「双语·纽约时报」“吃人”​的互联网

“吃人”的互联网

The Internet Will Be the Death of Us

纽约时报

New York Times

Nora Ephron once wrote a brilliant essay about the trajectory of her and many other people’s infatuations with email, from the thrill of discovering this speedy new way of keeping in touch to the hell of not being able to turn it off.

诺拉·埃芙隆(Nora Ephron)曾经写过一篇精彩的文章，讲述她和其他许多人对电子邮件的迷恋，从发现这种快速保持联系的新方法时的兴奋，到发现无法将其关闭时的恐惧。

I’ve come to feel that way about the whole of the internet.

我对整个互联网都有这种感觉。

What a glittering dream of expanded knowledge and enhanced connection it was at the start. What a nightmare of manipulated biases and metastasized hate it has turned into.

一开始，它曾是一个多么闪亮的梦想，是关于扩展知识并加强联系的。如今它成了一场受操纵的偏见和被转移的仇恨的噩梦。

Before he allegedly began mailing pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others, Cesar Sayoc found encouragement online — maybe not in the form of explosives instructions, but in the sense that he could scream his resentments in a theater that did the opposite of repudiating them. It echoed them back. It validated and cultivated them. It took something dark and colored it darker still.

在据称开始向贝拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)、希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)和其他人发送简易炸弹之前，塞萨尔·塞阿克(Cesar Sayoc)在网上发现了鼓励——也许不是以爆炸物制作说明书的形式，但从某种意义上说，他可以在一个剧场中高声叫出自己的怨恨，这个剧场完全没有拒绝它们，而是发出回响。这是在验证并培育他们。它接受了一些黑暗的东西，给它们涂上更黑暗的颜色。

“By the time he was arrested in Florida on Friday,” The Times reported, “Sayoc appeared to fit the all-too-familiar profile of a modern extremist, radicalized online and sucked into a vortex of partisan furor.”

“当他周五在佛罗里达州被捕时，”时报报道，“塞阿克似乎很符合现代极端分子已经为人所熟悉的特征：在网上很激进，并陷入党派狂热的漩涡。”

Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jewish Americans in Pittsburgh the morning after Sayoc’s arrest, stoked his madness and nurtured his bloody fantasies in that same online vortex. While Sayoc carved out ugly niches on Facebook and Twitter, Bowers found even safer harbor for his racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic passions on Gab, a two-year-old social network that has served as a nursery for white nationalists. There they congregated, commiserated and riled up one another with an unfiltered efficiency that simply doesn’t exist offline.

在塞阿克被捕后的上午，罗伯特·鲍尔斯(Robert Bowers)被控在匹兹堡谋杀了11名犹太裔美国人，同一个网络漩涡引发了他的疯狂，并且培养了他的血腥幻想。塞阿克在Facebook和Twitter上营造了自己丑陋的小环境，但鲍尔斯在Gab上为他的种族主义、仇外心理和反犹太主义激情发现了一个更加安全的避风港，这是一个有两年历史的社交网络，一度是白人民族主义者的摇篮。他们聚集在那里，以一种网络之外根本没有的、赤裸裸的高效率，互诉同情，发泄愤怒。

It was on the internet, with its privacy and anonymity, that Dylann Roof researched white supremacy and formulated his evil conviction that violence was necessary. He then went into a historic church in Charleston, S.C., and fatally shot nine African-American parishioners in June 2015.

有了互联网的隐私与匿名性，迪兰·鲁夫(Dylann Roof)才得以在互联网上研究白人至上主义，并制定了他的邪恶信条：暴力是必要的。然后，他于2015年6月进入了南卡罗来纳州查尔斯顿一座历史悠久的教堂，射杀了九名非洲裔美国教民。

It was on the internet — on Facebook, to be exact — that Alek Minassian posted a pledge of allegiance to the “incel rebellion,” which refers to the resentments of “involuntarily celibate” men who can’t interest the women around them in sex. He then used a van to mow down and kill 10 people in Toronto in April.

正是在互联网上——确切地说是在Facebook上——阿利克·米纳西安(Alek Minassian)宣布效忠“非自愿处男的起义”(incel rebellion)，这是“非自愿禁欲”男人的怨恨，他们无法令周围的女性对他们产生性方面的兴趣。然后，他在四月开着一辆面包车，在多伦多撞倒并杀死了10人。

Enclaves of the internet warped the worldviews of all of these men, convincing them of the primacy and purity of their rage. Most of us had never heard the term “incel” before the Toronto massacre. But it was the indelible centerpiece of Minassian’s life.

