Software Has Eaten The Media
软件吞噬了媒体

As I wrote a year ago in The Rot Economy (and as I argued on the first episode of my podcast Better Offline), I believe that both public and private markets have become decoupled from the concept of "good business," ruled instead by a hunger for the eternal growth of revenue and market share, regardless of whether they're making a good product or treating humans as disposable in the process.
正如我一年前在《腐烂经济》（The Rot Economy）一书中所写（也正如我在播客 "更好的离线"（Better Offline）第一集中所论述的），我认为公共市场和私人市场都已经与 "好企业 "的概念脱钩，取而代之的是对收入和市场份额永恒增长的渴求，而不管它们是在制造好产品，还是在制造过程中将人视为可有可无的东西。

This is why your Google search results seem worse, or you're seeing too many videos on Instagram, or why the App Store's "free" section is pumped full of microtransaction-laden apps that are most decidedly not free, or why your iPhone likes to nag you with ads for Apple products — because these companies must always demonstrate revenue growth, every quarter, without fail, to be regarded as "successful" in the eyes of the market.
这就是为什么你的谷歌搜索结果看起来更糟了，或者你在 Instagram 上看到了太多的视频，或者为什么 App Store 的 "免费 "版块充斥着充满微交易的应用程序，而这些应用程序显然不是免费的，或者为什么你的 iPhone 喜欢用苹果产品的广告来唠叨你--因为这些公司必须每个季度都不折不扣地实现收入增长，才能在市场眼中被视为 "成功"。 

Public tech companies added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalization in 2023 as tech firms laid off over 260,000 workers in the space of a year (though that number is inclusive of private companies). In January 2024, over 23,000 tech workers were laid off from companies like Google ($19.69 billion in profit in Q4 2023), Meta ($11.58 billion in profit in Q4 2023), and Microsoft ($22.29 billion in profit in Q4 2023) as they pushed into the buzzy and unprofitable world of artificial intelligence, burning billions to try and reach feature parity in a world of "innovation" that never seems to end with a particularly useful product.
2023 年，上市科技公司的市值增加了 2.4 万亿美元，而科技公司在一年内裁员超过 26 万人（尽管这一数字包括私营公司）。2024 年 1 月，谷歌（2023 年第四季度利润为 196.9 亿美元）、Meta（2023 年第四季度利润为 115.8 亿美元）和微软（2023 年第四季度利润为 222.9 亿美元）等公司解雇了 23000 多名科技人员，原因是这些公司正大力发展热闹但无利可图的人工智能领域，在这个 "创新 "的世界里，他们耗费数十亿美元试图实现功能均等，但似乎永远不会有特别有用的产品问世。

As I've said before, Google should've fired CEO Sundar Pichai by now for mismanaging his company to the point that it’s had to fire more than 12,000 people in the space of a year, costing it $2.1 billion in severance, in addition to laying off more than a thousand in the first 44 days of 2024. Yet Pichai continues to get paid unfathomably large sums every year, making $221 million in 2022 — a year in which Google made thousands of unnecessary hires to meet post-lockdown demand that would obviously dissipate as life returned to normal.
正如我之前所说，谷歌现在应该已经解雇了首席执行官桑达尔-皮查伊（Sundar Pichai），因为他对公司管理不善，导致谷歌不得不在一年的时间里解雇了 12000 多人，遣散费高达 21 亿美元，此外，在 2024 年的前 44 天里，谷歌还解雇了 1000 多人。然而，皮查伊每年仍能获得难以估量的巨额薪酬，2022 年的收入高达 2.21 亿美元--在这一年里，谷歌不必要地招聘了数千人，以满足关闭后的需求，而这些需求显然会随着生活恢复正常而消失。

If a worker were to make such a categorical mistake that thousands of people had to be let go, they would be let go with them. Yet executives are never the victims of their own decision-making. C-Suite executives at Meta received six-figure bonuses as thousands of people lost their jobs last year. Indeed, it seems that the only people that shoulder the responsibility of a CEO's decisions are those that actually do the work.
如果一个工人犯了如此严重的错误，导致成千上万的人不得不被解雇，那么他们也会被解雇。然而，高管从来不是自己决策的受害者。去年，当成千上万人失业时，Meta 公司的 C 级高管却领到了六位数的奖金。事实上，似乎只有那些真正从事工作的人才会为首席执行官的决策承担责任。

In fact, I'd argue that investors — not just those backing pre-IPO businesses, but also those investing in public companies — have become entirely disconnected from production, to the point that an alarming amount of modern business is done to please investors over customers, turning product strategy into a form of symbolic marketing. Our economy isn't one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage — and the result is the public decay of creativity and innovation.
事实上，我认为投资者--不仅是那些支持上市前企业的投资者，也包括那些投资上市公司的投资者--已经完全与生产脱节，以至于现代企业的大量业务都是为了取悦投资者而非顾客，将产品战略变成了一种象征性的营销。我们的经济不是生产使用的东西，而是生产能提高使用率的东西--其结果是公众的创造力和创新力日渐衰退。

