互联网一直比看起来更具实体性——也更脆弱。作者：约翰·韦斯特 2001年7月18日星期三，一列货运列车在巴尔的摩的霍华德街隧道脱轨。易燃液体被点燃，引发大火，将隧道内的温度升高至1000至1500度。“我们被告知一些货车车厢实际上正发着红光，”消防部门发言人告诉美联社。超过100名消防员被调往现场灭火。
The internet has always been more physical—and fragile—than it seems. By John West On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, a freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel. Flammable liquid ignited, causing a fire that raised the temperature in the tunnel to 1,000 to 1,500 degrees. “We’re told some of the boxcars are actually glowing,” a fire-department spokesperson told the Associated Press. More than 100 firefighters were called to fight the blaze.
国家运输安全委员会对这场大火进行了调查，但从未查明出了什么问题。无人死亡，其他列车改道以避开这场大火。但不仅仅是列车在隧道砖砌的墙壁间穿行：几家互联网服务提供商和电信公司正在隧道内铺设光缆。互联网无法如此轻易地重新传输。蜿蜒穿过隧道的光缆受损，远至亚特兰大和洛杉矶的网络流量陷入瘫痪。一家衡量网络性能的公司表示，“互联网延迟是其见过的最严重情况，”美联社报道称。仅这一个隧道就承载了全国大部分的网络流量，美国人为此付出了代价。
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the fire but never figured out what went wrong. No one was killed, and other trains were rerouted to avoid the inferno. But more than trains navigated the tunnel’s brick-lined walls: Several internet-service providers and telecommunications companies were running cables through it. The internet couldn’t be so easily retransmitted. The cables that wound their way through the tunnel were damaged, and web traffic as far away as Atlanta and Los Angeles slowed to a crawl. One company that measures web performance said“the internet delays were the worst it had seen,” reported the Associated Press. A single tunnel was responsible for much of the country’s web traffic, and Americans paid the price.
互联网并非我们想象的那样。它是实体的，受制于自然和时间的变幻无常，正如我们的身体一样。和我们一样，它会闪烁、消逝。互联网的脆弱性无处不在：体现在人们依赖的网站突然消失，也体在于帖子、图片和视频源源不断的喧嚣之中。
The internet isn’t what we think. It is physical, subject to the vagaries of nature and time, just as our bodies are. Like us, it will flicker and fade. The internet’s fragility crops up everywhere: in the sudden disappearance of a relied-upon website, and in the endless thrum of posts, images, and videos.
在霍华德街隧道事件中，脆弱性在没有任何预警的情况下变得十分明显。正如作家玛丽亚·法雷尔和技术专家罗宾·贝尔松在2024年的文章《我们需要让互联网回归自然》中所指出的，WorldCom——当时一家主要的电话和互联网公司——在大火后导致的停机中扮演了重要角色。两人写道：“WorldCom将网络流量分散到不同的光纤网络上”，但“该地区狭窄的物理地形将所有这些不同的光纤网络集中到一个瓶颈——霍华德街隧道。”
In the case of the Howard Street Tunnel, the fragility became, without warning, quite obvious. As the writer Maria Farrell and the technologist Robin Berjon note in their 2024 essay titled “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” WorldCom—a major phone-and-internet company at the time—played an important role in the outages that followed the inferno. “WorldCom had spread web traffic over different fiber networks,” they write, but “the region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity.”
WorldCom的韧性，字面上说，被烧毁了。它拥有技术冗余，却缺乏多样性。尽管其业务涉及物理世界——构成真实、物质互联网的光纤电缆——WorldCom却似乎忘记了土地有自己的规则。
Despite dealing in the physical world—in the fiber-optic cables that make up the real, material internet—WorldCom had somehow forgotten that the land makes its own rules.
瓶颈也可能带来好处。通过整合我们在线所需服务的公司传输数据，可以实现效率。2021年，云公用事业提供商Fastly停机一小时，导致CNN、纽约时报和卫报等主要新闻网站无法访问。技术新闻网站The Verge在其网站停机期间，最终通过Google Docs发布了关于停机的更新。停机当天，Fastly的股价实际上上涨。“投资者对那些让他们了解一家鲜为人知的技术服务提供商、似乎对一项重要服务拥有锁定的头条新闻感到高兴，”法雷尔和贝尔松写道。
Bottlenecks can have their benefits. Efficiencies can be found in transmitting data through companies that consolidate the services we need to be online. In 2021, Fastly, a cloud-utility provider, stopped working for an hour, taking down the websites of major news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian. The Verge, a technology-news site, ended up publishing updates about the outage via Google Docs while its website was down. The day of the disruption, Fastly’s stock price actually rose. “Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service,” Farrell and Berjon write.
“对投资者来说，这种关键基础设施的失败看起来不像脆弱性，而像是获利的机会。”脆弱性与利润相辅相成，这在你记得企业冗余总是伴随低效率时就有一定道理。脆弱性是云经济的一大商业特征，而非缺陷。
“To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.”Fragility and profit go hand in hand, which makes some sense when you remember that corporate redundancy always carries inefficiency. Brittleness is big business, a feature and not a bug of the cloud economy.
但这片“云”遮蔽了真实存在的公司、人员和流程的集合，正是它们创造并构建了互联网。当我们把东西放进云端时，我们不只是把维护数据的责任交给了一块块靠电力发光的、反复无常的磁性金属；我们同时也把这一责任交给了一组相当有限的、反复无常的人类机构。你可能希望你的家庭照片能在云端保存几个世纪，但“大多数公司都活不长久，”马克斯韦尔·尼利-科恩在为哈佛法学院图书馆创新实验室撰写的文章中写道。
But the cloud obscures the very real collection of companies, people, and processes that create and structure the internet. When we put something in the cloud, we don’t just offload the responsibility of maintaining our data to fickle chunks of magnetic metal alight with electricity; we also offload that responsibility to a rather limited set of fickle human institutions. You might want your family photos to live in the cloud for centuries, but “most companies do not last long,” Maxwell Neely-Cohen wrote for the Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab.
