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Next month, I will head west to Colorado to take part in the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual current affairs conference. No surprise there, you might think. These days, pundits, politicians, academics, executives and journalists like me spend a considerable amount of time attending conferences — whether the Aspen event, the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, the Milken Institute’s global conference in Los Angeles or countless others.
下个月，我将前往西部的科罗拉多州，参加一年一度的时事会议阿斯彭理念节(Aspen Ideas festival)。你或许会觉得这没什么好惊讶的。如今，专家、政治人士、学者、高管和像我这样的记者会花费相当多的时间参加会议——阿斯彭理念节、达沃斯的世界经济论坛(World Economic Forum)、洛杉矶的米尔肯研究院(Milken Institute)全球会议以及数不胜数的其他会议。
Conferences have become such a deeply ingrained ritual (at least for globetrotting executives and commentators) that you can mark the passage of the seasons by these events.
会议已经变成了一种根深蒂固的仪式（至少对那些奔波于世界各地的高管和评论人士来说是这样的），以至于你可以通过这些会议来标记季节的变换。
But in another sense, the fact that I and hundreds of others are flying to Aspen is actually rather strange. One of the great themes discussed by conference attendees is that the internet is turning the business world upside down. Digital disruption has transformed the way media, retailing and industrial spheres work, and it is now spreading into medicine and government.
但在另一个层面上，我和其他数百人飞赴阿斯彭其实是一件相当怪异的事情。与会者讨论的一个重大主题是互联网正在颠覆商业世界。数字化的颠覆作用已经改变了媒体、零售和工业领域的运作方式，还正在波及医药业和政府。
This ought to imply that conferences are ripe for disruption. In a world where we can all connect online instantly, there should be no need to fly anywhere. When I recently met Klaus Schwab, the doughty founder of the World Economic Forum, at a conference (where else?), he predicted that this process of digital disruption was so powerful that within a couple of decades the conference business “will no longer exist” in its current form. “I don’t know what [a conference] will look like but it will be different,” he observed.
这本应暗示着颠覆会议的时机已经成熟。在一个我们所有人都能瞬间在线互联的世界，我们本应无需飞到任何地方。我最近在一次会议上（还能是哪儿？）遇到克劳斯•施瓦布(Klaus Schwab)，这位世界经济论坛的勇敢创始人预测道，这一数字化的颠覆进程来势如此凶猛，不出几十年，现在这种形式的会议业“将不复存在”。他说：“我不知道将来的（会议）会是什么样子，但肯定与现在不同。”
Here is the oddity: if you ask Schwab what is happening to the conference business now, it does not seem to have been seriously disrupted at all. Far from it. In the past five years, the revenues of the WEF have jumped by 40 per cent to almost SFr200m a year, since company executives are apparently so keen to participate in Davos that they have swallowed hefty price increases. Thus, it currently costs SFr600,000 a year to be a “strategic partner” of the WEF and about a tenth of that to be an affiliate.
奇怪的是：如果你问施瓦布，会议业现在正在发生什么事情，你会发现这个行业似乎根本没有被严重颠覆——远远谈不上。过去5年，世界经济论坛的收入跃增了40%，至每年近两亿瑞士法郎，企业高管看上去非常热衷于参加达沃斯会议，因此咬牙接受了会费的大幅上涨。于是，现在要成为世界经济论坛的“战略合作伙伴”需要每年缴纳60万瑞士法郎的会费，而成为世界经济论坛的会员公司大概需要6万瑞士法郎。
And the WEF is not alone. This year’s Milken event was crammed with attendees — never mind that a ticket cost $10,000 per person. For next month in Aspen, tickets for the main events have already sold out — although they cost $3,000 or so. And this is similar elsewhere; even in a world of hyper-connected cyber links, conferences still keep people travelling.
世界经济论坛并非唯一的例子。今年的米尔肯全球会议也爆满——尽管入场券要1万美元一位。本月召开的阿斯彭理念节的主要会议的门票已经售罄——尽管每张门票需要花费3000美元左右。其他地方的情况也与此类似；即使是在可以通过网络高度互联的世界，会议依然让人们奔波于路途中。
Why? One explanation might be that it has become much easier to travel, because aviation has improved. Another might be that modern professionals spend so much time on the internet that they are eager to meet real people without a screen. And, of course, the beauty and value of face-to-face encounters is that they are exclusive. That is different from the internet, where everything can easily be replicated — and commoditised.
