A Year in Reading: The Dark Side of Progress

Living through cultural shifts is an odd experience.

经历文化转变是一种奇怪的经历。

You may know at some level that all things are transitory, but you rarely think how “all things” includes the constants and variables of day-to-day life.

你可能在某种程度上知道万事万物都是短暂的，但你很少想到“万事万物”如何包含日常生活中的常量和变量。

Then you look back at all the pieces you read and recommended over the past year and realize you’re not just in the middle of one cultural shift—you’re in the middle of many cultural shifts.

然后，你回顾过去一年中阅读和推荐的所有文章，并意识到你不仅处于一种文化转变之中，而且还处于许多文化转变之中。

And they all boil down to the fact that technology and money are rewriting our cultural bedrock.

所有这些都归结为这样一个事实：技术和金钱正在改写我们的文化基石。

I know, I know.

我知道，我知道。

Duh.

呃。

But the breadth is still surprising.

但其广度仍然令人惊讶。

Name me an area of human experience that feels stable, and I’ll show you a stellar piece of journalism from this year that proves otherwise.

给我说出一个让人感觉稳定的人类经验领域，我将向你展示今年的一篇出色的新闻报道，证明事实并非如此。

TV, movies, and other screen-based storytelling?

电视、电影和其他基于屏幕的故事讲述？

Even putting aside the fact that writers, directors, and actors all went on strike at the same time in 2023, the entertainment industry has still gotten itself into a bit of an existential pickle.

即使抛开编剧、导演和演员在 2023 年同时罢工的事实，娱乐业仍然陷入了生存困境。

Apparently, that’s what happens when the widespread deregulation of 30 years ago meets cheap money and private-equity investors.

显然，这就是 30 年前广泛放松管制遇到廉价资金和私募股权投资者时所发生的情况。

Daniel Bessner’s “The Life and Death of Hollywood” in Harper’s outlines the conundrum expertly enough to make you realize that superhero fatigue and sequelitis are but symptoms of the larger disease.

丹尼尔·贝斯纳（Daniel Bessner）在《哈珀杂志》上发表的《好莱坞的生与死》足够专业地概述了这个难题，足以让你意识到超级英雄疲劳和后遗症只是更大疾病的症状。

To pull an analogy from the seemingly doomed world of prestige TV: Creative work used to feel like Mad Men; now it feels a lot like Severance.

从看似注定要失败的高端电视世界中打个比方：创意工作过去感觉就像《广告狂人》；现在感觉很像遣散费。

Screenplays as macrodata refinement.

剧本作为宏观数据的细化。

Music isn’t faring much better.

音乐的情况也好不了多少。

Yes, 2024 has seen some incredible work from incredible artists, but the economics of creativity make much less sense in the Spotify era than they did even a decade ago.

是的，2024 年我们看到了一些令人难以置信的艺术家创作的令人难以置信的作品，但在 Spotify 时代，创造力的经济学意义远不如十年前。

For The New York Times Magazine, Brett Martin profiles Matt Farley, a man living in Massachusetts who has recorded and released more than 24,000 songs—as many as 50 a day.

布雷特·马丁 (Brett Martin) 在《纽约时报》杂志上介绍了居住在马萨诸塞州的马特·法利 (Matt Farley)，他录制并发行了 24,000 多首歌曲，每天多达 50 首。

His manic pace provides him with a comfortable living, but it also embodies how difficult it is for any artist to break through, not just the ones who perform two-minute ditties about poop and birthdays.

他狂躁的节奏为他提供了舒适的生活，但这也体现了任何艺术家想要突破是多么困难，而不仅仅是那些表演关于便便和生日的两分钟小曲的艺术家。

Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium, Martin writes of Farley, who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies: that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public.

当然，今天在任何媒介上工作的创作者都很少有，马丁在谈到法利时写道，他们不会认识到法利所体现的焦虑：他们的作品现在的生死取决于不透明算法的变幻莫测，为日益分心的公众提供无底的选择菜单。

And that if they don’t bow to the demands of these new realities, their work—and by extension, they—will simply disappear.