Decaydence

Nowhere has this effect been more pronounced than in the media, which is currently suffering horrifying consequences at the hands of some of the scummiest executives to ever walk the Earth.
这种影响最明显的莫过于媒体，目前，媒体正遭受着地球上一些最卑鄙的高管所造成的可怕后果。

The Messenger, a news outlet that raised $50 million in venture capital and hired 300 people (many of them reporters), abruptly shut down on February 1 2024, leaving workers unemployed, uninsured, and without any kind of severance package. From the outset, the Messenger was doomed, both by corporate mismanagement — spending $8 million in office space in New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles and $900,000 a year on their CEO Jimmy Finkelstein — and an aggressive and wrongheaded editorial strategy driven by people who didn't know what they were doing other than that "more traffic was good."
信使》是一家筹集了 5000 万美元风险投资、雇佣了 300 名员工（其中许多是记者）的新闻媒体，2024 年 2 月 1 日突然关闭，员工失业、没有保险，也没有任何遣散费。从一开始，《信使》就注定要倒闭，一方面是公司管理不善--在纽约、华盛顿特区和洛杉矶的办公场所花费了 800 万美元，其首席执行官吉米-芬克尔斯坦（Jimmy Finkelstein）的年薪高达 90 万美元；另一方面是由那些不知道自己在做什么的人主导的激进而错误的编辑策略，他们只知道 "流量越大越好"。 

After the company’s collapse, Eli Walsh, a former Messenger employee who joined the company after a career in California local journalism, described a constant pressure to produce more content, with much of it lifted from other publications, notably the Daily Mail and the New York Post. “I have no usable clips in eight months' time because of this editorial strategy. Zero. Not one,” he said. 
在公司倒闭后，曾在加利福尼亚当地从事新闻工作后加入 Messenger 的前员工伊莱-沃尔什（Eli Walsh）描述了制作更多内容的持续压力，其中大部分内容都是从其他出版物，特别是《每日邮报》和《纽约邮报》上抄袭来的。"由于这种编辑策略，我在八个月内没有任何可用的剪辑。零。一个也没有。

Sports Illustrated, formerly one of the most important brands in sports journalism, was slowly choked to death after being sold twice, first to Meredith Corporation (which acquired it as part of its $1.85 billion acquisition of Time Magazine in 2017), and then again when the intellectual property was licensed to Authentic Brands Group (a holding company) for $110 million, with the actual goal being to put Sports Illustrated's brand on things like medical clinics and gambling businesses. Meredith Corporation would continue publishing Sports Illustrated until 2019, when Authentic Brands Group would license editorial operations to The Maven as part of a 10-year licensing deal, which promptly laid off 40 people, shifting its editorial strategy away from deep and thoughtful analysis to focus on breaking news, the thing that people can get anywhere, all while flooding Sports Illustrated's website with contributed content from affiliate sites run by poorly-vetted "contributing bloggers."
体育画报》（Sports Illustrated）曾是体育新闻领域最重要的品牌之一，在被两次出售后慢慢窒息而死，先是卖给了梅雷迪思公司（梅雷迪思公司在 2017 年以 18.5 亿美元收购《时代》杂志时收购了该《体育画报》），然后又以 1.1 亿美元的价格将知识产权授权给了 Authentic Brands Group（一家控股公司），其实际目的是将《体育画报》的品牌推广到医疗诊所和博彩业等领域。梅雷迪思公司将继续出版《体育画报》，直到 2019 年，届时 Authentic Brands Group 将把编辑业务授权给 The Maven，作为为期 10 年的授权协议的一部分。The Maven 立即裁员 40 人，将其编辑策略从深思熟虑的分析转变为关注突发新闻，人们在任何地方都能获得这种新闻，同时在《体育画报》的网站上充斥着来自联盟网站的投稿内容，而这些网站都是由审查不严的 "投稿博主 "运营的。 

Sports Illustrated would spend years deteriorating until January 2024, when The Maven, now called "The Arena Group," would lay off most of Sports Illustrated's staff after failing to pay Authentic Brands Group the licensing fee required to keep running Sports Illustrated into the ground, owing over $45 million in unpaid fees. Now the future of the publication is in jeopardy, with Arena Group claiming that it may, somehow, keep publishing Sports Illustrated. Arena Group posted a net loss of $50 million in the first nine months of 2023.
体育画报》多年来每况愈下，直到 2024 年 1 月，The Maven（现名为 "Arena 集团"）因未能向 Authentic Brands 集团支付继续经营《体育画报》所需的授权费而解雇了《体育画报》的大部分员工，拖欠的费用超过 4500 万美元。Arena Group 在 2023 年前 9 个月的净亏损为 5000 万美元。

