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Most of the time for most users, the Internet simply magically appears through a click on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Most of the time we don’t think about how this magic is made possible, do not think about the complex production process behind that pretty little screen and the Internet that seems to hold all the world’s knowledge. Before taking up questions about what goes on in digital cultures, it is important to think about how digital cultures are possible at all, to look at the history and present of the production process that enables an online world to exist in the first place.
对于大多数用户来说，互联网大多数时候只是通过点击智能手机、平板电脑或笔记本电脑神奇地出现。我们大多数时候并不考虑这种魔法是如何实现的，也不考虑在那个看似承载着世界所有知识的漂亮小屏幕背后复杂的生产过程。在探讨数字文化中发生的事情之前，重要的是要思考数字文化是如何可能存在的，回顾使在线世界得以存在的生产过程的历史和现状。

The technocultural history of the Internet is a fascinating one that offers a rich example of the interplay of conscious design, unpredicted consequences and ongoing human adaptations. But first we might ask, is there really only one Internet that has been in existence since the 1970 or 1980s, as most histories tell it? Or is it more accurate to think of a series of Internets, because the nature, scope, uses and meaning of the Internet(s) have changed so much over time? The Internet is more like a process than a thing. At the very least the Internet we know today has evolved through several very different phases, and will go through more radical changes in the future.
互联网的技术文化历史是一个引人入胜的故事，提供了一个关于有意识设计、意想不到的后果和持续的人类适应之间相互作用的丰富例子。但首先我们可能要问，是否真的只有一个自 1970 或 1980 年代以来存在的互联网，正如大多数历史所描述的那样？还是说更准确的说法是有一系列互联网，因为互联网的性质、范围、用途和意义随着时间的推移发生了如此大的变化？互联网更像是一个过程，而不是一个事物。至少我们今天所知的互联网经历了几个非常不同的阶段，并将在未来经历更激进的变化。

Though there are many possible ways to characterize the phases or versions of the Internet(s), I think the following labels provide a shorthand pointing to most of the key stages or transformations, and they will provide the scaffolding for my version of this history: 1) the military/academic Internet (in the 1970s and 1980s);
尽管有许多可能的方式来描述互联网的各个阶段或版本，但我认为以下标签提供了一种简洁的指向大多数关键阶段或转变的方式，并将为我版本的历史提供框架：1）军事/学术互联网（在 1970 年代和 1980 年代）；
2) the scientific/academic Internet (of the 1980s); 3) the avant-garde countercultural Internet (of the early 1990s); 4) an emergent public Internet (in the mid-1990s); 5) the commercial Internet (in the late 1990s); 6) the domesticated Internet (growing increasingly since the last decade of the twentieth century); and 7) Web 2.0/interactive Internet (beginning in the early 2000s). Each of these stages or versions overlaps with and partly incorporates elements of the earlier stages, and the boundaries between the phases are porous and somewhat arbitrary. But no matter how one chooses to name it/them, the history of the Internet(s) is a culturally complicated one that continues to evolve in only partly predictable ways. It is also a history that is more than a little bit strange.
2) 科学/学术互联网（1980 年代）；3) 前卫反文化互联网（1990 年代初）；4) 新兴公共互联网（1990 年代中）；5) 商业互联网（1990 年代末）；6) 驯化互联网（自 20 世纪最后十年起日益增长）；7) Web 2.0/互动互联网（自 2000 年代初开始）。这些阶段或版本彼此重叠，并部分吸收了早期阶段的元素，各阶段之间的界限是渗透的，且有些任意。但无论如何命名，互联网的历史是一个文化上复杂的过程，仍在以部分不可预测的方式不断演变。这段历史也有些奇怪。

The cultural history of the Internet is strange in large part because what has come to be the defining media form for our age evolved largely through a series of unexpected, unplanned transformations quite far from the original intentions of its creators. While a technological system as immensely complicated as the Internet has many and varied origins, it is clear that its initial uses were military and scientific. What has become the most public, extensive communications network in the history of the world was originally a topsecret, highly restricted communication system built by and for the United States military with support from mostly university-based scientists and engineers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US government created ARPANET to facilitate communication among military personnel and scientists working in or for the military. With the rare exception of one key figure in this developmental process, J. C. R. Licklider of MIT and DARPA, who as early as 1962 spoke of a “galactic network” that sounds quite a bit like the Internet that was to emerge decades later, the people responsible for what became a worldwide network of users had a very restricted idea of what their project would entail. This networked computer system was first referred to as the Internet in 1974 (“A Brief History of the Internet”; Edwards 1996).
互联网的文化历史之所以奇特，很大程度上是因为作为我们时代定义性媒体形式的东西，主要通过一系列意想不到、未计划的转变演变而来，这些转变与其创造者的初衷相去甚远。尽管像互联网这样复杂的技术系统有着多种多样的起源，但显然其最初的用途是军事和科学。如今成为世界历史上最公开、最广泛的通信网络的东西，最初是一个高度机密、限制严格的通信系统，由美国军方及大多数大学的科学家和工程师共同建立。美国国防高级研究计划局（DARPA）创建了 ARPANET，以促进军方人员和为军方工作的科学家之间的通信。在这一发展过程中，除了一个关键人物 J. C. R.外，几乎没有例外。 麻省理工学院和国防高级研究计划局的利克莱德早在 1962 年就谈到了一个“银河网络”，这听起来与几十年后出现的互联网非常相似，负责这个最终成为全球用户网络的项目的人对他们的项目内容有着非常有限的想法。这个网络计算机系统在 1974 年首次被称为互联网（“互联网简史”；爱德华兹 1996 年）。

The Internet began life as a top-secret secure network designed to allow the United States military command and control to survive a nuclear attack. The dispersed, decentralized nature of the Net that gives it such a powerfully democratic potential today was initially intended to allow communication to continue if vast areas of the network were destroyed in war. The transformation of this system into the largest, most open, public network of communication in history could be characterized as, in a very quirky way, technologically determined, in the sense that the technology overran its intended uses.
互联网最初是一个高度机密的安全网络，旨在使美国军事指挥和控制在核攻击中生存。网络的分散、去中心化特性赋予了它今天如此强大的民主潜力，最初是为了在战争中如果网络的广泛区域被摧毁时继续进行通信。这个系统转变为历史上最大、最开放的公共通信网络，可以说在某种奇特的意义上是技术决定的，因为技术超出了其预期用途。

But there was nothing predetermined about the various phases the Internet has passed through. Those have very much been determined by sociocultural, not solely technical, factors, though the technical breakthrough of a more user-friendly way to access the Net was inarguably a key in the transformation.
但互联网经历的各个阶段并没有什么是预先确定的。这些阶段在很大程度上是由社会文化因素决定的，而不仅仅是技术因素，尽管更用户友好的上网方式的技术突破无疑是转型的关键。

The path by which the Internet has come increasingly to be a major medium of popular communication is a winding one with many unexpected turns. Another key step forward occurred in 1991, when the National Science Foundation in the US received permission from the military to link to the ARPANET, permission granted largely because of a close connection between many scientists and the military. While hardly a general opening to the public, this move proved crucial in expanding the Net beyond the military and more deeply into academia such that universities soon became an important force in the further expansion out into public space. The scientific/academic Net gradually drew in more and more users in more and more scholarly fields (and continues to do so), moving from the sciences to the social sciences to the arts and humanities. As the number of academic entry points grew, knowledge about this new online world began to slip outside of colleges and universities.
互联网逐渐成为大众交流主要媒介的道路曲折而多变，充满了意想不到的转折。1991 年，美国国家科学基金会获得军方许可连接到 ARPANET，这是又一个重要的进展，这一许可的获得主要是由于许多科学家与军方之间的紧密联系。尽管这并不算是对公众的全面开放，但这一举措在将网络从军事扩展到学术界方面起到了关键作用，大学很快成为进一步向公共领域扩展的重要力量。科学/学术网络逐渐吸引了越来越多的用户，涵盖了越来越多的学术领域（并且仍在继续），从自然科学到社会科学，再到艺术和人文学科。随着学术入口点的增加，关于这个新在线世界的知识开始逐渐传播到大学之外。

