就十年而言，2010年代令人尴尬。如今忙于人工智能模型和火箭的科技大佬，对当年打造的消费级应用不屑一提。银行家们则在“戒酒所”里度过了这十年。在经历了一段漫长的高管狂欢期后，2010年代在许多董事长办公室里成了纪律严明的寒冬：这是由政府、公众、激进投资者和董事会强加的。然而，这个“可怕的十年”对当今商业的启示，远胜于投资者津津乐道的1870年代、1920年代或1990年代的传奇。2010年代是个令人尴尬的十年？无疑。但无论如何也是个革命性的十年。
As decades go, the 2010s were an embarrassment. Tech bosses, now preoccupied with artificial-intelligence models and rockets, talk dismissively of the consumer apps they built back then. Bankers spent it in the drunk tank. After a long summer of executive exuberance, the 2010s were, in many corner offices, a winter of discipline: imposed by governments, the public, activist investors and boards. Yet this decennium horribile has far more to say about business today than the tales from the 1870s, 1920s or 1990s that investors tell themselves. Were the 2010s a cringeworthy decade? Certainly. But a revolutionary one nonetheless.
硅谷最适合对2010年代进行修正主义解读。美国为何能在中东战火不受干扰的情况下，开展规模空前、耗能巨大的建设热潮？要感谢2010年代。得益于页岩革命，美国在十年末首次在半个多世纪里成为能源净出口国。而如今为数据中心建设提供源源不断资金的资本池？金融危机后，银行被设定了“限速”，全球借贷体系发生转型。如今使用的许多资本市场技巧，从特殊目的载体到离岸保险资本，都是在2010年代经过尝试和检验的。
Silicon Valley is ripest for 2010s-revisionism. How is it that America can undertake an enormous, energy-intensive construction boom on a scale never before seen, unbothered by war in the Middle East? Thank the 2010s. Because of the shale revolution, America ended the decade as a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than half a century. And that endless well of capital now funding the construction of data centres? After the financial crisis, speed limits were imposed on banks and the global lending system was transformed. Many of the capital-markets tricks used today, from special-purpose vehicles to offshore insurance capital, were tried and tested in the 2010s.
如果这场赌注赢了，将是因为人工智能彻底改变了白领工作。不了解2010年代，就无法理解办公室生活。当时政客们为Uber（2010年）或DoorDash（2013年）的零工劳动者担忧。但办公室生活的变化大得多。工人们被“挂绳盖世太保”命令“带着完整的自我”去工作。当他们来到这个布置柔软、无处遁形的现代办公室——那个“软装全景监狱”时，他们用Datadog（2012年）或Snowflake（2014年）搭建“仪表盘”，从“热工位”接Zoom（2013年）电话，或许是在WeWork（2010年）里，伴随着Slack（2013年）消息传来的阵阵“机枪声”。
If this gamble pays off, it will be because AI has revolutionised white-collar work. It is impossible to understand office life without understanding the 2010s. Back then politicians fretted about the gig workers of Uber (2010) or DoorDash (2013). But office life was changing far more. Workers were ordered by the lanyard-Stasi to bring their whole selves to work. When they arrived at the soft-furnished panopticon that is the modern office they built “dashboards” using Datadog (2012) or Snowflake (2014), took Zoom (2013) calls from “hot desks”, perhaps in a WeWork (2010), to the sound of distant machine-gun fire from Slack (2013) messages.
回首 2010 年代，当时似乎是一个缺乏新商业思维的时代。事实证明这种看法大错特错。有效利他主义是一种哲学，其严苛的伦理核算直指普世价值，但它只能诞生于 2010 年代初期牛津和斯坦福的象牙塔之中。其思想内核载于在线论坛“LessWrong”（2009 年创立），并由“80,000 Hours”（2011 年成立）等慈善机构付诸实践。如今，它已成为硅谷人工智能实验室的主导哲学，这使它轻而易举地成为当下最具影响力的管理理念。
When it was happening, the 2010s felt like an age bereft of new business thinking. How wrong that has proven. Effective altruism is a philosophy whose exacting ethical calculus grasps at the universal, but which could have come only from the cloisters of Oxford and Stanford in the early 2010s. The content of its ideas is set out on LessWrong (2009), an online message board, and put into practice by charities like 80,000 Hours (2011). It is now the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley AI labs, which makes it easily the most influential management idea out there.
政治家们同样从那个革命性的十年里拾起了许多被搁置的想法。全民基本收入在痴迷平等的 2010 年代还是边缘想法，但在痴迷人工智能的 2020 年代，它已被作为严肃政策进行讨论。左右两派都拥护的“大即是恶”反垄断学派，是 2010 年代中期美国名牌法学院的创造。在富裕国家中，财富税已成为左派的最爱政策。其核心观点由法国经济学家托马斯·皮凯蒂和加布里埃尔·祖克曼这对搭档在 2010 年代提出。
Politicians likewise find plenty of ideas left on the shelf from the revolutionary decade. Universal basic income was a fringe idea in the equality-obsessed 2010s but is now talked about as serious policy in the AI-obsessed 2020s. The big-is-bad school of antitrust embraced on both left and right is a creation of prestigious American law schools during the mid-2010s. Across the rich world, wealth taxes have become a favourite policy of the left. The central ideas were set out by Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, a pair of French economists, in the 2010s.
