互联网就是现实生活 The Internet is Real Life —— A16Z
The Internet is Real Life
互联网就是现实生活
https://www.a16z.news/p/the-internet-is-real-life
Have you spoken to a normie recently? They aren’t actually normal anymore. Nobody is. In all aspects of American life, the internet is upstream of everything else. Sooner or later (and, more often than not, sooner) everyone ends up thinking, speaking, and acting on terms that have been set online. The internetisreal life.
Newsnow exists to summarize things that have already happened online. Politicians communicate with the public directly, or in conversations with internet personalities. Stories originate on internet platforms, where the underlying details can be viewed in full without the selective editing and spin of a traditional media outlet. And entire discourse cycles in the legacy media are dedicated to memetic phenomena, such as the now multi-month looksmaxxing saga–most recently featured on 60 Minutes.
All this remains true to a remarkable extentevenin the context of events where the traditional news media’s edge should remain uniquely durable, such as the ongoing Iran War. The relative distance, inaccessibility of on-the-ground internet reporting, and proliferation of unreliable AI slop might all in principle be thought to accentuate the value of legacy reporting, but a flight back to traditional media doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
你最近和“正常人”聊过天吗？他们其实已经不再正常了。没有人是正常的。在美国生活的方方面面，互联网都凌驾于一切之上。或早或晚（而且往往是更早），每个人最终都会按照网络设定的方式思考、说话和行动。互联网就是现实生活。
如今的新闻不过是对网络事件的总结。政客们要么直接与公众对话，要么通过与网络红人交流来发声。故事起源于网络平台，在那里可以完整查看所有细节，而不必受传统媒体选择性剪辑和导向性报道的影响。传统媒体的整个话语周期都围绕着网络迷因现象展开，比如持续数月的容貌优化热潮——最近还登上了《60分钟》节目。
即便在传统新闻媒体本该保持独特优势的领域——比如正在进行的伊朗战争——上述现象仍在很大程度上成立。地理距离的阻隔、实地网络报道的缺失，以及不可靠人工智能内容的泛滥，理论上本应凸显传统报道的价值，但回归传统媒体的趋势似乎并未出现。
Musicnow achieves popularity via viral takeoff in TikTok reels. Indeed, TikTok has become so significant that various older bands have seen a mass influx of Gen-Z listeners launch them to new heights of success. This also means, of course, that songs are now beingwrittenwith Tiktok in mind. Just as the constraints of radio defined song length and structure historically, a musician seeking to achieve success in the present day needs to write a riff that will work well over a 15-second video clip.
Songs don’t need to have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure anymore, or even a nice-sounding radio edit. But they do need to capture a mood, or be able to hook audiences in the first second rather than after a build-up, or be generally memeable. Where the tweet was a bite-sized article, the TikTok reel is giving us bite-sized music.
Moviesare now often created with the aim of appealing to distinct and existing online subcultures, rather than trying to hook a general audience. In a world where film captures an increasingly lower share of audience attention, the strategy of being vaguely interesting to a large number of people may lose out to one of being extremely interesting to a small number of people–particularly ones for whom the movie is not a standalone product but rather a piece of a larger subcultural identity. If participation in an existing identity requires being able to discuss a particular piece of media, then that piece of media has a dedicated audience from the start. Where competition for attention is tight, a guaranteed audience–one that will spend a lot of timetalking aboutthe product, no less–is better than a marginal one.
No surprise, then, that movies have increasingly leaned into implicit affiliation with internet subcultures. Take last year’s Oscar nomineeBugoniaas an example. At first blush, the most salient fact aboutBugoniamay be the fact that its entire plot is rooted in the timely question of internet-brained conspiracism. And it’s true that this, even on its own, is indicative of how the internet has become real life. As interesting, however, and less-remarked on, was the choice to cast comedian and podcaster Stavros Halkias in a minor role. The only apparent explanation for this decision was that it would immediately create buzz around the film in the existing online communities that followed Halkias’ work.
This is only one example of how movies are increasingly shaped by the existence of a separate and upstream online cultural sphere. In addition to adapting books, plays, or comics, movies are now adapting 4chan greentext memes as well. And, in addition to the reels-oriented memeability discussed above, movies are also themselves coming toresemblefast-paced sequences of memes themselves. The high-stress, frenetic, constant-attention grabbing style of anAnoraorMarty Supremeis the future of filmmaking, if for no other reason than that it is the only way to prevent an audience member from constantly checking his phone.
Politicsare downstream of the internet now as well. This sounds like conventional wisdom in the present day–after all, haven’t we been talking about Russian Facebook ads and social media information silos for the past decade? But while it’s true enough that the influence of internet media onvoting patternshas been documented for some time now, less widely discussed has been the influence of internet discourse on the underlying shape of politics itself.