But no doubt the strangest-seeming detour along the route to the current Internet passes through the “hippie” counterculture. Among the first folks outside the military and scientific communities to take an active interest in the new communication possibilities deriving from networks of linked computers were some refugees from the 1960s counterculture (popularly known as hippies). The San Francisco Bay Area was famously one of the major meccas of hippie culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and that area was just adjacent to what became the symbolic center of digital innovation, Silicon Valley, just south of San Francisco. The proximity of those two communities, along with nearby centers of academic computer research such as Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, were a matrix for the next stage of development of the Net. Countercultureshaped figures such as Stewart Brand began to envision the Internet as a potential cyberutopia embodying the values of “peace, love and understanding” at the heart of hippie ideology. The Bay Area has a long history of bohemian communities (not only the hippies, but as one of the centers of Beat culture in the 1950s and others before that), a site with a more openly progressive political orientation than many other parts of the US. Those communities developed a serious social critique of America’s obsession with wealth, war and selfish forms of excessive individualism (Turner 2006). Folks who had
但毫无疑问，通往当前互联网的路线中，最奇怪的绕行路线经过了“嬉皮”反文化。在军方和科学界之外，最早对来自联网计算机的新通信可能性产生积极兴趣的人中，有一些来自 1960 年代反文化的难民（通常被称为嬉皮士）。旧金山湾区在 1960 年代和 1970 年代以嬉皮文化的主要圣地而闻名，而该地区恰好毗邻后来成为数字创新象征中心的硅谷，位于旧金山以南。这两个社区的接近，加上斯坦福大学和加州大学伯克利分校等附近的学术计算机研究中心，为互联网的下一个发展阶段提供了基础。受反文化影响的斯图尔特·布兰德等人物开始设想互联网作为一个潜在的网络乌托邦，体现了嬉皮意识形态核心的“和平、爱与理解”的价值观。 湾区有着悠久的波希米亚社区历史（不仅仅是嬉皮士，还有 1950 年代的垮掉派文化中心以及之前的其他社区），这里的政治取向比美国许多其他地方更为开放进步。这些社区对美国对财富、战争和自私的过度个人主义的痴迷进行了严肃的社会批判（特纳 2006）。人们曾经有
helped end racial segregation in the US and protested the disastrous Vietnam War, and who felt the soul of America to be lost in a sea of excessive consumerism believed a free, open new form of communication beyond the control of corporations and the government could radically change the country and the world for the better.
帮助结束美国的种族隔离，抗议灾难性的越南战争，并认为美国的灵魂在过度消费主义的海洋中迷失的人们相信，一种超越公司和政府控制的自由、开放的新沟通形式可以从根本上改善国家和世界。

The combination of “freaks” (as counterculturalists preferred to call themselves) and “geeks” (as the technosavvy were beginning to be called) proved a potent mix for imagining and building early popular cyberspaces. It is important to keep in mind that this phase was still largely a written text phase; some sound and images were present but in nowhere near the levels we now take for granted. Much of the early utopian thought about cyberspace (the term came into wide usage at this point) that spoke of it being beyond gender, beyond race, beyond disability stemmed from the fact that many online communicators were invisible and inaudible to each other at this stage. All you had to go on were words not noticeably connected to particular human bodies. In two of the most influential early books on digital culture, Howard Rheingold (2000 [1994]) touted the possibilities of a virtual community that transcended all social and geographic borders, and social psychologist Sherry Turkle (1995) speculated that online communication would enhance self-exploration by allowing us to engage in masquerade, to play with identities not our own. Both of these books offer cautions as well as optimism in regard to computer cultures, but they were largely received as part of a wave of praise for the possibilities of life on screen. They represent a wave that pictured the Web as a place not just for scientists or computer “geeks” (before geeks became chic), but for anyone seeking an exciting new space to explore, create and change the world.
“怪胎”（正如反文化主义者喜欢称呼自己）和“极客”（正如技术精英开始被称呼的）结合在一起，成为构想和建立早期流行网络空间的强大混合体。重要的是要记住，这一阶段仍然主要是一个书面文本阶段；虽然有一些声音和图像，但远没有我们现在所认为的那样普遍。关于网络空间的早期乌托邦思想（这个术语在这一点上开始广泛使用）提到它超越性别、种族和残疾，源于许多在线交流者在这个阶段彼此是不可见和不可听的。你所依赖的只是与特定人类身体没有明显联系的文字。在两本关于数字文化的最具影响力的早期书籍中，霍华德·莱因戈尔德（2000 [1994]）宣传了一个超越所有社会和地理边界的虚拟社区的可能性，而社会心理学家谢丽·图克尔（1995）则推测在线交流将通过让我们参与伪装、玩弄非自己身份来增强自我探索。 这两本书在计算机文化方面既提供了警示，也传达了乐观，但它们在很大程度上被视为对屏幕生活可能性的赞美浪潮的一部分。它们代表了一种潮流，描绘了网络不仅是科学家或计算机“极客”（在极客变得时尚之前）的地方，而是任何寻求激动人心的新空间来探索、创造和改变世界的人。

The counterculture origins of much early digital culture work have had a lasting impact. This history in part accounts for a strong anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian streak in much “geek culture,” ranging from the libertarian efforts of the open-source movement to political hackers and WikiLeakers. But where these early adopters touted the utopian possibilities of virtual communities (they created one of the first of these, the Bay Area’s WELL-Whole Earth “Lectronic Link”) and the exciting new kinds of identities possible via the Web, others, partly in response to this optimism, saw only dystopian possibilities. Critics expressed fears that humans would all become mindless drones lost in computer screens with little sense of the real world and little connection to others. In subsequent years and with wider use of the technologies, this two-sided exaggeration has largely given way to more modest assertions about the cultural impact of
早期数字文化工作的反文化起源产生了持久的影响。这段历史部分解释了“极客文化”中强烈的反建制、反权威倾向，从开源运动的自由意志主义努力到政治黑客和维基解密者。但这些早期采用者宣传虚拟社区的乌托邦可能性（他们创建了其中一个最早的虚拟社区，即湾区的 WELL-Whole Earth“Lectronic Link”）以及通过网络可能实现的新型身份，而其他人则部分是对这种乐观情绪的回应，只看到了反乌托邦的可能性。批评者表达了对人类将变成无意识的机器人，迷失在电脑屏幕中，对现实世界缺乏感知，对他人缺乏联系的担忧。随着技术的广泛使用，这种两面夸大的观点在随后的几年中大多让位于对文化影响的更温和的主张。
digital cultures. But it is not hard to this day to find cyberutopian and cyberdystopian screeds on the bookshelves or Amazon.com.
数字文化。但直到今天，在书架上或Amazon.com上找到网络乌托邦和网络反乌托邦的文章并不困难。

The countercultural, avant-garde Web slowly opened up into wider circles over the course of the early 1990s. In order for digital culture to become a significant phenomenon, two key technical things had to happen to make the Net more user friendly. The first huge step in this direction has been mentioned: The creation in 1990-1991 of the World Wide Web. When British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the interface that he dubbed the World Wide Web in 1989, he had little idea he was creating the means for billions of people to communicate. He was responding to a very practical problem that had developed in his place of work, CERN (originally Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the foremost physics laboratory in the world (home to the fastest and most sophisticated atom-smashing particle accelerator, among other things). Berners-Lee wanted to find a better way for scientists at the lab to communicate, and feeling, as he put it, rather “desperate,” he pulled together a bunch of software and networked hardware (using a NeXT computer created by Steve Jobs shortly after he was unceremoniously kicked out of his own company, Apple Computers), and out of that messy matrix emerged the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee 1999).
反文化的先锋网络在 1990 年代初逐渐向更广泛的圈子开放。为了使数字文化成为一个重要现象，必须发生两项关键技术，以使网络更加用户友好。朝这个方向迈出的第一步已经提到：1990-1991 年创建的万维网。当英国物理学家蒂姆·伯纳斯-李在 1989 年发明他称之为万维网的界面时，他并没有意识到自己正在创造一种让数十亿人沟通的手段。他是在回应他工作地点——欧洲核子研究中心（CERN，原名 Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire）中出现的一个非常实际的问题，该中心是世界上最顶尖的物理实验室（拥有世界上最快、最复杂的粒子加速器等设施）。 伯纳斯-李希望为实验室的科学家们找到一种更好的沟通方式，他感到相当“绝望”，于是将一堆软件和网络硬件（使用了一台由史蒂夫·乔布斯在被自己公司苹果电脑无情地踢出后不久创建的 NeXT 计算机）结合在一起，最终从这个混乱的矩阵中诞生了万维网（伯纳斯-李 1999）。

At the time, the name World Wide Web was a ridiculously ambitious one, but it has proven to be a prophetic one. Berners-Lee has consistently been one of the most important promoters of the ideas that the Internet should in fact be worldwide, that access to it is nothing less than a “human right” and that it should be regulated only technically with no censoring interference by governments or corporations (see Net neutrality in the Glossary). The crude browser that Berners-Lee and his younger French colleague, Robert Cailliau, came up with, was the great-great-great-grandparent of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer, and all the others that came to be the main entry points to the Internet. Due in part perhaps to the accident of its naming, the World Wide Web started on a self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming an ever-expanding network of computers moving first slowly, then at breakneck pace, beyond the confines of the military and the scientific community. With hindsight, such a development seems inevitable, but it was far from obvious to anyone, including Berners-Lee, that the Web would gain anything even remotely resembling its current ubiquity.
当时，“万维网”这个名字显得极其雄心勃勃，但它证明是一个预言性的名字。伯纳斯-李始终是互联网应该真正成为全球性的理念的重要推动者之一，他认为对互联网的访问无疑是一种“人权”，并且应该仅在技术上进行监管，而不应受到政府或企业的审查干预（参见术语表中的网络中立性）。伯纳斯-李和他的年轻法国同事罗伯特·凯利奥发明的粗糙浏览器，是 Chrome、Firefox、Safari、Opera 和 Internet Explorer 等浏览器的远祖，以及所有后来成为互联网主要入口的浏览器。或许由于其命名的偶然性，万维网开始了一个自我实现的预言，成为一个不断扩展的计算机网络，最初缓慢移动，随后以惊人的速度超越了军事和科学界的限制。回头看，这样的发展似乎是不可避免的，但对于任何人，包括伯纳斯-李来说，网络会获得任何与其当前普及程度相似的东西，远非显而易见。

