Finding a Different Future Between Technology and Culture

A few months ago, FateTell moved into a new office in Hangzhou. On opening day, we met Bay Area journalist Afra Wang near the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu. That encounter later became the opening scene of her story for The New Yorker.

Wang documented the Liangzhu of today: a community of AI builders leaving conventional career paths and finding new ways to work and live among nature, close-knit communities, and new technological tools. FateTell appears in the story as one of those teams, sharing how we build here and how we are trying to reconnect AI with Eastern culture.

Founded in 1925, The New Yorker is one of America’s best-known publications for reporting and culture. Its century-long editorial tradition spans in-depth journalism, criticism, fiction, art, and humor. Today, it continues to document a changing world through print, digital publishing, audio, and film.

As technology changes the world at unprecedented speed, we care about whether people can still understand themselves and choose their own direction. FateTell brings new AI capabilities together with Eastern wisdom developed over thousands of years. Our aim is to help people see where they stand, find direction amid uncertainty, rediscover themselves in nature, and understand meaning on a wider scale.

The original story was published on September 23, 2026. The adapted text below follows the reporting while omitting sections of political commentary.

What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom

Technology workers are moving to Liangzhu, a small town outside Hangzhou, to leave the corporate grind behind and build a future with AI.

In mid-May, a few days after Donald Trump visited Beijing, a Chinese technology founder named Levy invited me to an office party for his AI fortune-telling company.

The company was FateTell. Its app reads a user’s bazi, a chart based on birth date and time that maps the balance and movement of the five elements. Levy’s invitation was connected to my chart as well. He told me that my governing element was fire, which could offset the excess water in his own chart.

I travelled from Beijing to FateTell’s headquarters in Liangzhu. Hangzhou is one of China’s major technology centers, home to Alibaba and the fast-rising AI company DeepSeek. Liangzhu sits at the city’s edge. Its name means “beautiful waterland,” and rivers, lakes, wetlands, and low hills give the town a character far removed from a conventional technology park.

Liangzhu feels fashionable, pastoral, and slightly contrarian. For people exhausted by corporate life in Beijing or Shenzhen, it offers a more affordable place to start again. Developers can work at their own pace and build software through conversations with AI instead of writing every line by hand. They can also step away from the “996” schedule of working from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week.

Residents often call themselves “villagers.” They sit on broad lawns between green parks and wide roads, with strollers nearby and dogs at their feet. Around the Liangzhu Culture and Art Center, young developers drink oat-milk lattes and talk about Kimi, DeepSeek, and OpenAI Codex.

Everywhere I went, someone was building an AI product.

FocusFlight is a concentration timer that recreates the feeling of being on a flight. While users work, white noise accompanies a virtual journey from one city to another. YouMind describes itself as a second brain for bolder creative work, collecting scattered reading, notes, and research before turning them into finished pieces.

Then there is FateTell.

FateTell sends a user’s bazi data through large language models and generates a personal guide grounded in Eastern wisdom. The New Yorker reported that the app had reached hundreds of thousands of users, with some paying for annual subscriptions. The team is also exploring hardware, including traditional moon-shaped divination blocks fitted with smart chips.

Traditional Chinese spirituality and Western New Age practices are easy to find across Liangzhu. Local event listings mix AI product meetups with I Ching classes, Zen chanting, and essential-oil workshops. A singing-bowl studio may sit beside a shop selling linen and silk, while crystals appear downstairs and tarot readings take place above.

AI, consumer culture, and spiritual inquiry overlap here in a way that recalls early Silicon Valley, where personal computing and spiritual exploration grew from the same counterculture.

FateTell founder Levy is an active figure in Liangzhu’s technology community. He graduated from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and later worked at ByteDance, the company behind TikTok. He speaks softly, pauses before answering, and moves easily between references to the I Ching and Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Levy has spent years thinking about the relationship between technology and spirituality. He once considered becoming a Taoist monk and began imagining a Taoist app in 2017. In the years that followed, he met hundreds of practitioners and fortune tellers and read extensively in the classical tradition.