We can use the proliferation of meme language in public discussion as a kind of dye-trace methodology to see how far this has gone. When we look, it’s clear that major politicians in both major parties are increasingly familiar with and even fluent in the memetic discourses of their respective bases. See: J.D. Vance discouraging “blackpilling” or Tim Walz mentioning the couch. And even where politicians are not doing the memeing themselves, they are increasingly directing their messaging toward an online audience via “Rapid Response” pages and internet-native press offices.
If this were limited to a shift in rhetoric, that would be one thing, but the important point is that politicians and their staffers are increasingly forming their views and attitudes in an online milieu. That means that they are paying attention to different issues, listening to different influencers, and generally being socialized in an entirely new cultural sphere. If Donald Trump was the first online President in the sense of being a viral internet personality, then JD Vance is the first online Vice President in the sense of being a habitual blogosphere content consumer.
Languagemost fundamentally is being shaped by the internet. Slang now not only spreads through the internet, but actually originates on it. Right-wing memes are displacing African-American Vernacular English as the most dynamic source of linguistic innovation.
Indeed, even the language that people use to talk about the need for more in-person, authentically “human” interaction occurs in an internet vernacular. When someone tells you that you are “extremely online,” or need to “touch grass,” they are–intentionally or not–confessing thatthey toohave had their brain colonized by internet cliches.
So, what is traditional media even good for anymore?
It’s actually still good at a few things.
First, it retains its edge as a reliable channel for the dissemination of leaks. Laundering private information that, for one reason or another (think: legal liability, internal political disputes, broadcasting messages that conflict with an organization’s official position) has been one of the media’s historic roles, and is one that the development of alternative channels for learning facts about the outside world does not displace.
In this area, institutional media branding exists not so much to signify reliable let alone unbiased reporting, but to distinguish certain channels as megaphones for important figures who need to get their messages out anonymously. That job is not as easily accomplished by a random twitter account, which will tend to lack the accumulated personal network and differentiated public persona that make leaking work, but require years of investment. In other words, leaking is often actually more “capital intensive” than firsthand factual reporting.
Second, the traditional media continues to play a role in coordination games, identifying positions for decentralized political actors to coalesce around. In the wake of the first presidential debate during the 2024 election, for instance, traditional media was able to help usher forth a synchronized move away from Joe Biden as the democratic nominee. But this is not a novel function. Walter Cronkite’s denunciation of American involvement in Vietnam famously affected public opinion around the war.
In other words, traditional media canfocus attentionon particular stories at particular times. While the decentralized online ecosystemdoesallow dissenters to locate one another pseudonymously, or observe the existence of alternative perspectives that might previously have been shut out of official channels, it is not as capable of informally “issuing orders” at pivotal moments.
Third, but really a subset of the above, traditional media can “normalize.” Like the coordination problem described above, normalization involves the question of “common knowledge”--whether everyone not only knows Fact X, butalsoknows thateveryone elseknows it. Normalization,i.e., the creation of “official knowledge” need not be a matter of targeted and well-timed action. Instead, it refers to the much broader enterprise of crafting consensus reality. And that remains a valuable edge in a world of increasingly individualized online experience. As the existence term “extremely online” may indicate, people are often shy to reference unofficial knowledge in a way that might mark them as “weird” or socially destabilizing.
To take a relatively apolitical example, this is why anime retains a “niche” aura despite being much more widespread among Gen-Z than,e.g., the NFL. The presence of the latter, but not the former, in traditional media is no doubt a big part of the explanation for thatvibe.
The internet is literally real life.
If that sounds like a crazy statement, consider for a moment that even real life is not “real life.” From the beginning of history, we’ve used technology to mediate between ourselves and the world. Domesticating the horse doesn’t mean that you stop being an embodied, physical being. But it does mean that life is no longer limited to the space that a “natural” human might have been able to traverse on foot. Gardening and agriculture accomplish the same with food, clothes and shelter with climate, and so on… All of these represent a mediative layer between the natural state of mankind and “real life” as it is actually experienced.
The mediative layer is not limited to physical technologies, of course.Socialtechnology is just as if not more important. Mathematics allows us to model the world in abstract. Governments scale trust and cooperation. Currencies enable trade. We take all of these for granted in one form or another, even though none of them are inherentfeatures of the human animal. A human today lives a life vastly different from one several thousand years ago; a bird or a fish does not. Nevertheless, we find nothing counterintuitive about thinking of these developments as a part of human experience as such.