The second key development, the point at which the Web truly became the hub of popular digital cultures, came in the mid-1990s with the invention of truly easy-to-use browsers. First Mosaic in 1993
第二个关键发展是网络真正成为流行数字文化中心的时刻，这发生在 1990 年代中期，随着真正易于使用的浏览器的发明。首先是 1993 年的 Mosaic。
broke the ground, and then 2 years later Netscape produced the first truly user-friendly and widely adopted browser. Ever more userfriendly Web browsers emerged in rapid succession. Where early navigation of the Net had required a fair amount of technical knowledge, new browsers made cyberspaces far more accessible. By 1996, close to 90 percent of Web traffic occurred through Netscape, with the other 10 percent mostly taken up by Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. But that year, Microsoft started including Internet Explorer as part of its basic software package, and the first of several browser wars was under way. While the details of who won and who lost in this and subsequent browser battles is of little consequence, the wars signaled recognition that the public Internet was a phenomenon here to stay (as late as 1995 Bill Gates had dismissed it as a passing fad), including as a space where corporate profits could be made.
打破了僵局，随后两年后，Netscape 推出了第一个真正用户友好且广泛采用的浏览器。越来越多用户友好的网页浏览器迅速涌现。早期的网络导航需要相当多的技术知识，而新浏览器使网络空间变得更加可及。到 1996 年，近 90%的网络流量通过 Netscape 进行，另外 10%主要由微软的浏览器 Internet Explorer 占据。但在这一年，微软开始将 Internet Explorer 作为其基本软件包的一部分，第一次浏览器战争就此展开。虽然谁在这场及后续的浏览器战争中胜出或失利的细节并不重要，但这些战争标志着公众互联网被认可为一种持久现象（直到 1995 年，比尔·盖茨还曾将其视为一时的潮流），并且作为一个可以获得企业利润的空间。

Indeed, corporate profits define the next major stage of Internet growth, the commercialization or monetizing (making a profit) moment. Put bluntly, a sector of the corporate world, first in the US, then in pockets around the globe, realized that the Internet could be used not just for business communication, but for business, period. Some had recognized the commercial potential of the Net from the beginning, but full commercialization evolved slowly until the mid1990s. Then came the phase first glorified, then vilified, as the “dotcom boom.” Just as the utopian phase of the early, avant-garde Net proved to be overly optimistic, so too the commercial phase proved overly ambitious in its claims, and the dotcom boom eventually came to seem like a dot-con job when the dotcom bubble burst. But this phase set in motion the development of the Web as a site of commerce that has of course continued to grow. After recovering from the dotcom bust, e-commerce has steadily increased its presence in the world, becoming a very significant part of the Internet. Slowly but steadily companies such as Amazon and eBay began to prove that the Net could be a profitable place for business. But even after the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle ended, the commercialization of the Net has been something of a rollercoaster ride. Initially, many major media corporations believed that they could turn the Web into a pay-per-use broadcast medium like television. What they did not realize was that a significant portion of the population that had grown up on the free, open and frontier-like Internet was not willing to relinquish that freedom for corporate control. The anti-authoritarian component of the digital world was soon at war with the commercial version, and that war continues in a variety of ways today.
确实，企业利润定义了互联网增长的下一个主要阶段，即商业化或盈利（获利）时刻。坦率地说，企业界的一个部门，首先在美国，然后在全球的某些地区，意识到互联网不仅可以用于商业沟通，还可以用于商业本身。一些人从一开始就认识到网络的商业潜力，但全面商业化的发展缓慢，直到 1990 年代中期。随后出现了一个阶段，先是被美化，后又被贬低，称为“互联网泡沫”。正如早期先锋网络的乌托邦阶段被证明过于乐观一样，商业阶段在其主张上也显得过于雄心勃勃，当互联网泡沫破裂时，互联网泡沫最终看起来像是一场骗局。但这个阶段推动了网络作为商业场所的发展，当然这一发展仍在继续。在从互联网泡沫崩溃中恢复后，电子商务在世界上的存在稳步增加，成为互联网中一个非常重要的部分。亚马逊和 eBay 等公司慢慢而稳步地证明了网络可以成为一个盈利的商业场所。 但即使在互联网泡沫的兴起与破裂周期结束后，网络的商业化仍然像过山车一样起伏不定。最初，许多主要媒体公司认为他们可以将网络变成像电视一样的按次付费广播媒介。他们没有意识到，许多在自由、开放和前沿的互联网环境中成长起来的人口并不愿意为了企业控制而放弃这种自由。数字世界的反权威成分很快与商业版本展开了战争，而这种战争至今以各种方式持续着。

There is no doubt that giant media corporations control a great deal of the content of the Web. Initially, the Time Warner/AOL merger seemed to promise a transformation of the Net into just another form of corporate media. But just as the Web slipped out of the hands of the military, and then of scientists, and then of avantgardists, it has eluded complete takeover by media moguls as well. A kind of uneasy truce, mixed with occasionally open warfare, characterizes the relation between the free Web and the monetized Web. And between the giant media corporations and the advocates of a wholly free Web, there are mixtures, including small businesses able to compete more easily with larger ones because of this cheap communication medium, and sites such as Google and YouTube that provide free search and upload spaces, respectively, but along with heavy injections of advertising.
毫无疑问，巨型媒体公司控制了网络上大量的内容。最初，时代华纳与美国在线的合并似乎预示着网络将转变为另一种企业媒体形式。但正如网络从军方、科学家和先锋派手中滑脱一样，它也未能完全被媒体大亨所掌控。自由网络与盈利网络之间的关系特点是一种不安的休战，偶尔伴随着公开的战争。在巨型媒体公司与完全自由网络的倡导者之间，存在着各种混合，包括能够更容易与大型企业竞争的小型企业，以及像谷歌和 YouTube 这样提供免费搜索和上传空间的网站，但同时也伴随着大量的广告注入。

The free Web spirit also continues to limit commercial uses of the Net in other ways. When television networks came to realize that charging for their shows on the Web would be widely resisted, they used digital space to intensify the popularity of their shows through overt and covert Net advertising, including encouraging development of fan sites that, thanks to new media capabilities, were far more intense and extensive than fan communities of the past (previously confined primarily to print and snail mail). Likewise, old media such as newspapers found that they had to offer at least some content on their new websites for free if they were to lure users into a relationship for which they would later pay. Search engines, the lifeblood of the Net, also had to find a medium ground. Initially attempts by Google, by far the world’s most widely used search engine, to put advertising on their site met with a great deal of resistance, especially when advertising seemed to merge with pure search responses. Eventually they compromised by more clearly delineating paid from unpaid search responses, and lost credibility whenever it was rumored that search rankings could be manipulated for a price.
自由网络精神也继续以其他方式限制互联网的商业用途。当电视网络意识到在网上收费播放节目会遭到广泛抵制时，他们利用数字空间通过明显和隐蔽的网络广告来增强节目的人气，包括鼓励开发粉丝网站，这些网站由于新媒体的能力，比过去主要局限于印刷和邮寄的粉丝社区更加激烈和广泛。同样，报纸等旧媒体发现，如果想吸引用户建立一种后续付费的关系，他们必须在新网站上提供至少一些免费的内容。搜索引擎，互联网的命脉，也不得不找到一个中间地带。最初，全球使用最广泛的搜索引擎谷歌在其网站上投放广告的尝试遭遇了很大的抵制，尤其是当广告似乎与纯搜索响应合并时。 最终，他们通过更清晰地区分付费和非付费搜索结果达成了妥协，但每当传出搜索排名可以被操控以换取金钱的谣言时，他们的信誉就会受到损害。