如果他们不屈服于这些新现实的要求，他们的工作——乃至他们——就会消失。

At least sex is still an honest transaction, right?

至少性仍然是一种诚实的交易，对吧？

Not so fast.

没那么快。

OnlyFans may have shifted the power dynamics around the porn industry and given control to the people in front of the camera, but it’s also commercialized an illusion of intimacy that’s impossible to support at scale.

OnlyFans 可能改变了色情行业的权力动态，并将控制权交给了镜头前的人们，但它也将一种不可能大规模支持的亲密幻觉商业化。

This has led to a new cottage industry: people who chat with OnlyFans patrons as the creator, juggling multiple conversations and upselling (on said creator’s behalf) all the while.

这催生了一个新的家庭手工业：那些作为创作者与 OnlyFans 顾客聊天的人，同时兼顾多个对话和追加销售（代表创作者）。

Invariably, these people are based in the Global South and paid meagerly to engage in what amounts to professional catfishing.

这些人总是居住在南半球，拿着微薄的报酬从事相当于专业鲶鱼的活动。

Brendan Koerner joins their ranks for a Wired story and delivers a sobering look at the decentralized future of the call center.

Brendan Koerner 加入了他们的行列，撰写了《连线》故事，并对呼叫中心的去中心化未来进行了发人深省的审视。

Once again, the promise of ease—of abundance, of always-on-ness, and of connection itself—masks a support apparatus that’s deeply unwell.

再一次，轻松的承诺——丰富的、永远在线的、以及连接本身——掩盖了一个非常不舒服的支持机制。

The iceberg is rotten, folks.

冰山已经腐烂了，伙计们。

Even when you peel away art and commerce, information itself is in a state of flux.

即使当你剥离艺术和商业时，信息本身也处于不断变化的状态。

For years, we’ve found what we’re looking for online by allowing bots called web crawlers to worm their way through the internet, reading the metadata and content of various sites so that search engines could spit them back to us.

多年来，我们通过允许称为网络爬虫的机器人在互联网上蠕动，读取各个网站的元数据和内容，以便搜索引擎将它们返回给我们，找到了我们在网上寻找的东西。

Importantly, though, this worked on the honor system: All sites have a tiny file called robots.txt, and bots would avoid sites whose robots.txt files waved them off.

但重要的是，这适用于荣誉系统：所有网站都有一个名为 robots.txt 的小文件，机器人会避开那些 robots.txt 文件拒绝它们的网站。

Now, as David Pierce explains in his thought-provoking Verge story “The Text File That Runs the Internet,” the explosive growth of AI is putting that honor system to the test—and demonstrating just how under siege the open web is.

现在，正如大卫·皮尔斯 (David Pierce) 在他发人深省的 Verge 故事《运行互联网的文本文件》中所解释的那样，人工智能的爆炸性增长正在考验荣誉系统，并展示开放网络是多么受到围攻。

For one, AI crawlers have been trawling sites since long before people got hip to the idea that their content is being used to train AI, not necessarily to make their site discoverable to other people.

首先，早在人们意识到网站内容被用来训练人工智能（而不一定是为了让其他人发现他们的网站）之前，人工智能爬虫就已经开始在网站上进行搜索了。

For another, crawlers aren’t obligated to obey what a robots.txt file requests.

另一方面，爬虫没有义务遵守 robots.txt 文件的要求。

There are some legit (or morally agreeable) reasons to ignore a “disallow” request—like archiving—but by and large, that’s not what’s happening.

有一些合法（或道德上可接受的）理由可以忽略“不允许”请求（例如存档），但总的来说，情况并非如此。

(Speaking of archiving, Niall Firth’s “The Race to Save Our Online Lives From a Digital Dark Age” in MIT Technology Review gives you even more reason to worry about the precarity of the internet as we know it.) Pierce’s piece demonstrates how site owners are caught between a rock and a hard place: Even if AI startups are crawling the internet solely to enrich their own products, disallowing the bots may doom a site to obscurity.