DeepSeek convinced him that the time had come to turn the idea into a product.

By late 2024, DeepSeek had approached the capabilities of leading global models while using fewer computing resources. Chinese labs including Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Z.ai also entered the global conversation. Chinese users could feel that a language model was beginning to understand their cultural context and write Chinese that did not sound translated from English.

Earlier AI products often felt imported and localized. DeepSeek R1 sounded closer to a native Chinese speaker. As reasoning models improved, AI-assisted fortune reading spread quickly across the Chinese internet.

Levy sees fortune telling as an enduring human need. When people face questions about work, relationships, health, or major decisions, they look for a framework that helps them understand their situation. He views bazi as a complex decision system that uses birth time, the structure of the five elements, and changes across different life stages to offer another way of looking at oneself.

Large language models can interpret complex relationships and explain them in ordinary language. This helps readers cross the barrier created by the specialized vocabulary of traditional fortune telling. The model does not have to declare an unchangeable future. It can clarify a difficult structure and help someone recognize personal tendencies, limits, and possibilities.

FateTell’s office is only a short walk from the Liangzhu archaeological site. It occupies the second floor of a gray building that once served as a village school and was later converted into a space for young entrepreneurs. The office itself used to be a classroom, and two long blackboards remain on the walls. Guests covered them with good wishes at the opening party.

At the time, FateTell had eight team members. Many everyday conversations and decisions were examined through the language of bazi. Before joining, employees compared their charts and discussed personality and working styles. One engineer even tried a two-week period of silence after reflecting on his reading.

The practice sounds unusual, but it fits Liangzhu. Many of the people who settle here have left conventional career paths. They no longer want corporate systems to determine every part of their lives, and they do not want to remain a single role inside a large organization.

China’s technology industry went through years of rapid expansion, followed by layoffs, hiring freezes, and slower growth. Many workers began to question whether entering a major company and climbing its hierarchy still offered the security they had expected.

The AI boom arrived at the same moment.

One person with a strong idea can now build software that once required a full engineering team. For workers leaving technology companies and young graduates struggling to find satisfying roles, AI offers a chance to regain control and create something of their own.

After leaving a technology company in Beijing, one product manager moved to Liangzhu and opened his living room to programmers, founders, and investors. A small gathering among friends grew until hundreds of people had attended. The living room became a well-known place to exchange product ideas and introduced founders to potential backers. One of FateTell’s early team members met Levy through such a gathering.

Other communities followed, including a weekly event known as “Crazy Thursday.” People fly in from Beijing, Shenzhen, and even Silicon Valley to attend. A developer may be showing an unfinished demo while experienced founders and investors sit in the audience.

Local authorities have noticed the activity and introduced AI incubator programs that provide workspace and investor introductions. Some founders worry that growing attention may eventually weaken the culture that formed on its own.

Liangzhu offers more than startup support. Rent is lower than in Beijing or Shenzhen, so people can afford a real living room, a studio, and a life close to nature. Founders move between walks, coffee shops, and community gatherings instead of treating long hours in an office as the only proof of commitment.

Back at the FateTell party, Levy moved from guest to guest. FateTell was one of the few AI products in Liangzhu already generating steady revenue, but running a company still meant constant pressure from product decisions, the market, and the need to make money.

Halfway through the party, Levy took me upstairs and pointed to the fire escape leading to the roof. Some nights, he said, he climbs out and sits beneath the stars.

Liangzhu is close to Hangzhou, yet the night sky still feels rural.

Levy sometimes wonders whether people living here thousands of years ago looked at the same sky and searched for patterns in the seasons, stars, and natural world. The objects and symbols they left behind may express the same hope: however chaotic the world appears, it contains an order that people can try to understand.

His relationship with AI feels similar. It is a tool for observation and prediction, applied to a world that never stops changing.

Read the original story: What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom