Gen Z Is Weaponising Asian Culture

The Drone Temple Was Predicted

Cao Fei spent three years in Southeast Asian farmland watching farmers offer incense to agricultural drones. Her project envisions a cyber-rural reality where ancient agricultural fields meet autonomous drones and AI — China’s rapid technological revolution reshaping rural ecosystems from the ground up.

What she documented is the same impulse visible in every other register of Asian cultural production right now: a generation that does not treat traditional forms as heritage to be preserved, but as raw material to be used. The drone worship is not nostalgia. It is syncretism. Ancient devotional logic being applied to a new object of dependence.