逐利主义和自由主义之间 技术嬉皮士

They have no name and no leader. But you could call them “techno-hippies”. Somewhere between the cheerful profiteering of Silicon Valley and the libertarianism of online hackers, this loose collection of artists and entrepreneurs is using the profusion of new devices and digital networks to challenge mainstream ideas about capitalism, consumption and the relationship between humans and nature.

这群人没有名字，也没有领袖。但你可以把他们称作“技术嬉皮士”。他们介于硅谷兴高采烈的逐利主义和在线黑客的自由主义之间，是一个艺术家和企业家的松散群体，他们正利用层出不穷的新设备和数字网络，挑战有关资本主义、消费以及人类与自然之间关系的主流观念。

Last month, they descended on Linz, a pretty city perched on the banks of the Austrian Danube that hosts the annual Ars Electronica festival, a digital media event that has become a magnet for counter-cultural technologists from around the world.

上月，他们来到位于奥地利多瑙河沿岸的美丽城市林茨，参加一年一度的电子艺术节(Ars Electronica)，这场数字媒体盛会吸引了全球各地的反主流文化技术专家。

Colonising Linz’s shopping malls, schools and even the local bishop’s residence, this year’s installations ranged from a cathedral being played with lasers like a giant musical instrument, to hermit crabs scuttling around under the burden of miniature 3D-printed city­scapes, to a display of “agriculturally printed” farmland in which algorithms had calculated the optimum planting pattern and ratio of crops to bug-resistant grasses.

今年的装置作品占据了林茨的购物中心、学校甚至当地主教的居所，包括一个用激光演奏的大教堂，就像一件巨大的乐器，还有在3D打印的城市高楼微型复制品的压力下四散奔逃的寄居蟹，以及“经过农业印刷”的农田，利用算法计算出最优种植模式和农作物与防虫害青草的比率。

“Ars Electronica is an early warning system,” says Hiroshi Ishii, the associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, who was visiting the festival. “It shows we are living in an era when the connectivity of people and machines can contribute to solving societal problems.”

“电子艺术节是一个预警系统，”参加此次电子艺术节的麻省理工(MIT)媒体实验室(Media Lab)副主任石井裕(Hiroshi Ishii)表示，“它显示出在我们生活的这个时代，人和机器的互联互通有助于解决社会问题。”

Where a typical start-up preaches the values of disruption and convenience, these alternative futurists point to the social or environmental impact. Instead of swooning over the latest high-profile product launch, they find playful ways to ask who controls and benefits from that technology. And with each new proprietary device, they question whether “open source” strategies might be better at empowering individuals to direct their own destinies and create incentives for innovation other than the profit motive.

一般的初创企业宣扬颠覆和便利的价值，而这些另类未来主义者指向社会或环境影响。他们没有为最新发布的高调产品尖叫，而是找到好玩的方式提问：谁控制并受益于这种技术。每当有新的专有技术设备问世，他们会提问，“开放源”战略会不会更有利于让个人得以执掌自己的命运，并给创新提供利润动机以外的激励？

Their initiatives include “repair cafés” that encourage people to avoid waste by sharing skills to fix defunct electronic objects, and “open source gardens”, where crates full of soil, flowers and plants are left in public spaces to see who takes care of them. Those projects were kicked off by Martin Hollinetz, my host for the festival. Mr Hollinetz, who trained as an engineer and a psychotherapist, runs a chain of so-called “open technology labs” or “Otelos” in rural Austria, which act as a cross between community groups and high-tech research laboratories.

他们发起的计划包括“修理咖啡馆”，鼓励人们通过分享修理坏了的电子产品技能来减少垃圾，还有“开放源花园”，在公共场所放置装满土壤、花和植物的大盒，看看谁能照看它们。这些计划是由我在此次电子艺术节的东道主马丁•霍林耐茨(Martin Hollinetz)推出的。他是科班出身的工程师和心理治疗师，他在奥地利乡村地区运行着一个所谓的“开放技术实验室”（被称为Otelos）连锁，它们兼具社区组织和高科技研究实验室的特点。

Mr Hollinetz, who lives in a yellow house he and his wife built from reclaimed freight containers previously used to transport refrigerators, took his cues for Otelos from the “maker” movement, a collection of digital do-it-yourselfers who gather in clubs to tinker with high-tech devices such as 3D printers. But he wanted Otelos to be more inclusive than the traditional hacker crowd.

霍林耐茨居住在他和他妻子用回收的货运集装箱建造的黄色屋子里，这个集装箱以前用来运输冰箱。他是从“maker”运动中获得建立Otelos的灵感的。这个运动是一个由数字DIY爱好者组成的群体，他们会聚集在俱乐部，摆弄3D打印机等高科技设备。但他希望Otelos成为更具包容性的组织，不仅包括传统的黑客人群。

“We wanted to create something like the ‘hackerspaces’ you see in Berlin and Barcelona, but to do it in a way that was more welcoming to people of all ages, to stop the brain drain to cities,” he explains. “We wanted to help show people that they had valuable knowledge to share.”

