我们赢下的那场文化战争 文化战争是真实存在的。 当一种主流文化遭遇严峻挑战时，文化战争就会发生。 但如果你不够留心，甚至可能完全察觉不到它的存在。 小时候，我是个“书呆子”。 我读很多书，在电脑前一坐就是几个小时，大量阅读科学和技术杂志，自学编程。 你可能会想：“这不是挺好吗？” 一点也不好。 在我成长的那个时间和环境里，这些事情毫无价值。 电脑被视为玩具。一个花大量时间用电脑的孩子，会被认为是对某种无聊玩意儿的病态迷恋。 我们有一个电脑俱乐部，但本质上那是“社会边缘人”的聚集地。没有人仰慕我们。 从事计算机相关工作，毫无声望可言。 《龙与地下城》甚至被认为是“危险的”——你必须隐藏自己对这类游戏的兴趣。 1983 年的电影《战争游戏》（WarGames）之所以令人印象深刻，正是因为那个沉迷电脑的孩子不仅赢得了女孩，还拯救了世界。 差不多就在那个时期，比尔·盖茨开始成名。 但这只是一个开始——随后展开的是一场持续了十年的文化战争，在这场战争中，黑客文化逐渐走向主导地位。 如今，大多数人多少都会说一点“黑客的语言”。 事情本不一定会这样发展，而且在不同地方的发展路径也并不相同。在美国，黑客文化的地位很高；但即便在今天，在许多其他地方，它的地位仍然较低。 即便如此，今天在许多组织中，哪怕是在美国，“搞电脑的人”依然被安置在地下室。我们不太常让他们露面。他们并不是“擅长与人打交道的人”。 所以，这场文化战争确实是由黑客赢下的，这一点无可否认。 但和所有战争一样，结果比表面看起来要复杂得多。仍有许多人巴不得把“搞电脑的人”重新打回声望阶梯的最底层。 薪资是衡量声望的一个很好指标。在美国、澳大利亚和瑞士，“搞电脑的人”薪水高、社会地位也相对较高。 但在整个英国呢？就没那么回事了。我敢打赌，在那儿当个“金融分析师”，收入和地位可能更好。 真正值得关注的是：“AI”将如何影响这些地位之争。 从某种意义上说，构建能够进行金融、政治和法律分析的软件，是“搞电脑的人”武器库中的最新武器。 许多人对 AI 可能给软件开发者带来的影响感到绝望。 我建议：把这件事放在“黑客文化战争”的背景下去理解。 The culture war that we won Culture wars are real. They occur when a dominant culture faces a serious challenge. But unless you pay close attention, you might miss them entirely. As a kid, I was a “nerd.” I read a lot and spent hours on my computer. I devoured science and technology magazines. I taught myself programming. “Great!” you might think. Not at all. This was not valued where and when I grew up. Computers were seen as toys. A kid who spent a lot of time on a computer was viewed as obsessed with a rather dull plaything. We had a computer club, but it was essentially a gathering of “social rejects.” No one looked up to us. Working with computers carried no prestige. Dungeons & Dragons was outright “dangerous”—you had to hide any interest in such games. The 1983 movie WarGames stands out precisely because the computer-obsessed kid gets the girl and saves the world. Bill Gates was becoming famous around that time, but this marked only the beginning of a decade-long culture war in which hacker culture gradually rose to dominance. Today, most people can speak the language of hackers. It did not have to turn out this way, and it did not unfold identically everywhere. The status of hacker culture is high in the United States, but it remains lower in many other places even now. Even so, in many organizations today, even in the United States, the « computer people » are stored in the basement. We do not let them out too often. They are not « people persons ». So the culture war was won by the hackers, the victory is undeniable. But as with all wars, the result is more nuanced that one might think. Many would like nothing more than to send back the computer people at the bottom of the prestige ladder. Salaries are a good indicator for prestige. In the USA, in Australia and in Switzerland, « computer people » have high salaries and relatively high status. In the UK as a whole? Not so much. I bet you do better as a « financial analyst » over there. What is worth watching is the effect that « AI » will have on the status battles. In some sense, building software that can do financial, political and legal analysis is the latest weapon in the arsenal of the computer people. Many despair about what AI might do to software developers: I recommend looking at it in the context of the hacker culture war.