Area Man Feels Joy Online for First Time in Years

When The Onion made a bid to buy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars two years ago, Donald Trump had just won his second presidential election—and, for many, things were looking dark.

两年前，当《洋葱新闻》（The Onion）出价收购阴谋论者亚历克斯·琼斯（Alex Jones）的“信息战”（Infowars）时，唐纳德·特朗普刚刚赢得了他的第二次总统大选——对许多人来说，前景一片黯淡。

“You guys remember … how fucking hopeless we felt?” Onion CEO Ben Collins asked an audience at the WIRED World Fair Wednesday in Miami. At the time, he asked his partner, researcher and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, if she was up for walking “into a fucking burning building” by trying to take over Jones’ media empire. Her reply, according to Collins, was “Yeah. Nobody else is going to do this.”

“你们还记得……我们当时感觉有多绝望吗？”《洋葱新闻》首席执行官本·柯林斯（Ben Collins）周三在迈阿密举行的《连线》（WIRED）世界博览会上向观众问道。当时，他问他的搭档、研究员兼记者凯特·阿布加扎莱（Kat Abughazaleh）是否愿意通过接管琼斯的媒体帝国，去“走进一栋正在燃烧的建筑”。据柯林斯说，她的回答是：“愿意。没别人会做这件事了。”

Although The Onion is still in an ongoing legal battle over Infowars—it won the media network in a bankruptcy auction, but a federal judge in Texas struck the deal down—Collins is feeling more hopeful in light of the Democrats’ midterm wins. “I want people to feel hope today because things changed last night,” he said. “We have an attorney general in Texas who might make a different decision.”

尽管《洋葱新闻》目前仍因“信息战”陷入法律纠纷——它在破产拍卖中赢得了该媒体网络，但德克萨斯州的一名联邦法官否决了这笔交易——但鉴于民主党在中期选举中的胜利，柯林斯感到更有希望。“我希望人们今天能感受到希望，因为昨晚情况发生了变化，”他说，“我们德克萨斯州的一位总检察长可能会做出不同的决定。”

Collins joined comedian Patti Harrison, who stars in The Onion’s parody Infowars show, in a panel about the role of satire in society and politics. Collins also cagily spoke about The Onion’s interest in sports—comments that made more sense on Thursday when he posted on Bluesky, “The Onion is extremely close to buying an honest-to-goodness, Division 1 college football bowl series bowl game. Yes, we’re trying to pull off The Onion Bowl.”

柯林斯与喜剧演员帕蒂·哈里森（Patti Harrison）一同参加了一个小组讨论，探讨讽刺在社会和政治中的作用，哈里森在《洋葱新闻》的恶搞版“信息战”节目中担任主角。柯林斯还含蓄地谈到了《洋葱新闻》对体育领域的兴趣——这些评论在周四变得更加清晰，当时他在Bluesky上发帖称：“《洋葱新闻》非常接近买下一场货真价实的、一级大学橄榄球碗赛。没错，我们正试图促成‘洋葱碗’（The Onion Bowl）。”

During the conversation, the pair discussed a lot of what has caused that sense of hopelessness in the Trump era: Jones’ disinformation campaign against the parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims; ICE raids; Democrats abandoning trans rights. But they also talked, albeit in measured tones, about the value in fighting back with humor.

在谈话中，两人讨论了特朗普时代导致这种绝望感的许多原因：琼斯针对桑迪胡克小学枪击案受害者家属的虚假信息运动；移民及海关执法局（ICE）的突袭；以及民主党放弃跨性别者权利。但他们也以审慎的口吻谈到了用幽默进行反击的价值。

“Comedy is a good pill-in-the-cheese way to sort of introduce ideas to people,” Harrison said, noting that though she had let out “a huge sigh of relief” over the midterms, there’s a large swath of the population that is still “truly radicalized.” “They’re still out there drinking Mountain Dew,” she added, perhaps a nod to a nonsensical joke Vice President JD Vance made about how his love for Diet Mountain Dew could be viewed as “racist.”

“喜剧就像是把药片藏在奶酪里，是一种向人们介绍思想的好方法，”哈里森说。她指出，尽管她对中期选举的结果“长舒了一口气”，但仍有很大一部分人口“真正激进化了”。“他们还在外面喝激浪（Mountain Dew），”她补充道，这或许是在暗指副总统JD·万斯（JD Vance）曾开过的一个荒谬玩笑，即他对比特激浪的喜爱可能会被视为“种族主义”。

Collins, who was previously an extremism reporter, extolled the virtues of being able to state things plainly via a satirical site. And he noted that many of The Onion’s headlines—including “almost everything that we say about RFK [Jr.]”—end up coming true. “We don’t need three sources to write down the perfect sentence about what’s wrong in the United States,” Collins said. “We’re allowed to get to the heart of the matter a lot faster.”

曾担任极端主义报道记者的柯林斯称赞了通过讽刺网站直言不讳的优点。他指出，《洋葱新闻》的许多头条新闻——包括“我们关于小罗伯特·肯尼迪（RFK Jr.）所说的一切”——最终都成为了现实。“我们不需要三个消息来源来写出关于美国出了什么问题的完美句子，”柯林斯说，“我们被允许更快地触及问题的核心。”

Both also reflected on the internet being a lifeline for them while growing up in small towns. For Harrison, MySpace offered her a chance to talk to “other weird people” who were into “weird stuff” she had no access to in a rural, Christian, white community.

两人还回顾了互联网在他们成长于小城镇时如何成为他们的生命线。对哈里森来说，MySpace让她有机会与那些喜欢“怪异事物”的“其他怪人”交流，而在她成长的那个乡村、基督教、白人社区里，她根本接触不到这些。

“I don’t think social media is intrinsically bad,” she said. “I think the version of it that we have is truly abusive and evil.” The algorithmic era of being online means that sometimes her content gets pushed on people who don’t get it; when she recently dressed up as Elon Musk in a black MAGA hat for a WIRED cover, a lot of people told her it was “so fucked up.”

“我不认为社交媒体本质上是坏的，”她说，“我认为我们现在所拥有的这个版本确实具有虐待性和邪恶性。”算法时代的在线生活意味着，有时她的内容会被推送给那些无法理解的人；当她最近为《连线》杂志封面打扮成戴着黑色MAGA帽的埃隆·马斯克时，许多人告诉她这“太离谱了”。

But she said comedy is still thriving online and it is possible to “de-algorithmize our internet.” Collins’ take was harsher. He referred to the current iteration of the internet as a “joy vacuum” that “takes away anything that could be fun.” However, spaces like The Onion offer catharsis. “You kind of need to find ways to stay sane when things are so messed up,” he said.

但她表示，喜剧在网上依然蓬勃发展，而且“去算法化我们的互联网”是有可能的。柯林斯的看法则更为严厉。他将当前版本的互联网称为一个“快乐真空”，它“剥夺了任何可能有趣的东西”。然而，像《洋葱新闻》这样的空间提供了宣泄的出口。“当事情变得如此混乱时，你确实需要找到保持理智的方法，”他说。

For now, he says, the most fun he has is “playing around in the real world,” including The Onion’s writers’ room or just hanging out with friends. Then again, he adds, “I do hope that some benevolent-ass companies come soon and try to fix it.”

他说，目前他最大的乐趣是“在现实世界中玩耍”，包括在《洋葱新闻》的编剧室里，或者只是和朋友们聚在一起。不过他又补充道：“我确实希望一些真正仁慈的公司能尽快出现，并尝试修复它。”