（说到存档，《麻省理工学院技术评论》中 Niall Firth 的《从数字黑暗时代拯救我们的在线生活的竞赛》让你更有理由担心我们所知道的互联网的不稳定。）Pierce 的文章展示了网站所有者如何陷入进退两难的境地：即使人工智能初创公司只是为了丰富自己的产品而爬行互联网，禁止机器人可能会让网站陷入默默无闻。

If all of this makes you think about the role tech giants have played in our current landscape—nurturing engagement through emotional manipulation, creating untenable content-moderation issues, algorithmically sanding away the kind of art that doesn’t appeal to the most people possible—you’re not alone.

如果所有这一切让你思考科技巨头在我们当前的环境中所扮演的角色——通过情感操纵来培养参与度，制造出站不住脚的内容审核问题，通过算法打磨掉那些对大多数人不感兴趣的艺术——你并不孤单。

It’s stories like these that help connect the dots.

正是这样的故事有助于将各个点联系起来。

No surprise, then, that elements of the tech industry are demonizing journalists and fighting to tell their story their way.

因此，毫不奇怪，科技行业的一些人士正在妖魔化记者，并努力以自己的方式讲述他们的故事。

In the Business Insider feature “Inside the Broletariat Revolution,” Zoë Bernard chronicles a media movement, run and read by wealthy venture capitalists and other techno-optimists, that is defiantly tribalistic in its approach.

在《商业内幕》专题文章“工人阶级革命的内部”中，佐伊·伯纳德（Zoë Bernard）记录了一场由富有的风险投资家和其他技术乐观主义者运营和阅读的媒体运动，其方法是公然的部落主义。

If the term “broletariat” doesn’t put you off your lunch, it’s a sobering read that lays bare how technological progress has been recast as an ideological battle: “While it’s tempting to cast the pro-tech media as PR with some razzle-dazzle,” Bernard writes, “there’s another side to its agenda: to call out the enemies of tech—namely regulation, wokeism, legacy media, and, increasingly, liberal politicians.”

如果“broletariat”这个词没有让你对午餐产生兴趣，那么这本发人深省的读物揭示了技术进步如何被重新塑造为一场意识形态之战：“虽然人们很容易将亲科技媒体描绘成带有一些令人眼花缭乱的公关，”伯纳德写道，“但它的议程还有另一面：指出科技的敌人，即监管、唤醒主义、传统媒体，以及越来越多的自由派政客。”

Still, optimism lurks deep within these stories, somewhere between the words.

尽管如此，乐观情绪仍然潜藏在这些故事的深处，在文字之间的某个地方。

We create because we’re driven to, even if an AI can approximate some version of our life’s work in a single day.

我们创造是因为我们有动力去创造，即使人工智能可以在一天内完成我们一生工作的某个版本。

Because it makes us feel.

因为它让我们感觉到。

We try to archive the internet because we believe that future generations will be here to benefit from it.

我们尝试对互联网进行存档，因为我们相信子孙后代将从中受益。

Even if collective self-governance on the internet feels outmoded, perhaps impossible, we fight for the open web.

即使互联网上的集体自治感觉已经过时，甚至不可能，我们也会为开放网络而奋斗。

We adapt to new parameters dictated by technology (and greed) because the alternative is being washed away.

我们适应由技术（和贪婪）决定的新参数，因为替代方案正在被冲走。

So there’s hope.

所以还有希望。

And if these pieces make you angry, that’s a good thing; sometimes it’s only when we’re angry that we begin to fight for change.

如果这些作品让你生气，那是一件好事；有时，只有当我们感到愤怒时，我们才会开始为改变而奋斗。

—PR

——公关

Browse all of our year-end collections since 2011.

浏览我们自 2011 年以来的所有年终系列。