The next major phase of the Net, generally referred to as Web 2.0, intensified debate about control and commercialization of digital spaces. First used by Darcy diNucci, and popularized by Tim O’Reilly, the term is meant to designate a more interactive set of networked relationships. The Web has long been the center of most digital culture, but the features designated by the phrase “Web 2.0” represent the fact that it has become even more central. The main devices associated with digital culture-desktop, laptop and tablet computers,
下一阶段的网络，通常被称为 Web 2.0，加剧了关于数字空间控制和商业化的辩论。这个术语最早由 Darcy diNucci 提出，并由 Tim O'Reilly 推广，旨在指代一种更具互动性的网络关系。网络长期以来一直是大多数数字文化的中心，但“Web 2.0”这一短语所指的特征表明它变得更加核心。与数字文化相关的主要设备包括台式机、笔记本电脑和平板电脑。
cellphones and video game consoles-now all have the capacity to be networked via the Web. That greater interconnection is in fact part of the definition of “Web 2.0”, along with claims of greater personal and collective interactivity via things such as social media sites (Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest), blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr), wikis, electronic self-publishing (WordPress, etc.), video sharing sites (You Tube, Vimeo), mashups, crowdsourcing and so on. Clearly many of these things were available before the phase called Web 2.0, and to the extent that the term represents a new phase of the Net at all it is one more of degree than absolute transformation (Tim Berners-Lee rejects the term as misleading jargon). But for the purposes of this book, the term is useful shorthand for ways in which the Web as a site of cultural production and exchange has expanded and intensified in recent years making questions about just what digital cultures are all about all the more important. And it is a term that has shaped how people think about the Web and digital culture, has shaped what some call the “technological imaginary,” our collective images of what a given technology is and can be.
手机和视频游戏机现在都可以通过网络连接。更大的互联互通实际上是“Web 2.0”定义的一部分，伴随着通过社交媒体网站（如 Facebook、Snapchat、Pinterest）、博客和微博（如 Twitter、Tumblr）、维基、电子自出版（如 WordPress 等）、视频分享网站（如 YouTube、Vimeo）、混合应用、众包等实现更大个人和集体互动的说法。显然，许多这些东西在被称为 Web 2.0 的阶段之前就已经存在，并且在某种程度上，这个术语代表的如果是网络的新阶段，那也是一种程度上的变化，而非绝对的转变（蒂姆·伯纳斯-李拒绝这个术语，认为它是误导性的行话）。但就本书的目的而言，这个术语是一个有用的简写，表明近年来网络作为文化生产和交流的场所如何扩展和加剧，使得关于数字文化究竟是什么的问题变得更加重要。 这是一种塑造人们对网络和数字文化思考的术语，塑造了某些人所称的“技术想象”，即我们对某种技术是什么以及可以是什么的集体印象。

Each stage of the evolution of the Net has left its mark. Each new phase has incorporated rather than fully supplanting the previous phase, and each of these phases or moments in the history of the Internet(s) has left some impression that can be uncovered with a little archeological digging. Successive versions never fully erase previous iterations, and clearly the history of the Interwebs is still very much in progress.
互联网演变的每个阶段都留下了印记。每个新阶段都融入了而不是完全取代前一个阶段，这些互联网历史中的每个阶段或时刻都留下了一些可以通过一点考古挖掘发现的印象。后续版本从未完全抹去之前的迭代，显然，互联网的历史仍在继续发展。

When we unwrap and pick up a shiny new high-tech device-a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, a game console-we don’t have to think much about how it came to be there in our hands. But understanding the process of production is as much a part of digital culture as analyzing the conversations generated by a blog post. Dozens of technical design decisions, intentional and accidental, enable and shape digital cultures. Technical decisions are always also social, political, economic and cultural decisions. The material objects-tablet computers, digital music players-are the result of many non-technical decisions that are laden with cultural import. Why did those decisions get made the way they did? What business pressures were involved? What social and political policy decisions shaped the technology? What cultural values were built into or left out of the design?
当我们拆开并拿起一台闪亮的新高科技设备——笔记本电脑、智能手机、平板电脑、游戏机——时，我们不需要过多思考它是如何来到我们手中的。但理解生产过程与分析博客文章所产生的对话一样，是数字文化的一部分。数十个技术设计决策，无论是有意还是无意，塑造并影响着数字文化。技术决策总是也是社会、政治、经济和文化的决策。这些物质对象——平板电脑、数字音乐播放器——是许多非技术决策的结果，这些决策蕴含着文化意义。为什么这些决策会以这样的方式做出？涉及了哪些商业压力？哪些社会和政治政策决策塑造了这项技术？哪些文化价值被融入或排除在设计之外？

Who participated or was consulted in the design decisions, and who was not?
谁参与或被咨询了设计决策，谁没有？

We know the names and think we know the digital dreamers who founded electronic corporations in their garages or brilliantly invented digital products that shook the world. We know names such as Steve Jobs, the zen genius of Apple Computers, Bill Gates, the once maligned, now heroically philanthropic genius behind Microsoft, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the “do no evil” geniuses behind Google, and, of course, Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard geek genius turned billionaire head of the Facebook empire. The media pays a lot of attention to the dreamers and digital stars, but far less is paid to the thousands of workers who make the visions of these “geniuses” become reality. Moving from the shiny new box containing the latest video game or tablet computer back in time to that object’s creation reveals some far less shiny realities.
我们知道这些名字，也认为我们了解那些在车库里创办电子公司的数字梦想家，或是那些聪明地发明出震撼世界的数字产品的人。我们知道像苹果公司的禅宗天才史蒂夫·乔布斯、曾被诟病但如今成为英雄般慈善家的微软天才比尔·盖茨、倡导“无恶”的谷歌天才拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林，以及当然还有哈佛极客天才、现已成为亿万富翁的脸书帝国掌门人马克·扎克伯格等名字。媒体对这些梦想家和数字明星给予了大量关注，但对成千上万将这些“天才”愿景变为现实的工人关注却少得多。从装有最新视频游戏或平板电脑的闪亮新盒子回溯到那个物品的创造过程，揭示了一些远不如表面光鲜的现实。

At the very top of the labor chain, there are some folks who no doubt embody the popular image of digital brainiacs sitting on sunny decks atop sleek steel and glass buildings sipping lattes and thinking up new digital gadgets and games. These are the heroes (and fewer heroines) of the industry, the ones every tech-savvy kid dreams of becoming the way every kid with basketball talent dreams of being an NBA star. But, as with the tiny elite of players who make it to the big leagues, this stratum of digital workers is a tiny group. This level also includes a small but essential corps of venture capitalists, the moneymen (and most are men) who finance start-ups and inject cash at key moments for existing corporations.
在劳动链的最顶端，有一些人无疑体现了流行的形象——数字天才们坐在阳光明媚的甲板上，位于光滑的钢铁和玻璃建筑之上，喝着拿铁，构思新的数字小工具和游戏。他们是行业的英雄（女性相对较少），是每个懂技术的孩子梦想成为的人，就像每个有篮球天赋的孩子梦想成为 NBA 明星一样。但是，与那些进入大联盟的少数精英球员一样，这一层次的数字工作者也是一个微小的群体。这个层次还包括一小部分但至关重要的风险投资家，他们是为初创公司提供资金并在现有公司关键时刻注入现金的金主（大多数是男性）。

Just beneath the superstars of the digital production world, there are large numbers of mid-level executives who come to work in casual attire and enjoy the benefits of lovely digital campuses with cafés and playgrounds. This level is part of what has been described as a brotopia in Emily Chang’s book of the same name, a brotherhood of young men who came to represent geek chic, a world that, while slowly changing due to intense pressure from women in tech, is still male-dominated (Chang 2018). Most of the rest of the workers who create the digital stuff wealthier folks love to consume face far different, considerably less pleasant work conditions.
在数字制作世界的超级明星之下，有大量中层管理人员穿着休闲服装上班，享受着拥有咖啡馆和游乐场的美丽数字校园的福利。这一层被描述为艾米莉·张同名书籍中的“兄弟乌托邦”，是一个年轻男性的兄弟会，代表着极客时尚。尽管由于女性在科技领域的强烈压力，这个世界正在缓慢变化，但仍然以男性为主（张，2018）。大多数创造数字产品的工人面临着截然不同、相对不愉快的工作条件。

While creating video games or hot new tech devices is the dream job of millions of young people, the realities of most production in the electronics industry are often more like a nightmare. Most of the second-tier production of computers, cellphones, apps and digital game software is done by hundreds of microserfs (Coupland 1995) in tiny cubicles working on some tiny part of a project of which
虽然创造视频游戏或热门新科技设备是数百万年轻人的梦想工作，但电子行业大多数生产的现实往往更像是一场噩梦。计算机、手机、应用程序和数字游戏软件的大部分二级生产都是由数百名微型农奴（Coupland 1995）在狭小的隔间中完成，他们在项目的某个小部分上工作。
many only have a tiny understanding. Few of these folks get to have substantial creative input into the products. Given the rapid obsolescence of much digital hardware and software, these workers also often face long hours to meet tight deadlines, while the relative glamour of a new industry only briefly compensates for often mediocre wages.
许多人对这一领域的理解仅仅是微不足道的。这些人中很少有人能够对产品进行实质性的创意贡献。鉴于许多数字硬件和软件的快速过时，这些工人往往面临长时间的工作以满足紧迫的截止日期，而新兴行业的相对魅力只能短暂地弥补他们通常微薄的工资。