What's very important to know about Sports Illustrated is that it used to be profitable. It was profitable when it was acquired in 2019, and stayed profitable through 2020. Its value (over a hundred million dollars) did not come from its logo, but from what the logo symbolized — important, meaningful sports writing from writers like George Plimpton, Curry Kirkpatrick and Emma Baccellieri. The thing that made Sports Illustrated famous was turned into a tool to be licensed to a holding company and licensed to a blogger network. The people that drove both The Messenger and Sports Illustrated into the ground are neither readers nor writers — they're do-nothing private equitors that contribute nothing to the world that make bad business decisions that seem disconnected from both the creation of stuff and the ability to make money from it.
关于《体育画报》，最重要的一点是它曾经盈利。它在 2019 年被收购时是盈利的，并一直盈利到 2020 年。它的价值（超过 1 亿美元）并非来自于它的标志，而是来自于标志所象征的东西--来自于乔治-普林普顿、库里-柯克帕特里克和艾玛-巴切利里等作家的重要而有意义的体育文章。让《体育画报》声名鹊起的东西变成了一种工具，被授权给一家控股公司，再授权给一个博客网络。把《信使》和《体育画报》逼入绝境的人既不是读者，也不是作家，他们是对世界毫无贡献的无所事事的私人等价交换者，他们做出了错误的商业决定，这些决定似乎与创造东西和从中赚钱的能力脱节。

And, most recently, Vice Media announced it would no longer publish written content to any of its flagship publications — including Vice.com, Vice’s regional sites, and its acclaimed tech vertical, Motherboard. An unspecified number — though measured in the “hundreds” — of workers were let go. It was an ignominious end for a publication that started life as an indie punk magazine in Montreal, eventually becoming a globe-spanning publication valued at $7bn.
最近，Vice Media 宣布将不再向其任何旗舰出版物（包括 Vice.com、Vice 的地区网站以及备受赞誉的科技垂直网站 Motherboard）发布书面内容。被解雇的员工人数不详，但以 "数百人 "计算。这对于一家从蒙特利尔的独立朋克杂志起家，最终成为一家价值 70 亿美元、遍布全球的出版物来说，是一个不光彩的结局。

Vice — although repeatedly lampooned for some of its faux-gonzo writing, which often consisted of privately-educated twenty-somethings waxing lyrical about the virtues of hallucinogenic substances — did a lot of good stuff. Simon Ostrovsky’s coverage of the earliest days of the Russo-Ukraine War, which culminated in him being arrested and held captive by separatists in the Donbass, provided important illumination to a conflict that few understood at the time — or even really cared to understand. This work earned Ostrovsky and Vice two Emmy nominations, plus a couple of Webby awards, and was rightfully seen by many as the Internet finally challenging traditional broadcast media in the conflict and foreign policy reporting spaces, where it previously enjoyed a monopoly.  
副刊》（Vice）--虽然因其一些虚假的庸俗写作而屡遭抨击，这些写作往往是由受过私立教育的二十几岁的年轻人抒发对致幻剂的美德的赞美--但它还是做了很多好事。西蒙-奥斯特洛夫斯基对俄乌战争早期的报道，最终导致他在顿巴斯被分离主义分子逮捕并关押，为当时很少有人了解--甚至很少有人真正愿意了解--的冲突提供了重要的启示。这部作品为奥斯特洛夫斯基和《Vice》赢得了两项艾美奖提名，还获得了几项威比奖，许多人理所当然地认为，互联网终于在冲突和外交政策报道领域向传统广播媒体发起了挑战。

Vice had an uncanny ability to access some of the world’s most isolated and dangerous places, and come back alive to tell the tale. North Korea. Siberian lumber camps, where an army of North Korean workers toiled in spartan conditions, raising money for their “Dear Leader.” The Syrian city of Raqqa, which, in 2015, was the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. And unlike many outlets, Vice actually made money — though it never seemed to be able to find consistent profitability. 
副总统有一种不可思议的能力，能够进入世界上一些最偏僻、最危险的地方，并活着回来讲述故事。北朝鲜西伯利亚伐木营，朝鲜工人大军在那里艰苦劳作，为他们的 "亲爱领袖 "筹集资金。叙利亚拉卡市，2015年曾是 "伊斯兰国 "自封的哈里发国的首都。与许多媒体不同的是，Vice 实际上赚到了钱--尽管它似乎从未找到过持续盈利的途径。

So what went wrong? 

While there’s no single definitive answer, they all share the same theme: the pursuit of growth and executive greed. Vice took on a lot of debt in its pursuit of becoming a global media empire. It expanded aggressively, made a lot of bad bets, and paid its executives lavishly. Executive compensation remained high, even when the company struggled to pay its utility bills and severance obligations. It took deals where investors were contractually guaranteed dividends — even if the company couldn’t afford them. And its aggressive push into branded content — like its 2014 deal with Absolut vodka — and partnership with the Saudi government undermined both its punk rock credibility and its editorial independence. 
虽然没有唯一的明确答案，但它们都有一个共同的主题：追求增长和高管的贪婪。Vice 在追求成为全球媒体帝国的过程中背负了大量债务。它大肆扩张，做了很多糟糕的赌注，并向高管支付巨额薪酬。高管薪酬居高不下，甚至在公司难以支付水电费和遣散费的情况下也是如此。即使公司无力支付分红，它也接受了投资者按合同保证分红的交易。此外，该公司大力发展品牌内容（如 2014 年与绝对伏特加达成的协议），并与沙特政府合作，这既损害了其朋克摇滚的信誉，也损害了其编辑独立性。