“它们会被收购，或被拆分成几块，或破产，或衰落成规模小得多的东西，或被灾难性的地缘政治事件颠覆。”这片云还遮蔽了构成互联网本身的海底电缆、数据中心和传输塔。“云的存在依赖于相对少数需要不断维护的海底电缆，”尼利-科恩继续写道。对于一种常被赞誉为去中心化的媒介，对于一个让人联想到某种弥散之物的隐喻来说，这集中化程度实在太高了。
“They get acquired or split up into pieces or go bankrupt or decline into something much smaller or are upended by catastrophic geopolitical events.”The cloud also shrouds the cables, data centers, and transmission towers that compose the internet itself. “The cloud is made possible by a relatively small number of undersea cables that require constant maintenance,” continued Neely-Cohen. For a medium so often praised as decentralized, for a metaphor that calls to mind something diffuse, that’s an awful lot of centralization.
少数几家公司拥有数据中心，这些数据中心由少数几根电缆连接，而这些电缆同样归少数几家公司所有，数据——同样归少数几家公司所有——则通过这些电缆流动。按这种说法，互联网看起来更像霍华德街隧道，而不是一朵云。
A small number of companies own the data centers, connected by a small number of cables also owned by a small number of companies, through which data, yet again owned by a small number of companies, flow. The internet, in this telling, looks much more like the Howard Street Tunnel than a cloud.
而如今人工智能汹涌而来，揭示了云过去所隐藏的物理基础设施。普通人比以往任何时候都更清楚地看到供应链的脆弱，以及那些塞满耗水耗电、如今让许多人厌恶的数据中心的芯片的强大。
And now artificial intelligence has gusted in, revealing the physical infrastructure that the cloud used to hide. Ordinary people can see more clearly than ever the precarity of the supply chains and the power of the chips that fill the water-guzzling, electricity-hungry data centers that so many have come to loathe.
正如人工智能揭示了我们数字生活的物质性，它也将支撑互联网运行的关键软件推到了风口浪尖。上周，一款人工智能模型在 PHP 中发现了安全漏洞，PHP 是一种被 70% 的网站使用的编程语言。尽管它对现代网络至关重要，但我猜 PHP 并非家喻户晓的名字。它最初是“个人主页”的缩写，最初是为了帮助其创建者托管简历而开发的。随着 PHP 越来越流行，它逐渐摆脱了部分 DIY 精神——以及那个缩写——但，就像许多保持网络运行的关键系统一样，志愿者仍然是其维护中不可或缺的一部分。
Just as AI reveals the physicality of our digital lives, it has also brought into sharp focus the crucial pieces of software that undergird the internet. Last week, an AI model found security vulnerabilities in PHP, a coding language used in 70 percent of websites. Despite its centrality to the modern web, I’d hazard a guess that PHP isn’t a household name. Originally named as an acronym for personal homepage, it was built to help host its creator’s résumé. As PHP grew in popularity, it shed some of that DIY spirit—and that acronym—but, like so many essential systems that keep the web online, volunteers remain an essential part of its maintenance.
在一幅关于现代基础设施现状的经典漫画中，摇摇欲坠的叠叠乐塔由一块标有“一个内布拉斯加州某个随机人士自 2003 年以来一直在默默维护的项目”的方块支撑着。人工智能——涌入鲜有人访问的维基百科页面，探测管理不善的政府网站，发现零日漏洞——揭示了网络一直以来就是一个脆弱而诡异的地方。的确，这种状况中最“云端”的部分，是人类主体性的缺失。
In a classic comic about the state of modern infrastructure, a precarious Jenga tower is held up by a single block labeled “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.”AI—swarming onto rarely used Wikipedia pages, probing poorly run government websites, discovering zero-day exploits—has shown the web to be the frail, uncanny place that it has always been. Indeed, the most cloudlike part of this state of affairs is the absence of human agency.
作为网络用户，我们必须关注云端所掩盖的数据和基础设施。成群结队的血肉之躯的工程师，坐在钢筋混凝土的办公楼里，以及水冷和空冷的数据中心中，照料着存储我们文字、图片和视频的系统。我们存储和传输的内容，都是对一个依然坚定地是物质世界的关注行为，尽管我们的数字生活看似非物质。人类机构在存储和传输的实践中仍然处于核心地位——这是一个令人不安的事实，因为人类机构会消亡，就像人类身体一样。
As users of the web, we have to pay attention to the data and infrastructure that the cloud cloaks. Hordes of flesh-and-blood engineers, sitting in glass-and-steel office buildings and water-and-air-cooled data centers, attend to the systems that hold our words, pictures, and videos. What we store and what we transmit are acts of attention to a world that remains resolutely material, despite the seeming immateriality of our digital lives. Human institutions remain central to the practice of storage and transmission—an inconvenient fact, because human institutions fade, just as human bodies do.
云端每时每刻都因人类的新鲜关注而得到刷新。正如粪肥适度能促使山茱萸开花，同样，我们的关怀——跨越几代人——也让互联网繁荣生长。
The cloud is refreshed every moment of every day by the fresh attention of humans. Just as manure, in balance, can encourage the dogwood to flower, so, too, does our care—over generations—make the internet bloom.