The largest tier are the assembly-line manual laborers who produce the microchips and other hardware components, or package (and package and package) the digital devices. Most of this labor force is terribly underpaid, overworked and often handling or breathing toxic materials without proper protective gear. While some of this work is still done in the Global North, the vast majority is done by women, men and children in the Global South. Some of this work, involving staring for hours into microscopes to check for irregularities in microchips, has led workers to severe eye injury or blindness. Ironically, and contrary to images of robots in electronic industry advertising (watch, for example, 2011 Droid commercials on YouTube), most of these high-tech devices require old-fashioned, painstaking hands-on assembly. While the two upper tiers continue to be dominated by males, this third tier is mostly composed of Third World women who are often stereotyped as more obedient employees (Margolis and Fisher 2006; Pellow and Park 2002).
最大的层级是组装线上的体力劳动者，他们生产微芯片和其他硬件组件，或包装（不断包装）数字设备。大多数这部分劳动力的工资极低，工作过度，且常常在没有适当防护装备的情况下处理或吸入有毒材料。虽然一些工作仍在全球北方进行，但绝大多数是在全球南方由女性、男性和儿童完成的。这些工作中，有些需要长时间盯着显微镜检查微芯片的异常，导致工人严重的眼部受伤或失明。具有讽刺意味的是，与电子行业广告中机器人的形象（例如，观看 2011 年 Droid 广告）相反，这些高科技设备大多需要传统的、费力的手工组装。虽然上层的两个层级仍然以男性为主，但第三层级主要由被刻板印象视为更顺从员工的第三世界女性组成（Margolis 和 Fisher 2006；Pellow 和 Park 2002）。

The occasional exception to this production process often gets more attention than the truth of the daily grind. Just as in the film industry, occasionally a low-budget, independent film will strike gold and make a huge profit, so too independent game or app designers now and then have a big hit that once again animates the myth of the lone genius or the do-it-yourself entrepreneur striking it rich through imagination and perseverance. But the overwhelming reality of the electronic culture industry, like that of the mainstream Hollywood film industry with which it increasingly competes, is the story of a few major mega-conglomerate media corporations (in this case mostly console makers Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) controlling the work produced by a handful of major “content providers” such as EA, Konami, Ubisoft, THQ and Activision. These larger companies tap into and absorb smaller game design studios, frequently siphoning off the most talented designers and bringing them into the conglomerated world. The impact of this process might be compared to how the mainstream music industry works. In order to keep selling music, the music industry must tap into emerging independent music trends. But it does so not to create real innovation, but only to turn real innovation into a more mundane mass marketable commodity
这种生产过程的偶尔例外往往比日常工作的真相更引人注目。就像在电影行业中，偶尔会有一部低预算的独立电影大获成功，获得巨额利润一样，独立游戏或应用设计师也时不时会有一款大作，再次激活了孤独天才或自我创业者通过想象力和毅力致富的神话。但电子文化产业的压倒性现实，像是与之日益竞争的主流好莱坞电影产业一样，是少数大型媒体巨头（在这种情况下主要是游戏机制造商任天堂、索尼和微软）控制着由少数主要“内容提供商”如 EA、科乐美、育碧、THQ 和动视所生产的作品。这些大公司会吸纳并吞并较小的游戏设计工作室，常常抽走最有才华的设计师，将他们带入这个巨头的世界。这一过程的影响可以与主流音乐产业的运作方式进行比较。 为了继续销售音乐，音乐产业必须利用新兴的独立音乐趋势。但这样做并不是为了创造真正的创新，而只是为了将真正的创新转变为一种更平凡的大众市场商品
for sale to pop audiences with less demanding tastes, but a desire for the thrill of the seemingly new. Just like the way punk or rap developed toned-down mainstream versions, but even more quickly, many significant innovations in game design are absorbed by game corp giants who generally dumb them down (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009).
为了向对新奇事物有渴望但品味要求较低的流行观众销售，就像朋克或说唱发展出更为温和的主流版本一样，许多游戏设计中的重要创新被大型游戏公司吸收，这些公司通常会将其简化（Dyer-Witheford 和 de Peuter 2009）。

This least well paid and often exploited level of the digital production world is, not surprisingly, the most invisible one. The world’s increasing income inequality, a process accelerated by the economic and cultural forces that go by the name “globalization,” is written all over the realms of digital production. Those actually producing what hip designers imagine often work for poverty wages in dangerous conditions. Many live crowded into dormitories in situations approaching slave conditions, often working 16 -hour days, and, when production deadlines loom, non-stop for several days. Apart from the occasional scandal when workers in a computer assembly factory in China or Bangladesh commit suicide or die in a fire because they were literally locked into the factory, these workers do not get much attention. And when scandals bring them to public attention, their work conditions are dismissed as aberrations and swept from popular memory as easily as the mind cleansing in films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Men in Black. 

China Watch (2013) reports that
中国观察（2013）报道说

Apple has zero tolerance for lapses in the quality of its products. If a quality issue arises, Apple will do everything it can to have it corrected immediately. But a lower level of urgency apparently applies in responding to labor rights abuses. Despite its professed high standards for the treatment of Apple workers, serious labor violations have persisted year after year.
苹果对其产品质量的失误零容忍。如果出现质量问题，苹果将尽一切努力立即纠正。但在应对劳动权利侵犯方面，显然适用的紧迫性较低。尽管苹果声称对待员工的标准很高，但严重的劳动违规行为年复一年地持续存在。

China Watch and other labor rights organizations find it difficult to believe claims by electronics corporations that they are unaware of working conditions in the factories of their subcontractors. Corporate executives often deploy a tactic made famous by corrupt politicians: Plausible deniability. CEOs for giant electronics corporations such as IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel and the like generally express outrage, briefly, and assert that they do not know what goes in their company’s supply chain. Creating some distance between the corporation and its actual producers is quite deliberate, done for both legal and public relations protection, given the inevitability that awful conditions will be exposed at some point. When challenged to clean
中国观察和其他劳动权益组织很难相信电子公司声称他们对其分包商工厂的工作条件一无所知。企业高管们常常采用一种被腐败政治家所熟知的策略：合理否认。像 IBM、苹果、微软、英特尔等大型电子公司的首席执行官通常会短暂地表示愤怒，并声称他们不知道公司供应链中的情况。为了法律和公共关系的保护，故意在公司与实际生产者之间保持一定距离是相当明显的，因为在某个时刻，糟糕的工作条件不可避免地会被曝光。当被要求改善时，
things up, electronics corporations invariably spin out some story about more careful monitoring, better conditions and so forth, while at the same time, again plausibly but ultimately dishonestly, claiming that because other companies do it too they can only improve things a small amount without being driven out of business (Pellow and Park 2002; Smith, Pellow and Sonnenfeld 2006).
电子公司总是会编造一些关于更仔细的监控、更好的条件等故事，同时又以一种看似合理但最终不诚实的方式声称，由于其他公司也这样做，他们只能在不被迫退出市场的情况下小幅改善情况（Pellow 和 Park 2002；Smith, Pellow 和 Sonnenfeld 2006）。

Critics admit that a concern with competitiveness is a real thing, but counter that this means the industry as a whole must be targeted, rather than periodically singling out one electronics corporation for momentary public shaming. Some who uncritically praise global markets argue that these underpaid, overworked, often endangered laborers are nevertheless better off than before, when many of them were penniless peasants. There is surely a grain of truth in this regarding some workers in the high-tech economy. But critics ask the next question: Are worse and slightly better but still horrendous the only options? Can we do no better as makers of a global economy? These processes not only exploit workers in the Global South, but they also come home to roost in privileged places such as North America and Europe, where the wages of workers are driven down by employers threatening to outsource jobs to the cheaper labor markets of Bangladesh, Malaysia, Mexico or Ghana (Gabry 2011; Pellow and Park 2002; Smith et al. 2006).
批评者承认，关注竞争力确实是一个现实问题，但反驳说这意味着整个行业必须成为目标，而不是定期单独针对某个电子公司进行短暂的公众羞辱。一些不加批判地赞美全球市场的人认为，这些薪水低、工作过度、常常处于危险中的劳动者，尽管如此，仍然比以前的贫穷农民生活得更好。对于高科技经济中的某些工人来说，这其中确实有一定的真理。但批评者提出下一个问题：更糟和稍微好一点但仍然可怕的选项是唯一的选择吗？作为全球经济的创造者，我们难道不能做得更好吗？这些过程不仅剥削全球南方的工人，还在北美和欧洲等特权地区产生影响，在这些地方，雇主通过威胁将工作外包到孟加拉国、马来西亚、墨西哥或加纳等更便宜的劳动力市场，压低工人工资（Gabry 2011；Pellow 和 Park 2002；Smith 等 2006）。

