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摘要

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that a hardheaded social scientist from, say, 1974 is plucked out of time and dropped here, in the midst of the internet age. What, more than anything else, would blow their mind? 1 I'm not just asking what they'd be most dazzled by. I'm asking what would shake their sense of how the world works. What would they least have seen coming? 2 My hunch is they wouldn't be as astounded by our world as we like to think. Our technologies of instant communication would be impressive, yes, but they'd at least make sense as the culmination of a trend that began with the telegraph. Other seemingly new phenomena like viral false news and deepfakes have predigital precedents. Even some of the most bizarre facts of online life chime with what's come before: Anyone familiar with the ancient Egyptian fixation on felines (cat mummies, cat statues, cat pictographs) and the mid-century American obsession with TV would at least have some pretext to accept that one of the largest conglomerates on the planet is the owner of a massive video site with millions of cat clips.