The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

互联网的乐趣已被“优化”殆尽

The seed of this post was hearing “I Don’t Wanna Wait” on the radio while shopping for groceries. The song rips off “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone, which anyone who was on the Internet in 2004 knows as “Numa Numa”. 这篇文章的灵感源于我在超市购物时，在广播里听到了《I Don’t Wanna Wait》这首歌。这首歌翻唱自 O-Zone 的《Dragostea Din Tei》，任何在 2004 年上过网的人都知道它就是当年的“Numa Numa”。

Gary Brolsma’s lip-syncing video was one of the Internet’s earliest memes, and perhaps the best. It was pure, joyful, spontaneous, and released with no expectation of fame or commercialization. It was just some guy in front of a webcam having the time of his life. Now everyone is lip-syncing all the time on TikTok, except there is no joy, no spontaneity, only endlessly choreographed offerings to the almighty algorithm. Gary Brolsma 的对口型视频是互联网最早期的模因（meme）之一，或许也是最棒的一个。它纯粹、快乐、自发，发布时没有任何成名或商业化的企图。那只是一个普通人在摄像头前享受着属于他的快乐时光。而现在，TikTok 上每个人都在对口型，但这里没有快乐，没有自发性，只有为了讨好万能算法而进行的无休止的精心编排。

I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two. Kids growing up today will never know that the Internet used to be different. Golden ages are usually defined in retrospect. As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special, but it always felt like there was something better around the corner. 过去一两年里，我一直在怀念旧时代的互联网。今天长大的孩子们永远不会知道互联网曾经是另一番模样。黄金时代通常是在回首往事时才被定义的。作为一名从 21 世纪初到 2010 年代中期在网上冲浪的孩子，我们知道自己正经历着某种特别的东西，但总觉得更好的还在后头。

Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t. Showing “Badger Badger” to my aunt on her bulky, beige desktop computer shouldn’t be a fond childhood memory, but it is. Newgrounds 充满创意且离经叛道；YouTube 傻气十足且未经排练；早期的 Facebook 是一种与熟人联系、并与陌生人建立共同兴趣纽带的有趣方式。在笨重的米色台式机上给阿姨看“Badger Badger”视频，这本不该成为一段美好的童年回忆，但它确实是。

Some of this is nostalgia, sure. But there really was a time when the Internet still felt amateur in the best sense of the word. People made things because they were bored, lonely, funny, obsessive, angry, horny, curious, or touched by some minor and inexplicable form of madness. A lot of it was bad. Much of it was embarrassing. But it wasn’t content creation. 当然，这其中有一部分是怀旧。但确实曾有过一段时期，互联网在最好的意义上保持着“业余”的状态。人们创作内容是因为无聊、孤独、有趣、执着、愤怒、冲动、好奇，或是被某种微小而难以名状的疯狂所触动。其中很多作品很糟糕，很多也很尴尬，但那不是所谓的“内容创作”。

That spirit is what feels gone. Not memes or videos themselves, of course. There are more of those than ever. What’s missing is the sense that they came from somewhere in particular. The dead Internet theory no longer feels like a joke so much as a plain description. The online world is hyper-optimized, relentlessly commercialized, algorithmically dead-eyed: the MrBeastification of everything. 那种精神似乎已经消失了。当然，并不是说模因或视频本身消失了，事实上它们比以往任何时候都多。缺失的是那种“它们源自某个特定个体”的感觉。“互联网死亡理论”现在看起来不再像个笑话，而更像是一种平实的描述。在线世界被过度优化、无情地商业化，在算法的操控下变得眼神空洞：一切都在经历“MrBeast 化”。

Marc Andreessen, who has done more to popularize the Internet and to destroy it than almost anyone else, recently joked: It’s becoming clearer how we’re going to tell that something wasn’t written by AI. Marc Andreessen——他为普及互联网所做的贡献，以及对互联网的破坏，几乎无人能及——最近开玩笑说：“我们越来越清楚该如何分辨某样东西不是由 AI 写的了。”

AI slop is bad. But it did not descend on a healthy Internet. It arrived after years of platforms teaching people to write, film, pose, joke, and think like machines. AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it. AI 生成的垃圾内容确实很糟糕。但它并不是降临在一个健康的互联网上。它是在各大平台花了多年时间教导人们如何像机器一样写作、拍摄、摆拍、开玩笑和思考之后才出现的。AI 没有杀死互联网；它只是继承了一个乐趣早已被“优化”殆尽的互联网。

For most of my life online, it was possible to believe each new thing on the Internet might improve on the last: a cooler platform, a richer medium, a better way of finding people and being found by them. Now the old Internet is gone, and with it the faith that the next thing would be better. The best is over. 在我大部分的上网生涯中，我曾相信互联网上的每一件新事物都可能比前一个更好：更酷的平台、更丰富的媒介、寻找他人或被他人发现的更好方式。现在，旧时代的互联网已经消失了，随之消失的还有对“下一个会更好”的信念。最好的时光已经结束了。