Most of the horrifying layoffs you've seen in journalism are a result of rot economics borne of the ideas of people who can't write and don't read. The news industry has spent a decade building itself on foundations made of sand, with executives desperate to change content strategies to match the constantly-shifting whims of social networks and search engines. 
你所见过的新闻业骇人听闻的裁员事件，大多是不会写作、不懂阅读的人的腐朽经济思想造成的。十年来，新闻业一直建立在沙土基础之上，高管们不顾一切地改变内容策略，以迎合社交网络和搜索引擎不断变化的奇思妙想。

If you’re looking for somebody to blame, you can start with Cory Haik, Vice’s Chief Operating Officer. Before joining Vice, she co-led Mic, a publication she drove into the ground by forcing it to move from producing beloved written journalism to dancing to the beat of Facebook's "pivot to video,” leading to the company laying off most of its staff and selling its intellectual property to Bustle. Haik is an example of the media world’s failure to police itself - a career failure that has now driven two great publications into the ground because she doesn’t understand what the fuck she is doing, as evidenced by her 2017 op-ed claiming that we were “in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism.” Cory Haik isn't a journalist, or an editor, or a creative — she’s a parasite.
如果你想找个人来指责，可以从 Vice 的首席运营官科里-海克（Cory Haik）开始。在加入《Vice》之前，她曾与他人共同领导过《Mic》，她迫使该刊物从制作深受喜爱的文字新闻转为跟随 Facebook "转向视频 "的节拍起舞，导致该公司解雇了大部分员工，并将其知识产权出售给了《Bustle》。海克是媒体界自律失败的一个例子--这种职业上的失败现在已经把两家伟大的刊物逼入绝境，因为她不明白自己到底在做什么，她在2017年的专栏文章中声称，我们正处于 "新闻业视觉革命的早期阶段"，就是明证。科里-海克（Cory Haik）不是记者，也不是编辑，更不是创意人士，她是寄生虫。

The destruction of modern journalism is a result of people like Haik having power, and being allowed to make calls based on vacuous pools of data that don’t make sense without an immediate connection to the actual newsroom, let alone an understanding of basic business tenets beyond thinking that growth is good. 
现代新闻业的毁灭是海克这样的人掌握权力的结果，他们被允许在与实际新闻编辑室没有直接联系的情况下，根据空洞的数据做出没有意义的决定，更不用说除了认为增长是好事之外，还了解基本的商业原则。

Worse still, these executives don’t really have any ideas, which is why they so often choose to grow media outlets like fledgling tech startups, failing to see the vast difference between an app that sells a service and a media company that makes content people watch, or the need to foster a relationship between a publication and its audience. Trust and authenticity are at the heart of media outlets, and readers are often highly sensitive to any change. If you mess with the formula too much, you inevitably alienate the people who pay the bills — either through subscriptions or ad revenue. 
更糟糕的是，这些高管其实并没有什么想法，这就是为什么他们常常选择像初出茅庐的科技创业公司那样发展媒体，而看不到销售服务的应用程序与制作人们观看的内容的媒体公司之间的巨大差异，也看不到培养出版物与受众之间的关系的必要性。信任和真实性是媒体的核心，读者往往对任何变化都非常敏感。如果你过多地改变这种模式，你将不可避免地疏远那些通过订阅或广告收入来支付账单的人。

If you’re no longer concerned with loyalty, and only really care about people who stumble onto your page through a carefully-crafted Facebook headline or blurb, you don’t have to worry about alienating readers. You can experiment as much as you want — undermine editorial standards as you see fit — so long as you get that ephemeral, random, spontaneous social and search traffic.
如果你不再关注忠诚度，只关心那些通过精心设计的 Facebook 标题或简介偶然进入你的页面的人，你就不必担心会疏远读者。只要你能获得短暂的、随机的、自发的社交和搜索流量，你就可以尽情尝试--破坏你认为合适的编辑标准。

When all you give a shit about is visits and impressions, your only real focus is that which would please Facebook, Twitter and Google - social networks that have used the news to fill their platforms with content until they no longer felt the need to, eventually choking the traffic they sent to publications. "Network effects" make the number go up, and that’s all that matters if you don’t know or care about what makes a lasting web presence, let alone a sustainable media outlet.
当你只关心访问量和印象时，你唯一真正关注的就是能取悦 Facebook、Twitter 和谷歌的东西--这些社交网络利用新闻在自己的平台上填充内容，直到它们觉得不再需要为止，最终扼杀了它们向出版物输送的流量。"网络效应 "使数字上升，如果你不知道或不关心什么是持久的网络存在，更不用说什么是可持续的媒体渠道了，这就够了。

And few network effects have damaged the news more than Search Engine Optimization, where the allure of traffic from search engines like Google has led publishers to create content not with the goal of serving their audience, but attracting the spurious traffic that one might get from those searching "when does the Super Bowl start."
网络效应对新闻的破坏莫过于搜索引擎优化，来自谷歌等搜索引擎的流量诱惑导致出版商创建内容的目的不是服务受众，而是吸引那些搜索 "超级碗什么时候开始 "的虚假流量。