“我们希望创造一些类似于你在柏林和巴塞罗那看到的‘黑客空间’那种组织，但更欢迎各种年龄的阶层，以阻止人才向城市流失，”他解释道，“我们希望帮助展示给人们：他们有宝贵的知识可以分享。”

With around 500 active members, Otelo projects to date include the design and fabrication of a plug-and-play microchip for broadcasting community radio, and a special soil-tilling machine to help farmers revive a traditional organic agricultural technique.

Otelos项目大约有500名活跃会员，迄今的成果包括设计和制造一种用于播放社区广播的即插即用芯片，以及一种特殊的田地耕作机，帮助农民恢复传统的有机农业方法。

Artists and entrepreneurs like Mr Hollinetz are weighing in to a big debate about how technological development should happen. Because making technology can be expensive, innovation tends to come from companies that can generate returns on capital by convincing consumers to buy their products. “There is a real tension in the altruistic or utopian conception of the development of technology on the one hand, and market forces on the other,” says Roland Lamb, the founder and chief executive of London-based music start-up Roli.

艺术家和霍林耐茨等企业家正加入一场大规模辩论，焦点是科技发展应如何实现。由于研发技术明可能成本高昂，因此创新往往来自那些通过说服消费者购买其产品而获得资本回报的公司。伦敦音乐初创企业Roli创始人和首席执行官罗兰•莱姆(Roland Lamb)表示：“确实存在紧张，一方面是科技发展的利他或乌托邦概念，另一方面是市场力量。”

Mr Lamb, who has a degree in comparative philosophy from Harvard, credits eastern thinking with helping him challenge western ideas about identity and discreteness in designing his company’s flagship Seaboard product, a piano that uses soft digital sensors in place of keys to allow a continuum of pressure from the player’s fingers to create changes in sound.

莱姆拥有哈佛大学(Harvard)比较哲学学位，他认为，在设计他公司的旗舰产品Seaboard的过程中，东方思维帮助他挑战了西方有关身份以及分离性的观点，该产品是一台钢琴，用软性数字传感器取代钢琴键，利用来自演奏者手指的连续压力，实现声音的变化。

There is a certain irony, Mr Lamb notes, in corporations that have encouraged consumers to be reliant on their devices now having to tread more carefully as a result.

莱姆指出，具有某种讽刺意味的是，那些一直鼓励消费者依赖它们设备的企业，现在不得不更为谨慎地行事。

“Phones in particular are beginning to cross a line from being understood as an external object, separate from oneself, to an internal object,” Mr Lamb adds, pointing to the recent outrage over Apple automatically downloading U2’s album Songs of Innocence on to unsuspecting iPhone users. “The very intimacy and closeness of these devices means people want to forget that they have been developed by a company that can push things on to them.”

“尤其是，手机正开始从一种被视为与人们脱离的外部产品变成一种内部产品，”莱姆补充称，他谈到，最近人们对苹果(Apple)自动向不知情的iPhone用户下载U2专辑Songs of Innocence感到愤怒，“这些设备与人们的亲密性意味着，人们希望忘记，这些设备是由那些能够将内容强行推给它们的公司开发的。”

But do these experimental interventions produce lasting benefits? Tech businesses such as Apple and Google have shown a willingness to use bottom-up approaches to turn themselves into “platforms”, sharing some of the secrets of their technology in exchange for a share of the revenues that developers get from building on top of it.

但这些实验性干预会产生持久效益吗？苹果和谷歌(Google)等科技企业显示出愿意利用自下而上的方法把自己变成“平台”，共享一些技术秘密，并从开发者基于这些秘密创造的收入中得到分成。

“There’s still the question of who has control, in the end,” says Erkki Huhtamo, a media historian at UCLA. “It’s quite clear that the corporate world is not interested in releasing control for anybody; rather it’s a strategy or lesson they’ve learnt – that it’s wiser to give people leeway in moulding the technology in certain ways.”

“最终，仍是一个谁拥有控制权的问题，”加州大学洛杉矶分校(UCLA)媒体历史学家埃尔基•胡塔莫(Erkki Huhtamo)表示，“很明显，企业界对于拱手让出控制权不感兴趣；它们学到了一项战略或者说吸取了一个教训：以某些方式在技术形成方面给人们留出余地是更为明智的做法。”

Still, Professor Huhtamo thinks artists and alternative futurists serve a valuable role in helping society adjust to massive technological shifts. He notes that Victorian-era fairground rides helped people come to terms with the mechanical culture of the industrial revolution at a time when many were still terrified of the escalators on the new London Underground. “Artists can help prepare the public for new technological paradigms.”

然而，胡塔莫教授认为，在帮助社会适应大规模技术变革方面，艺术家和另类未来主义者发挥着重要作用。他指出，维多利亚时代的露天游乐场帮助人们接受了工业革命的机械文化，当时很多人仍害怕新建伦敦地铁(London Underground)的自动扶梯。“艺术家能够帮助让公众为新的科技范式做好准备。”