A similar question about workers in both the less industrialized, less technologized Global South and the overdeveloped, over-teched Global North is why, if certain jobs are really so bad, so many people fight to get them? Again, critics respond, the answer is fairly simple: Given the choice of starving with no job or taking a bad job, anyone in need is going to opt for the bad job. The less simple followup questions are how is it that the world economy has produced so many dangerous jobs and such vast income inequalities, and, more important, how might various forces, including technological forces, be marshaled to improve worker conditions and economic fairness around the globe? How do you justify a wage ratio in which CEOs in the US make 355 times more than laborers, 105 times more in Sweden or in Japan a “mere” 55 times more? The disparity among countries alone reveals that there is nothing natural or inevitable about this degree of inequality.
关于全球南方的低工业化、低技术化地区和全球北方的过度发展、过度技术化地区的工人，有一个类似的问题：如果某些工作真的如此糟糕，为什么那么多人还在争取得到这些工作？批评者再次回应，答案相当简单：在没有工作的情况下选择饿死或接受一份糟糕的工作，任何有需要的人都会选择糟糕的工作。更复杂的后续问题是，世界经济是如何产生如此多危险的工作和如此巨大的收入不平等的，以及更重要的是，如何利用包括技术力量在内的各种力量来改善全球工人的工作条件和经济公平？你如何解释美国首席执行官的工资与工人之间的比例，首席执行官的收入是工人的 355 倍，瑞典是 105 倍，而日本则“仅仅”是 55 倍？仅仅在国家之间的差异就表明，这种程度的不平等并不是自然或不可避免的。

The electronics industry is by no means the only one relying upon exploitative labor practices, but electronics is in many respects the leading contemporary industry and thus reform of its practices would reverberate through the entire global economy. There are hundreds of groups and thousands of people working to provide more
电子行业绝不是唯一依赖剥削性劳动实践的行业，但在许多方面，电子行业是当代领先的行业，因此对其做法的改革将对整个全球经济产生深远影响。有数百个团体和数千人致力于提供更多
humane alternatives to current conditions. Politicians and government workers, educational institutions, unions and other worker solidarity organizations and social protest movements in every part of the globe are working diligently to create a more equitable economy. But they are up against immensely powerful, highly mobile corporations, often supported by governments, with vast resources to fight against any reform that represents even the smallest threat to their profits. In yet another twist of the Internet plot, however, those very devices and processes created by high-tech corporations have provided more economical, accessible and communicatively richer means to organize to resist corporate exploitation. It is quite possible to appreciate the designers of high-tech gadgets, cool apps and hot video games without ignoring the human costs of putting those designs into existence. What is important to keep in mind is that valuing the hip entrepreneurs of digital production more than those who materially produce the things that make cybercultures possible is a political choice with political consequences for millions of people. Pressure to reform by providing better pay and more humane, safer work environments can only work when pressed upon the entire realm of electronic production. And that pressure will have to come from many quarters, social movement activists, unions (local and transnational), governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and consumers unwilling to buy devices produced by near-slave labor. Ironically and fortunately, the technology at the heart of all this process, the Internet, is a near perfect tool to organize and publicize such efforts to change the system.
人道的替代方案以应对当前的状况。政治家和政府工作人员、教育机构、工会以及其他工人团结组织和社会抗议运动在全球各地努力创造一个更公平的经济。但他们面临着极其强大、流动性极高的企业，这些企业通常得到政府的支持，拥有庞大的资源来抵制任何对其利润构成威胁的改革。然而，在互联网情节的另一个转折中，这些高科技公司创造的设备和流程提供了更经济、可及和更丰富的沟通方式，以组织抵制企业剥削。我们完全可以欣赏高科技小工具、酷应用和热门视频游戏的设计者，而不忽视将这些设计付诸实践的人类成本。重要的是要记住，重视数字生产的时尚企业家而非那些实际生产使网络文化成为可能的事物的人，是一种具有政治后果的政治选择，影响着数百万人的生活。 改革的压力，通过提供更好的薪酬和更人性化、更安全的工作环境，只有在整个电子生产领域施加时才能奏效。这种压力必须来自多个方面，包括社会运动活动家、工会（地方和跨国）、政府、非政府组织（NGO）以及不愿购买由近乎奴隶劳动生产的设备的消费者。具有讽刺意味的是，幸运的是，所有这一过程的核心技术——互联网，是一个几乎完美的工具，可以组织和宣传这些改变系统的努力。

A fourth tier or category of digital culture production includes all the producers outside of the mainstream, large-scale digital production companies and processes. They fall into a couple of categories that might be summed up as users who augment mainstream digital production and DIY makers who challenge that increasingly monopolistic system led by major electronics corporations.
第四层或类别的数字文化生产包括所有不属于主流大型数字生产公司和流程的生产者。它们可以分为几类，概括为增强主流数字生产的用户和挑战由大型电子公司主导的日益垄断系统的 DIY 制造者。

One of the most common claims about new media compared with old is that they are highly interactive and participatory. Indeed, “interactive” and “participatory” were cited as among the key components distinguishing the supposedly new Web 2.0 from the earlier Web. But people are questioning what constitutes meaningful interactivity, and asking who benefits from most kinds of interactivity
关于新媒体与旧媒体的最常见说法之一是，新媒体具有高度的互动性和参与性。实际上，“互动性”和“参与性”被认为是区分所谓的新 Web 2.0 与早期 Web 的关键组成部分之一。但人们正在质疑什么构成有意义的互动，并询问谁从大多数类型的互动中受益。
as defined by the major digital corporations. Interactivity and true power are not the same thing in digital worlds. To many in a new generation of users, much of this kind of interactivity seems like little more than cosmetic changes atop a template deeply controlled by the corporate overlords of the Net.
由主要数字公司定义。在数字世界中，互动性和真正的权力并不是同一回事。对许多新一代用户来说，这种互动性似乎不过是深受网络企业主控制的模板上表面上的一些变化。

User-generated content has always been part of the Net, but in the early twenty-first century new technologies and broadband capabilities greatly expanded that potential. One critic coined the word prosuming (producing/consuming), another the equally awkward term “produsing” (producing/using) to name the process by which culture consumers have become culture producers via the Web. Useruploaded videos, iReports for major media outlets such as cable news networks, thousands of online product reviews and a host of other consumer-generated content represent what some see as a far more democratically produced cultural content. Undoubtedly digital cultures offer exciting new forms of interaction. An ordinary individual can be an eye-witness reporter, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster or a political crisis. A layperson can act as a scientist or scholar participating in a crowd sourced research project. An amateur Sherlock can go online to help detectives solve real-world crimes. Certainly these forms of digital participation are popular and have impact in enriching lives and in diversifying the overall content of the Web. YouTube users generate more video content daily than all of network television in its entire history. Sheer volume, again, makes it very hard to characterize the nature and impact of such user generated cultural production.
用户生成内容一直是网络的一部分，但在 21 世纪初，新技术和宽带能力极大地扩展了这一潜力。一位评论家创造了“生产消费”（prosuming）这个词，另一位则创造了同样笨拙的术语“生产使用”（produsing），用以描述文化消费者通过网络成为文化生产者的过程。用户上传的视频、主要媒体机构（如有线新闻网络）的 iReports、成千上万的在线产品评论以及其他消费者生成的内容，代表了某些人认为的更具民主性的文化内容。毫无疑问，数字文化提供了令人兴奋的新互动形式。普通个体可以成为目击记者，向世界通报自然灾害或政治危机的突发新闻。外行人可以作为科学家或学者参与众包研究项目。业余侦探可以在线帮助警探解决现实世界的犯罪案件。毫无疑问，这些数字参与形式受欢迎，并在丰富生活和多样化网络整体内容方面产生了影响。 YouTube 用户每天生成的视频内容比整个网络电视历史上所有内容加起来还要多。庞大的数量再次使得很难对这种用户生成的文化生产的性质和影响进行特征化。

Notwithstanding the positive side of some digital interactivity, others note that much of it primarily benefits the same few huge corporations that dominate the digital market. They argue that this is more con- than pro-suming. It underwrites immense profits for major corporations, not only ones such as YouTube and Amazon but also for companies whose products are endorsed, sometimes honestly, sometimes not, via online reviews and Facebook “likes.” Some have critiqued this as merely the next step in product branding wherein companies, having already turned consumers into walking billboard advertisements through ubiquitous logos on clothes, are now going a step further by turning them into an unpaid labor force of content producers and advertisers. Consumer endorsements, real and fictionalized, have long been a part of advertising, but the Web has turned this form into a much larger phenomenon, though one lacking the compensation given to more formal endorsers (Karaganis 2007; Schäfer 2011). 

No one denies that there can be something quite empowering in uploading cultural material of one’s own creation onto the Web. But the more thoughtful realize that this kind of participatory culture does not seriously challenge the content dominance of the main culture industries (the major media corporations). The traditional giant culture-producing corporations have moved quickly to incorporate and profit from user-generated content. As Tobias Schäfer summarizes, so far it is “evident the new [digital media] enterprises emerge and gain control over cultural production and intellectual property in a manner very similar to the monopolistic media corporations of the twentieth century” (Schäfer 2011). This is hardly surprising since some of those “new” monopolistic media enterprises are the same old ones: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, NewsCorp/Wall Street Journal (owner now of Tumblr) and once idealistic new media corps such as Google that seem to have forgotten their promise to “do no evil” (Hillis, Petit and Jarrett 2013; Jarrett 2008; McChesney 2013; Schäfer 2011; Vaidhyanathan 2011). 