以 2010 年代的攻势，最好用 2010 年代的防御来化解。Anthropic 和 OpenAI 都采用了公益公司制，这种形式理论上能更容易平衡社会与股东的利益。两家实验室均在特拉华州注册——依据的是 2013 年的规则。2019 年，实力强大的 CEO 游说团体“商业圆桌会议”宣布，企业的股东将从今往后让位于其利益相关者。如今读来，这像是企业高尚姿态达到顶峰时的遗物。
2010s attacks are best repelled by 2010s defences. Anthropic and OpenAI are both structured as public-benefit corporations, a form that, in theory, makes it easier to balance the interests of society and stockholders. Both labs are incorporated in Delaware—under rules from 2013. In 2019 the Business Roundtable, a powerful CEO-lobby group, announced that a firm’s shareholders would henceforth yield to its stakeholders. Today it reads like an artefact from the high point of corporate high-mindedness.
然而其影响力依然存在。本周，Anthropic 承诺将其 5% 的股份捐赠给非营利事业。SpaceX 也在向公众让出股份。借用马克思的话稍作改动：商人并非随心所欲地创造历史，而是在 2010 年代传递下来的条件下创造历史。
Yet its power endures. This week Anthropic pledged 5% of its shares to non-profit causes. SpaceX is also giving stakes to the public. To misquote Marx, businessmen do not make history as they please, but under conditions passed down to them from the 2010s.
并非2010年代的每个宏大构想都完整存活至今。央行维持利率在零附近的政策于2022年终结。企业狂热推行社会公正运动的现象较以往减少。尽管如此，商业领域仍有角落让未经改良的2010年代延续至今。私募股权基金正在设计方案，以避免向出资人返还资金，免得面对2010年代之后的世界。欧洲仍坚持ESG（环境、社会和治理）理念。
Not every big idea from the 2010s survives in full. Central banks’ policy of keeping interest rates around zero ended in 2022. Zealous corporate social-justice campaigns are fewer than before. Still, there are corners of commerce which keep the unreformed 2010s alive. Private-equity funds are devising ways to avoid returning money to their backers, lest they face the post-2010s world. Europe still clings to ESG.
咨询公司也是如此。麦肯锡关于职场女性与少数族裔的研究曾是那个时代的“圣典”。本月，该咨询公司因一名合伙人公开质疑类似观点而将其降职。竞争对手贝恩最近撰文称：“77%的美国消费者表示关注环境可持续性，高于去年的69%。” 如果你这么说吧。就像无视二战结束的日本士兵一样，B-Corp（益企业）阵营中的一些强硬派依在坚持战斗。
So do consultants. McKinsey’s studies of women and ethnic minorities in the workplace were the sacred texts of that era. This month the consultancy demoted a partner for publicly questioning similar ideas. Bain, a rival, recently wrote that “77% of US customers say they are concerned about environmental sustainability, up from 69% last year.”If you say so. Like Japanese soldiers who ignored the end of the second world war, some hardliners from the B-Corp battalion fight on.
很难想象会出现像对1990年代和2000年代那样对2010年代的怀旧浪潮。有什么值得怀旧的呢？天然气的黄金时代不足以支撑。流媒体的黄金时代，或许算一个。音乐界的巨头——泰勒·斯威夫特、德雷克等——拥有如同漫威超级英雄系列般经久不衰的商业价值。
It is difficult to imagine a wave of nostalgia for the 2010s like that for the 1990s and 2000s. What is there to be nostalgic for? A golden age of gas won’t cut it. A golden age for streaming, maybe. The big beasts of music—Taylor Swift, Drake, etc—have the ageless commercial quality of the Marvel superhero franchise.
但人们对2010年代的兴趣无疑将会增长。欧元区在2010年代大部分时间都处于危机之中，如今又站在另一场危机的边缘。理解硅谷，就等于理解2010年代。《社交审判》是一部关于Facebook的新电影，只是即将涌现的一系列回顾2010年代的作品之一。一部关于山姆·班克曼-弗里德的新系列剧即将上映，他是2010年代末的一名加密货币骗子。
But interest in the 2010s will surely grow. The euro zone, which spent much of the 2010s in crisis, now stands on the brink of another one. Understanding Silicon Valley means understanding the 2010s. “The Social Reckoning”, a new film about Facebook, is but one of a stream of 2010-gazing works. A new series will soon be released about Sam Bankman-Fried, a late-2010s crypto fraudster.
伊丽莎白·霍姆斯是另一名骗子，也是另一部电影的主角，她几乎是2010年代的最佳象征。还有埃隆·马斯克，世界首富（如今也是世界上最长纪录片之一的主角）。他的飞行汽车，是对“我们最终只得到140个字符”这一2010年代自我厌恶格言的解药。然而，马斯克本质上是一位电动车大亨，其权力源自一个无法无天的社交网络。一个与其时代相符的人吗？当然：一个2010年代的人。
Elizabeth Holmes, another fraudster and the subject of yet another film, could hardly be a better symbol of the 2010s. Then there’s Elon Musk, the world richest man (and now the subject of one of the world’s longest documentaries). His flying car is the antidote to the self-hating 2010s mantra that all we ended up with is 140 characters. Yet Mr Musk is, at his core, an electric-car magnate whose power derives from a lawless social network. A man of his age? Absolutely: a man of the 2010s.