【烤鸭课外精读】从硅谷到世界：互联网的十年之路

　　【烤鸭课外精读】从硅谷到世界：互联网的十年之路 【原文译文】Paradise lost【失乐园】Whose internet is it anyway?【到底是谁的网络】Memoirs by an alumna of Silicon Valley and an internet user chart the web’s history 一位硅谷校友和一位互联网用户的回忆录记录了互联网的历史

　　1. IN THE PAST decade the number of people using the internet has leapt from 1.8bn, or a quarter of the world, to 4.1bn, well over half. Internet companies grew with their user bases. Ten years ago Facebook had roughly 2,000 employees; today 45,000 people work for it full-time, mostly in Silicon Valley. Google went from 24,000 staff to 119,000 in the same period. Add in other big firms such as Apple and Netflix, dozens of unlisted “unicorns” and thousands ofstartups, and the head-count in the valley is equal to a fair-sized city.

　　过去10年，互联网用户数量从18亿人(占全球人口的四分之一)猛增至41亿人，远远超过全球的一半。互联网公司随着用户群的增长而增长。十年前，Facebook大约有2000名员工;而如今已有45000名全职员工，他们大部分在硅谷。同时，谷歌员工从2.4万名增至11.9万名。再加上苹果、Netflix等其他大公司和数十家未上市的“独角兽”公司和数千家初创公司，硅谷的员工总数相当于一个中等规模的城市。

　　2. Who are these people? A handful are stereotypical wunderkinds, too busy building apps that improve the human condition to waste time on human emotions (or finish their degrees). But many—all the normal folk in sales, marketing, HR, customer support—are like Anna Wiener, the author of “Uncanny Valley”, a memoir about working in the tech industry of the 2010s. Like most people, the condition they mainly want to improve is their own.

　　这些人都是谁?他们中有一些是典型的神童，忙于开发改善人类状况的应用程序，而没有时间浪费在感情上(或在完成他们的学业上)。但是很多人——所有在销售、市场营销、人力资源、客户支持领域工作的普通人——都像《恐怖谷》的作者安娜·维纳一样，主要目标是改善自己的生存状况。《恐怖谷》一书是关于21世纪头十年在科技行业工作的回忆录。

　　3. In her telling, Ms Wiener, a sociology major who had the misfortune to graduate into the global financial crisis, starts her professional career as an assistant to a literary agent in New York. Tired of being privileged yet “downwardly mobile”, she joins a tech startup on the east coast, flubs it, but fails upwards to a better-paid job in San Francisco. Once there she observes first-hand the absurdities and extravagances of the industry. One of her employers is ameritocracy-obsessed cult with a name-your-own-salary policy that leads to an enormous gender pay gap. It marks its first round of venture-capital funding by building an exactreplica of the Oval Office.

　　维纳是一名社会学专业的学生，很不幸地在全球金融危机中毕业。按照她的说法，她的职业生涯始于纽约一家文学代理公司，她是那家公司的助助理。厌倦了享有特权，却又“不断下滑”，她加入了东海岸的一家科技初创公司，结果搞砸了，却未能在旧金山找到一份薪水更高的工作，只能留在这家公司。一到那里，她就亲眼目睹了这个行业的荒谬和奢侈。她的一个雇主是一个精英主义信徒，奉行“你自己定工资”政策，这导致了巨大的性别薪酬差距。通过建造一个与美国总统圆形办公室一模一样的办公室，科技公司开始了其第一轮风险投资。

　　4. Another outfit unironically releases a sinister feature called Addiction which, as Ms Wienerghostwrites in the blog post announcing it, “allows companies to see how embedded they are into other people’s lives”. She is at her best when describing the carelessness that would give the tech industry its well-deserved reputation for hubris. “Don’t be evil” is a blithe motto if the definition of “evil” is unexamined.

