunt who haggles at the wet market every day why she would need an AI assistant.

4. Who gets to define "smart"

The funny thing is, we habitually equate "knowing about new tech" with "smart". But the people in county towns who run a thriving business, who keep a household running like clockwork, who carve out their own rhythm inside limited resources — they are not less wise than anyone.

Their wisdom just doesn't have to show up through prompt engineering.

There's also a small group there who are genuinely curious, who know about Doubao but use it like Baidu. What image generation is, what Seedance 2.0 is, doesn't matter and isn't needed. That's not ignorance, that's pragmatism. They know clearly what they need and what they don't.

Flip it around: those of us chasing every new model and feature — is it really because we "need" it? Or is it just FOMO?

5. To close

The base color of nine hundred million people isn't backwardness. It's reality.

We love measuring other people's lives by our own coordinate system, assuming that not using AI means falling behind, that playing mahjong is wasting your life. But there has never been just one way to live.

Going back to that small mountain town for the holidays, watching the mahjong parlors lit up along the street, hearing the steady clatter of tiles being shuffled, I suddenly thought: this is pretty good, too.

Not everyone needs to be "empowered". Some people are just living their lives.