As the once wide-open Net falls more and more into the hands of a small group of monopolistic digital corporations, the push for alternatives is growing. More and more young people are learning to code in school and out, and few of them dream of jobs in giant, impersonal, profit-distorted companies. Many see both the negative side of the production process and the increasingly standardized, unimaginative digital culture these behemoths are creating. A wider culture of local production-in food, in the arts, in virtually every aspect of life-is driving a major revolt against the big five digital companies. Crowdsourcing, an idea that originally seemed exciting and democratic, often leads to sameness and blandness, though it has also created some stunning things.
随着曾经开放的网络越来越多地落入少数垄断数字公司的手中，寻找替代方案的呼声日益高涨。越来越多的年轻人在学校和课外学习编程，他们中的少数人梦想在那些庞大、冷漠、扭曲利润的公司工作。许多人看到了生产过程的负面影响，以及这些巨头所创造的日益标准化、缺乏想象力的数字文化。地方生产的更广泛文化——在食品、艺术以及生活的几乎每个方面——正在推动对五大数字公司的重大反抗。众包，这个最初看起来令人兴奋和民主的想法，往往导致同质化和平淡，尽管它也创造了一些惊人的事物。

In response, a large do-it-yourself maker culture has arisen, assisted by some new technologies alongside new social spaces and attitudes. Many new community centers and other collective spaces (FabLabs, Makerspaces, Innovation Stations, etc.) have sprung up to encourage collaboration and mutual learning in the techniques of DIY digital production. Sites such as Code Academy make coding available to a very wide group of people, Git hub pushes open-source software that challenges expensive corporate software, low cost peer-to-peer sharing social media is an alternative to corporate media, various DIY production tools demystify digital processes, and 3D printing represents the possibility of a far more decentralized, locally varied production process. In some ways maker culture is returning to the original meaning of “hacker.” Before the term was co-opted to
作为回应，一种大型的自助制造文化应运而生，得益于一些新技术以及新的社交空间和态度。许多新的社区中心和其他集体空间（如 FabLabs、Makerspaces、创新站等）纷纷涌现，以鼓励在 DIY 数字生产技术方面的合作与相互学习。像 Code Academy 这样的网站使编码对广泛的人群可用，GitHub 推动开源软件，挑战昂贵的企业软件，低成本的点对点分享社交媒体成为企业媒体的替代品，各种 DIY 生产工具揭示了数字过程的奥秘，而 3D 打印则代表了一个更加分散、地方多样化的生产过程的可能性。在某种程度上，制造文化正在回归“黑客”一词的原始含义。
describe illegal activity, “hacking” meant digital improvisation, creative problem-solving and new ways to be creative.
描述非法活动，“黑客”意味着数字即兴创作、创造性问题解决和新的创造性方式。

Given an emphasis on the local and on variety, it is difficult to generalize about maker culture(s), but there are certain values that many makers share, including perhaps most crucially sharing itself. In fact one of the terms used to talk about maker culture(s) was the “sharing economy,” though the term was itself quickly co-opted by commercial interests. But sharing and trading of software, templates, skills and much cultural production itself via barter, along with the reuse and recycling of materials, are important in most maker cultures. Maker fairs, hackathons (collaborative coding event often in support of social causes), game jams (game making contests) and similar events deepen networking communities. Mesh media networks (locally linked rather than going through the Internet) offer an alternative to the giant social media companies such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. Bandcamp challenges commercial music sites such as Apple Music and Google Play Music by connecting listeners directly to artists without corporate intermediaries; Patreon similarly connects visual artists directly to supporters, bypassing the mainstream art market. Throughout maker culture there is a preference for crowdfunding instead of reliance upon corporate forces that organize and standardize taste, while taking a large chunk of the profits that might otherwise go to creators. Some argue for barter networks or cryptocurrencies to challenge the giant banks and financial networks. Taken together, these and related developments add up to the opportunity to create a whole new sustainable economy not dominated by giant corporations and polluting energy sources (Boler and Ratto 2014). 

New, alternative cultural forms are up against deeply entrenched, fabulously well-funded existing cultural production monopolies. The old adage that the only people with true freedom of the press are the people who own presses is equally true in a slightly different way regarding digital culture. While in some sense, all users own the Web, the power of an individual not working for a large media corporation to disseminate cultural offerings to the Net’s audience clearly pales alongside Viacom’s ability to do so, especially if government rules continue to favor giant digital corporations and refuse to challenge the increasingly monopolistic nature of companies such as Google/ Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon. The occasional exception to the rule-the blog comment or video that goes viral-serves mostly to keep alive the fantasy of a level playing field, rather like the way that lotteries keep alive the highly unlikely possibility that tomorrow you 
may be a multi-millionaire. A far more level playing field is indeed a potential within the capabilities of the Net, but it is an as yet mostly unfulfilled potential that will take collective social action, not just individual luck, to fully realize.
可能是一个百万富翁。一个更为平等的竞争环境确实是网络能力中的潜力，但这仍然是一个大部分未被实现的潜力，需要集体社会行动，而不仅仅是个人运气，才能完全实现。

DIY/maker culture is now a global phenomenon, and a growing one. Makers are increasingly the source of innovation in the digital world (Hertz 2014). At its most ambitious, maker culture imagines a major transformation of the world’s economy, one that challenges the concentration of power in central governments and a few corporations. Just as alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, biopower and others that can be locally controlled are challenging centralized, high-polluting fossil fuels, 3D printing offers an equally decentralized alternative to huge, monopolistic, often socially alienating and environmentally damaging factories. And at the level of cultural creation, an open-source DIY Web, based on a return to Net neutrality principles, promises far more interesting, varied and rich musical, visual and written art, and more vibrant cultures overall. Like the locavore movement in food production and consumption, digital maker culture promises a more mind-nourishing and soul-satisfying fare. Advocates of what some call critical maker culture understand the need to work collectively to break up digital monopolies at the same time that they develop locally based, environmentally sustainable and more democratic alternatives. Tied into long-standing dissatisfaction with corporate globalization, various non-market and mixed market/cooperative models are being widely embraced around the globe, which could move maker culture from the margins to the heart of society (Alperovitz and Bhatt 2013; Boler and Ratto 2014; Raworth 2017). 

Perhaps the biggest lie told about the electronics industry is that it is a “clean” business (companies widely circulate images of clean rooms where workers in white suits carefully handle precious circuit boards). While when looking at corporate headquarters, the industry looks clean—sleek white buildings, no smoke stacks billowing pollution up into the air-in fact both the manufacture and the disposal of electronic devices involve serious dangers to people and the environment. Looked at more closely, the electronics industry is not that far from what the poet William Blake called the “dark satanic mills” 
of nineteenth-century industrial production. It is no coincidence that large chunks of major electronic production sites are among the most polluted places on the planet. In Silicon Valley alone, birthplace of the electronics industry, there are 30 “Superfund sites,” representing the US Environmental Protection Agency’s highest level of toxic contamination (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition n.d.). With digital devices now outnumbering humans on the planet, the situation is worsening. 

In fact, at every stage-mining for components, assembly, use, disassembly-electronics has proven to be an extremely environmentally damaging industry. Mining for key minerals, and toxic assembly and disassembly processes, endanger the lives of workers, and toxic e-waste (electronic waste) presents major health issues for people and the environment all around the globe. In addition, the extensive use of electricity-hogging digital devices has a very high cost in energy resources, thus contributing to global climate change. 

Computers, monitors, game consoles, cellphones, printers, cables and most other e-devices and peripherals contain significant amounts of toxic, often carcinogenic, elements. These include arsenic, barium, beryllium, bromated flame retardants such as polybromated biphenyl, cadmium, chlorofluorocarbons, chromium, copper, dioxins and furans, lead, mercury, phthalates, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which when burned create hydrogen chloride gas, and selenium, to name a few. A list of the hundreds of dangerous elements in high-tech devices, along with specific health hazards attached to each, would take up much of the rest of this book. Some of these toxins affect the workers who assemble devices, some can impact users, all impact those who disassemble devices (especially when components are burned), and all of us, though hardly equally, are impacted by landfills piling up obsolete e-devices that can leach into local water supplies and agricultural lands, as well as incinerators that send this material into the air where they can potentially drift over any community (Grossman 2007). 

There is also danger in some of the mining that unearths the minerals used in digital devices. The case of one of these minerals is comparable to the “blood diamond” controversy in South Africa, implicated in genocidal war in the Congo surrounding the mining of coltan (used in the capacitors found in almost every kind of digital device) (Snow n.d.). Thousands, including many children, have died in the coltan wars, and ultimately those lives are lives lost to our electronic pleasure. After extraction, the assembly process of electronic devices likewise often takes place under horrendous conditions. 