　　另一家机构不无讽刺地发布了一项名为“上瘾”的邪恶功能，正如维纳在宣布这一功能的博客文章中所写的那样，该功能“让企业看到自己在他人生活中的嵌入程度”。她在描述那些会给科技行业带来其当之无愧的傲慢名声的粗心时，表现得最好。如果“邪恶”的定义未经检验，那么“不作恶”就是一句很好的格言。

　　5. In New York, Ms Wiener recalls, “I had never considered that there were people behind the internet.” But in San Francisco “it was impossible to forget”. After all, she was one of them. Occasionally she has pangs of conscience, asking a friend, “Do you think I work at asurveillance company?” But such concerns fall by the wayside in a cloud of ecstasy and clean air, as she finds the twin millennial grails of a decent salary and comprehensive health care. Ever the ingénue, Ms Wiener does not set out to straddle the world like a colossus. She andlegions like her are content merely to peep about from under the legs of digital history’s great men—men like the founder of “the social network everyone hated”, as sheperiphrastically refers to him.

　　维纳回忆说，在纽约，“我从未想过互联网背后还有人”。但在旧金山，“不可能忘记”。毕竟，她是他们中的一员。她偶尔会良心不安，她问一个朋友：“你觉得我是在一家监控公司工作吗?”但是，当她发现千禧一代的目标是体面的薪水和全面的医疗保障时，这些担忧在狂喜和清新的空气中被抛到了一边。即使是天真的维纳，也不会像个巨人一样横跨世界。她和众多像她一样的人满足于仅仅从数字历史伟人的腿下窥视——这些人就是她委婉提到的那些“人人都恨的社交网络”的创始人。

　　6. “Of course, I hate [Facebook]. Who doesn’t?” writes Joanne McNeil in “Lurking”, a memoir of using, rather than making, the internet. She is almost apologetic about this judgment, noting that her lapse from reasoned criticism to diatribe is reserved for this single platform, a “digitalcesspool” that is “one of the biggest mistakes in modern history”. The passage comes after more than 200 pages of reminiscences about the internet of yore—a place where people could choose to be “private or public, anonymous or named, factual or make-believe”. Ms McNeil covers niche New York chat rooms; the web’s early suburbs, known as GeoCities; and the proto-social networks of Friendster and Myspace, guiding readers, Virgil-like, to the Zuckerberginferno.

　　“当然，我讨厌Facebook。谁不讨厌呢?Joanne McNeil在《潜伏》一书中写道，这本书是关于使用而不是创造互联网的回忆录。她为自己的这样的论断感到抱歉，指出她从理性的批评到谩骂的转变，都是为这个平台保留的，这个“数字粪坑”是“现代历史上最大的错误之一”。这篇文章是在200多页关于昔日互联网的回忆之后发表的——在那个地方，人们可以选择是“私密还是公开，是匿名还是实名，是真实还是虚构。”麦克尼尔负责纽约的小众聊天室;这是网络的早期边缘，被称为GeoCities，是还有社交网站Friendster和Myspace的原型，它们就是维吉尔一样的角色，引导读者进入扎克伯格的地狱。

　　Mon semblable, mon frère

　　我既不是活的，也未曾死

　　7. What happened? How did the web become “a hell that is fun, ruled by idiots and thieves”? The key is the smartphone, which brought the internet into everyday life. When Steve Jobsunveiled the iPhone in 2007, “the internet” and “real life” were still separate domains; people had to “get online” to move from one to the other. That was a disincentive, and anyway many had better ways to spend spare time than sit in front of a screen. A decade later, smartphones in hands, the distinction had evaporated. Suddenly anyone could be online—and they were, everywhere and all the time.