The result is a media industry in crisis. Desperate executives and disconnected editors twist their reporters' coverage to please Google's algorithms as a means of improving traffic to please advertisers' algorithms, creating content that looks and sounds the same as other outlets, which in turn leads to layoffs as profits fail to increase, which in turn normalizes and weakens the content created by the outlet. This is largely a result of those in power not actually consuming or producing any of the product that makes the outlet money, only understanding the business as a series of symbols that at some point create revenue, ostensibly from the written word and video.
结果是媒体行业陷入危机。绝望的高管和脱离实际的编辑为了取悦谷歌的算法而扭曲记者的报道，以此来提高流量，取悦广告商的算法，创造出与其他媒体看起来和听起来都一样的内容，这反过来又导致利润无法增长而裁员，这反过来又使媒体创造的内容正常化和弱化。这在很大程度上是由于当权者并没有真正消费或生产任何能让该媒体赚钱的产品，而只是将业务理解为一系列符号，在某一时刻创造收入，表面上看是来自文字和视频。

When you make decisions for a website or company that produces words that it sells for money based not on the writing, but on how to twist that writing to make it "more profitable," the conclusion is always inevitable — the creation of identical-looking slop that people only read by accident, and the slow asphyxiation of journalism and culture.
当你为一个网站或公司做决策时，它生产的文字不是用来卖钱的，而是如何扭曲这些文字使其 "更有利可图"，那么结论总是不可避免的--制造出看起来一模一样的泔水，人们只是偶然读到，新闻和文化慢慢窒息。

It almost always leads to overstaffing and mismanagement, too. Any form of creative media requires an understanding that building an audience takes time and money, and that one cannot just spend a bunch of money to make that happen. But these craven idiots are as rotten as the rest of the economy. They believe that an outlet must be "big enough," that it must "cover everything," and that it must hit X traffic goal by Y quarter or it's trash. The media is being run by people that do not see value in people or the things that they create, but the metrics that come as a result. 
这也几乎总是导致人员过剩和管理不善。任何形式的创意媒体都需要认识到，培养受众需要时间和金钱，不能只花一大笔钱就能实现。但是，这些疯狂的白痴和其他经济体一样腐朽。他们认为媒体必须 "足够大"，必须 "覆盖一切"，必须在 Y 季度达到 X 流量目标，否则就是垃圾。管理媒体的人看不到人或他们创造的事物的价值，而只看到结果带来的指标。

These same executives somehow can't see the success of outlets like Defector, or any number of successful, profitable newsletters built with only a few people as a sign that people don't want the same shit in a different flavor, but the informed opinion of fallible, imperfect people. The world does not need another content mill aggregating the aggregation of another outlet's story, and though your content might get picked up by Google more often than another outlet's, that doesn't mean that that reader actually trusts you because you were able to tell them how to stream the latest season of a show. Every outlet that you read today that feels like a shadow of its former self — and there are many — has reached that point at the hands of somebody who doesn't read it and gets paid significantly more than the writers that keep it alive.
同样是这些高管，他们却看不到像《叛变者》这样的媒体，或者其他一些只有几个人就能成功盈利的通讯社的成功，这说明人们需要的不是换汤不换药的同样的东西，而是有缺陷、不完美的人的明智意见。尽管你的内容可能比其他媒体的内容更常被谷歌收录，但这并不意味着读者会因为你能告诉他们如何流式传输最新一季的节目而真正信任你。今天，你所阅读的每一个媒体，如果都感觉像以前的影子--这样的媒体不在少数--都是在某些人的手中走到这一步的，这些人不阅读这些媒体，却拿着比维持这些媒体生存的作者高得多的薪水。

Tech companies have made billions of dollars separating readers from writers, and the only true salvation for modern journalism is rebuilding and reinforcing the relationship between writers and their audiences, and media properties fostering and empowering that relationship rather than smothering it to please an algorithm.
科技公司已经赚取了数十亿美元，将读者与作者分离开来，而现代新闻业唯一真正的救赎就是重建和加强作者与受众之间的关系，媒体属性要促进和增强这种关系，而不是为了取悦算法而扼杀这种关系。

Ultimately, the Rot Economy's core problem is that decisions are being made about the things you love that exist to satisfy a party — an algorithm, an executive, an investor — that has no real interest in the product itself.
归根结底，"腐烂经济 "的核心问题在于，人们对自己喜爱的事物做出决定，是为了满足某一方--算法、高管、投资者--的需求，而这一方对产品本身并没有真正的兴趣。