如果这听起来像是一个疯狂的说法，不妨想想：即便是现实生活也并非"真实生活"。从历史开端起，人类就运用技术作为自身与世界的中介。驯化马匹并不意味着你不再是血肉之躯，但确实意味着生活疆界不再受制于人类双脚所能丈量的"天然"范围。园艺农耕对食物如此，衣物居所对气候亦然……这些都在人类自然状态与实际经历的"真实生活"之间构筑起中介层。
这种中介层绝非仅限于实体技术。社会技术同样举足轻重——数学让我们得以抽象建模世界，政府制度扩展信任合作，货币体系促成贸易往来。尽管这些都不是人类与生俱来的特质，我们却已视之为理所当然。今日人类的生活已与数千年前截然不同，飞禽走鱼却亘古如一。然而奇怪的是，我们竟丝毫不觉得这些发展成果有违人性本质。
Still, rapid shifts in the environment (whether physical or as part of the meditative layer) can disrupt our lives in important ways. Just as the introduction of a novel disease can devastate populations without a history of evolved resistance, so too can the introduction of novel technologies. That’s true of basic physical goods, like alcohol. But why not social technologies as well? What happens to humanity when you rapidly introduce a new social paradigm?
Dealing with that question requires holding two thoughts in one’s head at once.
First, the new paradigm is “real life”--at least for the time being. That is, it is now an inherent aspect of life that must be accounted for, just like mathematics and government and currency, and that cannot be dismissed simply because it is new.
Second, the new paradigm is potentially dangerous. Humans haven’t had time to evolve alongside it, to ascertain its full implications, to develop resistance, to reach some kind of equilibrium.
然而，环境的快速变化（无论是物理环境还是冥想层面）都可能以重要方式扰乱我们的生活。正如新型疾病的出现会摧毁那些没有进化出抗体的族群一样，新技术的引入同样可能造成破坏。基础物质商品如酒精便是如此。那么社会技术为何不能同理？当人类突然面临新的社会范式时，会发生什么？
思考这个问题需要同时持有两种观点：
首先，新范式就是"现实生活"——至少目前如此。这意味着它已成为生活中必须考量的固有部分，就像数学、政府和货币一样，不能仅仅因为它是新生事物就予以否定。
其次，新范式具有潜在危险性。人类尚未获得与之共同进化的时间，无法全面评估其影响，未能形成抵抗力，也尚未达到某种平衡状态。
The essence of mastering a new technology therefore means understanding what life might look like without it, what it changes, what it improves, and what it damages. The advent of mass radio and televised communication in the 20th century brought aboutcentralizationof narrative. Did that make it more “true”? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, it meant greater perception of truth. Success in such a world meant learning to wield that tool, or inventing a new one. For the boomer, mass mediawasreal life.
The internet is a form of mass communication as well, albeit one with very different logic. Whereas centralization meant that truth, as understood by the masses, could be determined at one or a few nodes, the internet at least in principle enables a distributed and emergent sense of reality. Does that make it more “true”? In some ways, it may not either, and understanding why that is may be useful. But the most important thing to understand is that the internet is now the fundamental mediating layer through which the rest of the world is filtered and understood. For humans living today, the internetisreal life, and navigating life means navigating the internet.
因此，掌握新技术的本质在于理解没有它时生活会是什么模样，它能改变什么、提升什么，又会破坏什么。20世纪大众广播与电视通信的出现催生了叙事权的集中化——这使真相更"真实"了吗？或许未必，但确实意味着对真相更广泛的认知。在那个世界里取得成功，意味着要学会驾驭这种工具，或发明新工具。对婴儿潮世代而言，大众媒体即真实生活。
互联网同样属于大众传播媒介，却遵循截然不同的逻辑。当集中化意味着大众认知的真相可由单一或少数节点决定时，互联网至少在原则上能构建分布式涌现的现实认知。这会让真相更"真实"吗？某些层面上或许也不能，但理解其中缘由至关重要。最根本的认知在于：互联网已成为过滤并解析世界的底层中介层。对当代人而言，互联网即真实生活，驾驭生活就意味着驾驭互联网。
So, what is the upshot of all this?
Ironically, the only way to be “offline”–that is, to understand the filter that the mediating layer of the internet puts on base reality–is to beonline. To account for the gravitational pull that online media now exerts on everyone’s life, one must observe the source directly. And for what it’s worth, a conscious attempt to think in these terms has the added benefit of helping to demystify other, traditional mediating layers as well through parallax. In theory, the most online media consumer can be the most critical media consumer.
If the internet is real life, then people have a need to understand it. Our bet is that this need is not currently being served or–if it is–is being done so in a manner that is biased toward what the online media consumer is already most familiar with.
Thus the logic ofMonitoring the Situation–a live and natively online news channel. Where traditional channels have their edge in leaks and distributed political organizing,MTS’ edge is…to be not that. To provide the accessibility and convenience of a traditional channel without the pretensions, the obfuscated motives, or the cultural inarticulacy that continues to plague them.
Everyone understands in principle that the internet has already reshaped our world. But many fewer have taken steps to stay ahead of the curve in the informational environment that it has created. They have let themselves become prey–or rather, let themselvesremainprey–in the face of deteriorating consensus about the nature of reality itself. That means opportunity for those who care enough to pay attention and have the wherewithal to monitor the situation.
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