　　发生了什么呢?网络是如何变成“一个有趣的、被白痴和小偷统治的地狱”的?关键就是智能手机，它把互联网带入了我们的日常生活。当史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)在2007年发布iPhone时，“互联网”和“现实生活”仍然是两个分离的领域;人们必须“联网”才能从一个地方转到另一个地方。这是一种抑制，无论如何，许多人有更好的方式来度过业余时间，而不是坐在屏幕前。十年后，当他们手里拿着智能手机时，这种区别已经消失了。突然之间，任何人都可以上网了——而且是随时随地地上网。

　　8. The people behind the internet continued to believe that most users were versions of themselves, “white, male, age 25 to 34, college-educated”. In reality the internet is more diverse, says Ms McNeil, taking in women and users of other ages, LGBT folk, ethnic minorities and all combinations thereof. True—but her idea of diversity is itself a narrow one. In fact, in the period she chronicles, the average internet user became poorer, older, less white and less likely to speak English. Seen through this lens, bemoaning the decline of “the internet” is a bit like complaining that flying has lost its glamour, or that a favourite bar has been overrun by strangers. Nobody goes there any more—it’s too crowded, as Yogi Berra once quipped.

　　互联网背后的人仍然认为，大多数用户是他们自己的翻版，“白人，男性，年龄在25岁到34岁之间，受过大学教育”。麦克尼尔女士说，事实上，互联网更加多样化，包括了女性、其他年龄段的用户、LGBT群体、少数民族以及所有这些群体的结合。没错，但她对多样性的看法本身就很狭隘。事实上，在她记录的这段时间里，普通的互联网用户变得更穷，更老，白人更少，英语使用者更少。从这个角度看，哀叹“互联网”的衰落，有点像抱怨飞行已经失去了魅力，或者一家最受欢迎的酒吧被陌生人占领了。再也没有人去那里了——就像约吉·贝拉(Yogi Berra)曾经打趣的那样，那里太拥挤了。

　　9. America developed the internet, powerful American companies still run big swathes of it, and jobsworth American workers like Ms Wiener merrily push pixels around inside thosebehemoths. Yet just 6% of the world’s internet users are American. A vanishingly small proportion ever hung out in the AOL chat rooms or LiveJournal blogs of Ms McNeil’s lostnirvana. And the cultural influence of those early American users is steadily waning.

　　美国发展了互联网，实力强大的美国公司仍在管理着大片的IT业务，而像维纳这样的美国劳动者则是这些庞然大物中快乐的推动者。然而，世界上只有6%的互联网用户是美国人。曾经在美国在线AOL聊天室或在线博客LiveJournal上看到麦克尼尔的消失的涅槃(lost nirvana)的人少得可怜。这些早期美国用户的文化影响力正在逐渐减弱。

　　10. Perhaps the starkest example of this is the rise of TikTok, an app that lets people create and share short, goofy videos. It is owned by ByteDance, a giant Chinese startup.

　　也许这方面最明显的例子就是TikTok的兴起，这是一款让人们创作和分享简短而滑稽的视频的应用程序。它的所有者是字节跳动(ByteDance)，一个巨大的中国创业公司。

　　11. TikTok is unusual. When your home market is small or poor (as in much of the world), orhived off into a separate silo (like China’s), it is hard to build global firms. All the same, even if the business of the internet remains anchored in California, its culture—the movies and music,flirtations and conversations—is expanding all the time, confounding the Silicon Valley types who thought they owned it. There is no longer such a thing as “the internet”, but many internets, belonging to many people, distinct but overlapping. It is not dying, as Ms McNeil fears, just respawning.

　　TikTok是不寻常的。当你的国内市场很小或很差(就像世界上很多地方一样)，或者被分割成一个单独的部分(就像中国的竖井)，就很难建立全球性的公司。尽管如此，即使互联网业务仍然扎根于加州，它的文化——电影和音乐、调情和交流——也一直在扩张，这让那些认为自己拥有互联网的硅谷人士感到困惑。不再有“互联网”这样的东西，而是许多属于不同人的互联网，虽然各不相同，但相互重叠。正如麦克尼尔女士所担心的那样，这不是死亡，只是重生。