Shadows In The Cave

Back in the world of tech, Google is planning to replace its Google Assistant with its generative-AI powered "Gemini" (formerly called Bard) chatbot, laying off multiple people on the Google Assistant team in the process. This decision is one made to satisfy investors — a way of showing that Google is integrating artificial intelligence to "push the boundaries of where we need to go" according to Sundar Pichai, who I do not believe ever uses Google Assistant. Computerworld's JR Raphael, who absolutely does use it, describes the move as a sign that "Google [has] forgotten why a phone assistant actually matters — and what we, as actual users in the real world, need from such a service." While Google has yet to fully make the move, the writing is on the wall, regardless of whether the actual assistant is fit for the task and not, say, hallucinating things that don't exist.
回到科技世界，谷歌正计划用其由生成式人工智能驱动的 "双子座"（原名巴德）聊天机器人取代谷歌助手，在此过程中，谷歌助手团队将裁员多人。桑达尔-皮查伊（Sundar Pichai）认为，这一决定是为了满足投资者的需求--表明谷歌正在整合人工智能，以 "推动我们的发展"。计算机世界》的 JR-拉斐尔（JR Raphael）绝对使用过谷歌助手，他认为此举表明 "谷歌已经忘记了手机助手的真正意义，以及作为现实世界中的实际用户，我们需要这样的服务"。虽然谷歌还没有完全行动起来，但无论实际的助手是否适合这项任务，而不是产生不存在的幻觉，这已经是板上钉钉的事了。

Speaking of Google, in late February, HouseFresh — a Wirecutter-esque site that publishes  lab-tested evaluations of air purifiers and filters — bemoaned how their Google traffic was steadily declining, despite the high standards of their coverage and rigorous review process. Although HouseFresh occupies a small niche in the tech market, it’s tough to fault the quality of its work, with all reviews detailed, tested against a rigorous and empirically-driven process, and accompanied with beautiful imagery. 
说到谷歌，二月下旬，HouseFresh--一个类似于 Wirecutter 的网站，发布经过实验室测试的空气净化器和过滤器评估报告--哀叹他们的谷歌流量正在稳步下降，尽管他们的报道标准很高，审查过程也很严格。尽管 HouseFresh 在科技市场中占据了一个小的利基市场，但其工作质量是无可挑剔的，所有的评论都很详细，经过了严格的实证测试，并配有精美的图片。

Google’s algorithm, at least in theory, is designed to reward high-quality content that readers find useful. Content like HouseFresh’s. Obviously, Google doesn’t actually poll the reader of each site, so it has to rely on context clues. It can rely on specific telemetry for this, like the length of the article, the number of internal and external links, the number of pictures and subheadings, and the inclusion of certain language that indicates a level of rigor and depth. It might see phrases like “lab test,” or the inclusion of a quote from an external party or expert, and look kindly upon them. 
谷歌的算法，至少在理论上，旨在奖励读者认为有用的高质量内容。像 HouseFresh 这样的内容。显然，谷歌不会对每个网站的读者进行实际调查，因此它必须依靠上下文线索。为此，它可以依靠特定的遥测技术，如文章的长度、内部和外部链接的数量、图片和小标题的数量，以及是否使用了某些表明严谨性和深度的语言。它可能会看到 "实验室测试 "这样的短语，或者引用了外部人士或专家的观点，从而对其产生好感。

These are all things that are, for the most part, easy to fake. HouseFresh identified several large publications that gave their seal of approval to low-quality, underperforming, and noisy air purifiers, including one that The Wirecutter (correctly) bullied into retracting its advertising claims. While these publications often said their reviews were based on empirical, lab-based tests, they never actually provided any evidence for this, or even discussed their testing parameters. Many publications based their reviews on random unsourced, unverified, and unvetted social media comments — including some that, hilariously enough, originated from suspected spam bots hawking the dodgy air purifiers. 
在大多数情况下，这些都是很容易伪造的。HouseFresh 发现有几家大型刊物对质量低劣、性能不佳、噪音大的空气净化器盖章认可，其中一家还被《The Wirecutter》（正确地）"欺负 "得收回了广告宣称。虽然这些出版物经常说他们的评论是基于实验室的实证测试，但实际上他们从来没有提供过任何证据，甚至没有讨论过他们的测试参数。许多出版物的评论都是基于随机的、无来源的、未经核实的、未经审查的社交媒体评论--包括一些令人捧腹的评论，这些评论疑似来自兜售可疑空气净化器的垃圾邮件机器人。

This is a problem of private equity in media, with owners seeking to maximize affiliate revenue with zero regard for journalistic rigor. To put it bluntly, these sites are deliberately lying to their customers, trying to trick them into buying expensive crap in order to maximize their quarterly earnings. But Google, as HouseFresh argues persuasively, also shares some responsibility for failing to identify obvious attempts to game the system, and failing to differentiate between a proper review and a listicle filled with affiliate links.    
这是媒体中的私募股权问题，所有者都在寻求最大化的联盟收入，而完全不顾新闻的严谨性。直白地说，这些网站是在故意欺骗客户，试图诱使他们购买昂贵的垃圾信息，以最大限度地提高季度收益。但正如 HouseFresh 所言，谷歌也有一定的责任，因为它未能识别出明显的游戏企图，也未能区分正确的评论和充斥着联盟链接的列表文章。