Among the most troubling of those conditions is failure to protect workers from exposure to dangerous chemicals. Conditions in Silicon Valley have historically been deeply inadequate, and conditions in other parts of the world are even worse (Pellow and Park 2002). Pictures of regimented rows of Chinese workers wearing medical gowns while assembling digital devices might suggest they are being protected, but in fact the gowns are to protect the chips and circuit boards from contamination by humans. In Europe, there are strong regulations on the books that putatively protect workers from exposure, but evidence makes clear those rules have frequently been bent or broken by less than scrupulous producers, and US rules are far more lax. And when those regulations become even mildly financially burdensome to electronics corporations, they generally export assembly jobs to countries with far more lax, or non-existent, protections for workers and the environment. This production process has been critically examined in satiric game form by Molleindustria’s Phone Story (Phone Story 2011). This game was removed by Apple after 3 days in its App Store, no doubt causing more controversy and bad publicity for the company than the game itself. But there is no reason to put the blame just on Apple Computers; the entire industry contributes to these horrendously hazardous work conditions and environmental impacts. 

While the appearance in recent years of electronic recycling depots is generally a good thing, they may give a false sense that e-waste is being dealt with seriously. In fact, the rapid obsolescence that digital products undergo (the average user life of a cellphone is less than 18 months, a laptop 2 years) has led to massive amounts of toxic waste, and a variety of failures to deal responsibly with that waste has compounded the problem. Overall, 50 million tons of electronic waste was produced in 2017, and over 70 million tons a year is expected by 2020. Less than 15 percent of that waste is recycled and a large percentage that is recycled is done so inadequately, in terms of handling the toxic materials and/or location of disposal sites. The US is the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, the international agreement that makes it illegal to export toxic waste. The US alone has over 50,000,000 obsolete computers, and US consumers toss away over 1,000,000 cellphones every year. Similar figures exist for Europe, Australia ( 30 million computers a year), the UK (900,000 tons annually of e-waste), Japan, China (70 million cellphones a year) and other major users of technology have proportionately comparable amounts of e-waste. E-waste is the fastest growing contributor to municipal landfill toxicity worldwide. 

And all these figures are growing at a rate of between 4 percent and 10 percent per annum. The rapid economic development of India and China, two nations far from the saturation point in terms of digital devices, will greatly deepen the problem. 

As with all other aspects of digital culture, the e-waste problem shifts with changes in digital design and marketing. While playing a 

FIGURE 2.1 High tech, handmade (Courtesy of shutterstock.com) 
positive role in expanding Net access to previously digitally deprived populations, the spread of smartphones around the entire globe threatens to increase the e-waste problem exponentially. The fact that the electronics industry has honed to an art form the practice of planned obsolescence (the purposeful creation of products that go out of date quickly to assure new sales) likewise compounds the problem (Slade 2007). The fast rate of obsolescence not only impacts the volume of electronic waste, but also decreases its chances of being recycled. For example, for several years recycling glass from computer monitors and TV sets was sufficiently lucrative to be a viable business. But the arrival of LCD, plasma and other flat screen technologies decimated that particular terrain of recycling, such that many former recyclers are now illegally dumping their old toxic TVs (Urbina 2013). 

Electronics recycling and reuse efforts have a considerably mixed history. Much recycling has been done illegally, with few safeguards for those handling the materials. Reuse of devices by passing them down the line to less privileged users has grown over the years. But reuse is a mixed blessing environmentally in that older devices sent to less technologically developed countries or poorer areas of developed countries (with good intentions by charitable organizations) are generally more toxic than newer ones currently in use among wealthier consumers. This becomes yet another way in which the e-waste problem falls unevenly on poorer populations in the world. 

As with so much of the world’s pollution, the burden of e-waste falls upon the less developed world, while the vast majority of the waste results from use in the overdeveloped world, especially North America, Japan and Europe. The issue is therefore not only an environmental issue, but very much an environmental justice issue. Environmental justice is the branch of environmentalism that documents and fights against the fact that environmental hazards are far more prevalent in working-class neighborhoods and neighborhoods with high concentrations of people of color in the Global North, and in the poorest communities of the Global South. The vast majority of workers endangered by e-waste around the globe are the poor, women and people of color, because they do most of the toxic assembly and because, as noted, most of the e-waste is exported from the developed world and dumped on the Global South, where protections for disassemblers are largely non-existent. Most of the toxic waste from electronic devices ends up leaching into the land, air and water in the poorest parts of Africa, India, China and other parts of the less industrialized world. Go to YouTube and punch in “e-waste” and you will 
come face-to-face with countless images of young children, pregnant women and all other manner of human beings breathing toxic fumes, handling dangerous chemicals and generally being subjected to the deadly impact of the digitized lives of others they will never meet. 

The Global North is not free of these problems either, though once again the greater burden falls on people of color there too. Many factories in Europe and the US employ immigrants at extremely low wages and often do not provide safety materials in all languages spoken by workers. Some disassembly work in the US is done under seriously unprotected conditions by free or nominally paid prison labor, a labor force that is disproportionately non-white, given deep racial inequities in the American economy and justice system. In the US, most incinerators used to burn toxic waste are in poor, mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods, or on Native American reservations. In parts of India, China and Africa incineration takes place not in facilities designed for that purpose, but in open fires in cities and villages where toxic smoke drifts through the streets (Pellow and Park 2002). It is far from unusual for pregnant women and very young children to be working near these toxic fumes for hours at a time. Birth defects, neurological disorders and a host of other diseases result from this process of recovering precious metals from digital devices. 

In addition to electronic waste, vast amounts of electricity are consumed by various proliferating forms of computing, mobile 

FIGURE 2.2 A pile of circuit boards for recycling (Courtesy of shutterstock.com) 
phoning and gaming. For example, as far back as 2006 Nicholas Carr pointed out that in 

Second Life-whose parallel universe, though free at the most basic level, is populated by the avatars of Europeans, North American, and Japanese with annual real life incomes of $\mathrm{\$}45,000$$\mathrm{\$}45,000$$45,000\$ 45,000 or more-the average [virtual] resident uses about 1,752 kilowatts of electricity a year . . . and generates ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$${\mathrm{CO}}_2$CO_(2)\mathrm{CO}_{2} emissions equivalent to a 2,300 mile journey in an SUV. 
(Carr 2006) 

And Second Life is just one of the many hundreds of large, online territories. Multiply that by multiuser online game sites, console games and the rest of the Web, and we are talking about a vast increase in the amount of directly and indirectly polluting energy used in a world deeply threatened by global climate change. If the Internet were a country, it would be the fifth largest consumer of energy in the world. Google alone uses as much energy as the entire nation of Turkey (Oghia 2017) 

Many people-from engineers to artists to activists-are working on these issues. More efficient (digital) energy monitoring devices can be of some help, as well more efficient batteries for storing solar and wind-generated energy. Important green computing or sustainable IT efforts are also under way, due in large part to increasingly bad publicity that e-waste has received that has in turn led to pressure from consumers (Hilty 2008; Tomlinson 2010). It is already possible to build digital devices that have far fewer toxic components, that are more truly recyclable and more energy-efficient. Green computer research is also attempting to make devices more energy efficient, and more broadly digital technologies such as smart grids and green grids have the potential to make energy use overall more efficient (The Green Grid n.d.). But efforts to shift to less toxic materials for digital devices can be expensive, and few large electronics firms are willing to bear the costs. Perhaps they underestimate the environmental consciousness of consumers, who, if made aware of the environmental costs, might well be willing to pay a bit more for their e-devices until mass production brings the costs of green digital technologies in line closer to the costs of currently toxic ones. 

Artists have brought attention to the issues in a variety of ways, from artworks made from recycled computer parts to esthetic clean-up art that creatively restores environments damaged by e-waste. Some 
artists have made e-waste a theme of their work, as for example in the photography of Chris Jordan, who has produced images that seem initially quite beautiful but upon closer inspection reveal the massive problem of e-waste dumping (Jordan n.d.). Use of recycled electronic components by artists such as Marion Martinez can both raise awareness of the e-waste problem, and suggest the need for creative solutions. Martinez, by using e-waste such as recycled circuit boards to create chicana futurist techna arte related to her Latina and Native heritage, evokes environmental stewardship as a spiritual value (Martinez n.d.). Some artists reshape the environment more directly through environmental restoration artworks, some of which, like the Gardening Superfund Sites project in Silicon Valley, have incorporated e-waste (Gardening Superfund Sites n.d.). Activists have also shown creativity through things such as eco-toxic tours, a somewhat satiric variation on eco-tourism that points up environmental hazards such as e-waste present around the globe. 

Numerous non-governmental environmental organizations and environmental justice movement groups include e-waste in their work (Gabry 2011; Pellow and Park 2002). They continue to pressure governments for better waste regulations, more effective recycling programs, greater protection for assembly and disassembly workers and less toxic, more efficient devices, among other issues. In yet another ironic twist of the digital world, much of this work is carried out via the World Wide Web and using various kinds of digital devices. Environmentalisms in general, and environmental justice efforts in particular, have a significant online presence (see cultural politics.net/index/environmental_justice). These efforts show promise, but as with so many environmental issues time seems to be running out, and much more is needed as unsustainable electronic production expands, threatening thousands of lives, rendering many environments uninhabitable and contributing significantly to overall environmental degradation and global climate change.