为什么会这样？一个可能的解释是由于航空的发展，现在旅行变得容易得多。另一个可能原因是现代专业人士已在互联网上花费了如此多时间，因此他们迫切地想与屏幕之外的真人会面。而且，面对面相遇的美好和可贵之处在于这种相遇是独一无二的。这一点与互联网上不同，在互联网上，一切都可以轻易被复制和同质化。
But I suspect that another reason why conferences are booming is that they are tapping into two contradictory but powerful desires among the modern elite: to belong to a particular social tribe but also to find safe ways of jumping out of their intellectual ghetto. More specifically, when I look around at the attendees of Aspen, Milken and Davos, the first thing that strikes me is that the gathering feels rather tribal — these events allow the global elite to affirm their networks and identities. In that sense, conferences are a little like the 21st-century corporate equivalent of tribal weddings: they enable people to forge bonds and to express shared values.
但我怀疑，会议行业之所以欣欣向荣，是因为会议切入了现代精英的两种相互矛盾但又十分强烈的诉求：他们既想从属于一个特定的“社会部落”，又想找到安全的办法跳出自己所处的思想圈子。更确切地说，当我环顾阿斯彭、米尔肯和达沃斯的与会者时，我想到的第一件事，就是这些集会很有部落感——这些盛会让全球精英确认他们的人脉和身份。在这种意义上，这些会议有点像是21世纪企业界版的部落婚礼：让人们建立联系，表达共同的价值观。
Homogeneity is not the only theme at these events: there is always a sprinkling of unexpected detail, debate, ideas and people. This enables the attendees to collide with the unexpected — be that an alternative political point of view, a religious idea, a medical breakthrough or something else — in a safe place. When I talk to conference devotees, they often say that one of the attractions of such events is precisely this note of serendipity. It seems that busy professionals are worried that they are living their lives in too narrow an intellectual ghetto — and want to find ways to break free (a little).
相似性并非这些会议的唯一主题：总会出现些许让人意想不到的细节、辩论、想法和人。这让参会者能够在一个安全的地方与意外的事物发生碰撞——无论是一个另类的政治观点、宗教理念、医学突破，还是别的什么东西。当我与热衷参会的人聊天时，他们总是说到这些活动吸引人的一个地方正是这种意外之得。忙碌的专业人士似乎担忧他们生活在一个过于狭小的思想圈子里，并且希望找到方法（稍微）从中挣脱。
Can this experience be replicated online? The WEF and others are certainly trying to do this by investing heavily in their internet platforms. But the problem with the internet is that it is not just hard to replicate the full-blooded experience of interacting as a social tribe; it is also difficult to produce serendipity, or the moment when people bump into new ideas or individuals in a corridor or over dinner.
这种体验是否在可以在网络上复制？世界经济论坛和其他一些会议确实试图通过大举投资于自己的网络平台达到这样的效果。但互联网的问题在于，它不仅难以复制人们在一个社会部落中互动的真实体验，也很难产生意外之得，或是创造那样的时刻——让人们在一条走廊里或吃饭席间忽然撞见新想法或有趣的人。
Maybe it is just a matter of time. The canny Schwab (not to mention the good folks at Aspen, Milken, TED and so on) would dearly love to deliver serendipity in cyber bytes. But until then, the airlines who fly into Aspen and other conference zones will continue to do a roaring trade. It is perhaps one of the peculiar ironies of our modern digital age — our desire to find anti-digital backlashes.
或许这只是时间问题。精明的施瓦布（更不必说阿斯彭、米尔肯、TED等会议的那些心怀良好意愿的主办者）将非常乐意通过网络来创造意外之得。但在这一天到来之前，飞赴阿斯彭和其他会议举办地的航班将持续火爆。这或许是我们所处的现代数字化时代的一个特有讽刺——我们渴望找到反数字化的反抗手段。