One might think tech companies were afraid to misinform their customers or make their core experiences worse, and you'd be wrong. Amazon already plans to heavily integrate generative AI into Alexa, and Apple is planning the same with Siri, all to show the world that they're "innovative" and "pushing boundaries" without being able to explain how. Microsoft's one minute Super Bowl ad for its "Copilot" AI assistant showed people asking it things like "write code for my 3D open world game" and "make a logo for my classic truck repair garage Mike's," the latter of which produced four usable images in the commercial. When I tried to replicate this in the real world, Copilot made four images with completely incomprehensible text, only one of which said "Mike's." And while one might come away from the commercial thinking you can do something, it isn't particularly clear what that something is.
亚马逊已经计划在 Alexa 中大量集成生成式人工智能，苹果也计划在 Siri 中这样做，所有这些都是为了向世界展示他们的 "创新 "和 "突破界限"，但却无法解释他们是如何做到的。在微软为其人工智能助手 "Copilot "制作的一分钟超级碗广告中，人们向它提出了 "为我的 3D 开放世界游戏编写代码 "和 "为我的经典卡车修理厂 Mike's 制作一个标志 "等要求，后者在广告中生成了四个可用的图像。当我试图在现实世界中复制这一点时，Copilot 制作出了四张图片，上面的文字完全无法理解，只有一张写着 "Mike's"。虽然从这个广告中，人们可能会认为你可以做一些事情，但并不特别清楚那是什么事情。

And I think it's because Microsoft isn't actually interested in users liking or using the product, but in showing the markets a new button that computer manufacturers can put on laptops that suggests that it is still innovative. It doesn't matter that their customers don't actually like Copilot and are worried about the mistakes it makes, because neither Satya Nadella nor his board members nor Jim Cramer nor any of the other people who actually invest in Microsoft will use it — they just need to be able to say that Microsoft has "still got it."
我认为，这是因为微软对用户是否喜欢或使用该产品并不感兴趣，而是想向市场展示一个新按钮，让电脑制造商可以在笔记本电脑上安装这个按钮，从而表明它仍然具有创新性。他们的客户实际上并不喜欢 Copilot，也担心它会犯错误，但这并不重要，因为无论是萨蒂亚-纳德拉（Satya Nadella）还是他的董事会成员、吉姆-克莱默（Jim Cramer）还是其他真正投资微软的人都不会使用它，他们只需要能够说微软 "仍然有能力"。

It also doesn't matter to the markets or investors that AI is both incredibly expensive and yet to turn a profit. As Paris Marx wrote, AI is causing tech companies to build massive new data centers to keep up with the incredible computing demands of artificial intelligence, and that these chatbots — despite clearly not being "better" at any task than a regular search engine — could cost ten times more to run than Google or Bing. These companies are buying thousands of acres of land and spending billions of dollars on data centers for products that are yet to provide any compelling reason why they require such incredible infrastructure spending.
对于市场或投资者来说，人工智能既昂贵得令人难以置信，又尚未实现盈利，但这并不重要。正如帕里斯-马克思（Paris Marx）所写的那样，人工智能正在促使科技公司建立大规模的新数据中心，以满足人工智能令人难以置信的计算需求，而这些聊天机器人--尽管在任何任务上显然都没有比普通搜索引擎 "更好"--的运行成本可能是谷歌或必应的十倍。

OpenAI makes $1.6 billion a year in revenue, but it's clear that the company is far from sustainable, which is why CEO Sam Altman is trying to raise trillions of dollars to boost the supply of the Graphics Processing Units used to fuel an entire industry that has yet to find a profitable product. In a logical tech economy, one would be terrified that so many bets have been made on such shaky ground, but we're in the Rot Economy, where an unsustainable product with few clear use cases can burn billions of dollars and fuel our climate crisis because the tech industry has run out of fucking ideas. Generative AI is imperfect and costly to run, yet is held up as a solution to many problems that it can't even begin to fix.
OpenAI 的年收入为 16 亿美元，但很明显，该公司远非可持续发展，这也是为什么首席执行官山姆-奥特曼（Sam Altman）试图筹集数万亿美元来增加图形处理单元的供应，以推动整个行业的发展，而该行业尚未找到盈利的产品。在合乎逻辑的科技经济中，人们会对在如此不稳定的基础上进行如此多的押注感到恐惧，但我们正处于 "腐烂经济"（Rot Economy）中，在这种经济中，一个几乎没有明确用例的不可持续产品可能会烧掉数十亿美元，并助长我们的气候危机，因为科技行业已经耗尽了该死的创意。生成式人工智能并不完美，运行成本也很高，但它却被当作许多问题的解决方案，而这些问题根本不是它能解决的。

I think the tech industry's (and venture capital’s) obsession with artificial intelligence is a symptom of rot, where products are created based on analytics and guesswork rather than actually thinking about what a customer might want. Artificial intelligence is allegedly going to change our lives, but it's difficult to find one compelling description as to how it will do so without tumbling into the murky world of tech bro science fiction — and even a $7 million Super Bowl commercial from a $3 trillion tech firm couldn't seem to find a tangible use case without outright lying about what the result would be.
我认为，科技行业（和风险投资）对人工智能的痴迷是一种腐朽的表现，在这种情况下，产品的创造是基于分析和猜测，而不是真正思考客户可能需要什么。据称，人工智能将改变我们的生活，但很难找到一个令人信服的描述来说明它将如何改变我们的生活，否则就会陷入科技兄弟科幻小说的阴暗世界--即使是一家价值3万亿美元的科技公司耗资700万美元拍摄的超级碗广告，似乎也无法找到一个切实的使用案例，而不对其结果公然撒谎。