互联网的小块聚集地扭曲了所有这些人的世界观，使他们相信，他们的愤怒是纯洁的，具有至高无上的地位。在多伦多大屠杀之前，我们大多数人从未听过“非自愿处男”一词。但它是米纳西安生活中不可磨灭的核心。

Most of us were unfamiliar with HIAS, the shorthand for a Jewish group that resettles refugees. But those initials dominated Bowers’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And that reflects the internet’s power to cast rogue grievances as legitimate obsessions and give prejudices the shimmer of ideals.

我们大多数人都不熟悉HIAS，这是一个重新安置难民的犹太团体的简写。但这些首字母主导了鲍尔斯的反犹太主义阴谋理论。这反映了互联网将异常的不满变为正当痴迷的能力，以及给偏见带来理想光环的能力。

Technology has always been a coin with two sides: potential and peril. That’s what Mary Shelley explored in “Frankenstein,” which is celebrating its 200th birthday this year, and it has been the main theme of science fiction ever since.

科技一直是一枚具有潜力和危险两面性的硬币。这就是玛丽·雪莱(Mary Shelley)在今年迎来200周年的小说《弗兰肯斯坦》(Frankenstein)中所探讨的，自该书出版以来，这种两面性一直是科幻小说的主题。

The internet is the technology paradox writ more monstrous than ever. It’s a nonpareil tool for learning, roving and constructive community-building. But it’s unrivaled, too, in the spread of lies, narrowing of interests and erosion of common cause. It’s a glorious buffet, but it pushes individual users toward only the red meat or just the kale. We’re ridiculously overfed and ruinously undernourished.

互联网是一个科技吊诡，比以往任何时候都更加骇人听闻。在学习、游览和良性社区建设方面，它是一个非常有用的工具。但它在谎言的传播、兴趣的狭隘化和对共同事业的侵蚀方面也是无与伦比的。这是一个丰盛的自助餐，但它推动个人用户只吃红肉或羽衣甘蓝。可笑的是，我们吃得太撑，同时又营养不良。

It creates terrorists. But well shy of that, it sows enmity by jumbling together information and misinformation to a point where there’s no discerning the real from the Russian.

它制造了恐怖分子。但是它一面回避这一点，一面将信息和不实信息混为一谈，以至于我们分辨不出真实和俄罗斯的区别。

Don’t take it from me. Take it from a Silicon Valley giant whose wares depend on our internet addiction. Speaking at a conference in Brussels, Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, warned, “Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies.”

不要把它从我手中拿走。把它从硅谷巨头手里拿走吧，他们的产品完全依赖于我们的网络成瘾。苹果首席执行官蒂姆·库克(Tim Cook)在布鲁塞尔的一次会议上发表讲话时警告称，“承诺改善我们生活的平台和算法，实际上可以放大我们人性中最恶劣的倾向。”

“Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false,” he added.

“不轨之徒甚至是政府都利用用户信任来加深分歧、煽动暴力，甚至破坏我们对真实和虚假的共同认识，”他补充说。

This was a week ago — before Sayoc’s arrest, before Bowers’s rampage, before Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, won Brazil’s presidential election. As The Times reported, pro-Bolsonaro forces apparently tried to hurt his opponents and help him by flooding WhatsApp, the messaging application owned by Facebook, “with a deluge of political content that gave wrong information on voting locations and times.”

这发生在一个星期前——在塞阿克被逮捕之前，在鲍尔斯肆意撞人之前，在极右翼民粹主义者雅伊尔·博尔索纳罗(Jair Bolsonaro)赢得巴西总统选举之前。正如《时报》报道的那样，支持博尔索纳罗的力量使用Facebook旗下的消息应用程序WhatsApp，“发送大量政治内容，提供关于投票地点和时间的错误信息，”以此来伤害对手并帮助他。

That same Times article noted that a search for the word “Jews” on the photo-sharing site Instagram on Monday led to 11,696 posts with the hashtag “#jewsdid911,” insanely blaming them for the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center, along with similarly grotesque images and videos that demonized Jews. Anti-Semitism may be ancient, but this delivery system for it is entirely modern.

同一篇时报的文章指出，周一在照片共享网站Instagram上搜索“犹太人”这个词时，有11696个帖子带有“#jewsdid911”（911是犹太人干的）的标签，疯狂地指责犹太人袭击了世界贸易中心，同时还有奇怪的图像和视频，把犹太人的形象妖魔化。反犹太主义可能很古老，但这种传播系统完全是现代的。

And utterly terrifying. I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives.

而且它非常可怕。我不确定我们如何才能用更好的互联网监管政策来规范至高无上的言论自由和表达自由，但我确信，我们需要以比目前更紧迫的态度来应对这一挑战。民主在受到威胁。生命也是如此。

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