And the rest of the tech industry — and society — suffers as a result of the rot economy's obsession with symbolic value creation. Tech companies are obsessed with juicing metrics to please Wall Street as our phones get flooded with annoying notifications and spam calls. The most common ads that I see on Instagram are scams where a guy plays a game that doesn't exist so that you'll download one of many different awful pay-to-win strategy games, and on Facebook, every third post is separated by a carousel of videos that have nothing to do with me, other than the fact that Meta wants me to see them. Social networks are no longer for networking — they’re content advertising platforms where, if we’re lucky, we might just get a chance to see stuff from the people we follow. 
由于腐烂经济沉迷于象征性的价值创造，其他科技行业和社会都深受其害。当我们的手机充斥着恼人的通知和垃圾电话时，科技公司却沉迷于提高指标以取悦华尔街。在Instagram上，我最常看到的广告是一个人在玩一个根本不存在的游戏，好让你下载一个各种糟糕的付费策略游戏；在Facebook上，每隔三条帖子就会出现一个视频旋转木马，这些视频与我无关，只是Meta想让我看到它们。社交网络不再是建立联系的平台，而是内容广告平台，如果幸运的话，我们可能有机会看到我们关注的人的内容。

Google Chrome is used by over three billion people, yet continues to take up incredible amounts of RAM for reasons that Google doesn't care to fix. Using a smartphone to browse many modern websites introduces you to advertisements that take up a quarter of your screen and actively try to trick you into clicking them. And when you try to cancel many modern subscriptions, "dark patterns" will work to trick you into not doing so, to the point that you might think you've canceled a product you're still paying for.
Google Chrome 浏览器的用户已超过 30 亿，但它却一直占用着惊人的 RAM，而 Google 对此却无动于衷。使用智能手机浏览许多现代网站时，你会看到占屏幕四分之一的广告，这些广告会诱使你点击它们。当你试图取消许多现代订阅时，"黑暗模式 "会诱使你不这么做，以至于你可能以为自己已经取消了仍在付费的产品。

These are all problems that can be fixed by the platforms in question — or they would be, if they saw them as problematic. Useless, misleading advertising improves Meta’s earnings, and Google Chrome being slow and ugly doesn’t stop people from having to use it for work. It doesn’t matter that mobile browsing sucks, or that nobody intentionally clicks a single one of those ads, or that these advertisements make us unable to read the content that we originally visited an outlet to read. Nothing really matters, as long as the numbers keep going up.
这些都是相关平台可以解决的问题--或者说，如果它们认为这些问题有问题，它们就会去解决。无用的、误导性的广告提高了 Meta 的收益，谷歌浏览器又慢又丑也不能阻止人们在工作中使用它。手机浏览糟糕、没有人故意点击一个广告、这些广告让我们无法阅读原本要阅读的内容，这些都不重要。只要数字继续上升，一切都不重要。

Every single one of these problems comes back to one point — that far too many industries are run by people who don’t see the customer as the recipient of the value of a product or service. This problem is central to everything I've written, and likely everything I'll ever write. It's bile-inducing and deeply ugly, but awareness is just one step in reversing the course of the Rot Economy.
所有这些问题都可以归结到一点--太多行业的经营者没有把客户视为产品或服务价值的接受者。这个问题是我写过的所有文章的核心，也很可能是我以后要写的所有文章的核心。这个问题让人痛心疾首，也让人深感丑陋，但认识到这一点只是扭转 "腐朽经济 "进程的一步。

Thanks for reading this week's newsletter.
感谢您阅读本周通讯。

Last week I launched my new podcast "Better Offline” with HeartRadio and Cool Zone Media. It’s a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s growing influence over society, and how startups, venture capitalists and big tech firms are looking to change the future - for better or for worse.
上周，我与 HeartRadio 和 Cool Zone Media 一起推出了我的新播客 "更好的离线"。这是一档每周播出的节目，探讨科技行业对社会日益增长的影响力，以及初创企业、风险投资家和大型科技公司如何改变未来--无论是好是坏。

This week’s episode is an evisceration of the Winklevoss brothers - the twin rowboat giants you might remember from the Facebook movie that ended up losing a billion dollars of their customers’ crypto. It’ll be out at 12AM Eastern Time on Wednesday February 28. 
本周的节目是对温克艾沃斯兄弟的抨击--你可能还记得 Facebook 电影中的双胞胎划艇巨头，他们最终损失了客户 10 亿美元的加密货币。本期节目将于美国东部时间 2 月 28 日星期三上午 12 点播出。

I'd be so grateful if you'd subscribe. You can find all the links (including the RSS feed) here. You can also join the Where’s Your Ed At Discord here and the very early (and fan-run) Better Offline Reddit here.
如果您能订阅，我将不胜感激。您可以在这里找到所有链接（包括 RSS 订阅）。您还可以在这里加入 "Where's Your Ed At Discord"，在这里加入早期的（由粉丝运营的）"Better Offline Reddit"。