Some 20th century artefacts have largely gone from the modern office, the typewriter and fax machine among them. They have been swallowed by computerisation and the internet. One dead-tree tradition endures: the business card.

一些20世纪的设备——打字机、传真机等等——大都已从现代办公室消失。取代它们的是计算机化工作和互联网。但有一种古老的传统还在延续：名片。

Despite strenuous efforts by mobile phonemakers and software companies to replace business cards it them with online contacts, shared like some invisible handshake by Bluetooth or wireless, the business cards remain. As long as you remember to carry them, nothing has improved on the ritual of exchanging rectangles of card stamped with your identity and details.

尽管手机制造商和软件公司奋力试图用线上通讯录（通过蓝牙或无线网络像看不见的握手一样分享）取而代之，但名片并未消失。只要随身携带名片，交换这些印有自己身份和详细信息的名片的仪式多少年来都未曾变化。

Business cards are light, portable and open. No need for compatible platforms and software to swap them — you hand them over, perhaps with a little bow if you are in Japan. Nor does the exchange endanger privacy. It is peer-to-peer networking: the only person who sees the card is the one who receives it.

名片轻薄、便携、开放。交换名片不需要兼容的平台和软件——只需递出名片，如果在日本的话，或许要略微躬身。交换名片也不会危及隐私。这是一种个人对个人的关系网构建：只有收到名片的人才能看到上面的信息。

Compare it with Microsoft’s deal this week to pay $26.2bn for the professional social network LinkedIn, with its 433m usersmembers. That works out at $60 per for each Linked-In user, or $250 for each of its 105m monthly active users — those who not only join but also regularly use the platform. It is a high price for a stack of cards.

将交换名片与微软(Microsoft)上周以262亿美元收购拥有4.33亿注册用户的职业社交网络领英(LinkedIn)比较一下。这相当于微软为每位领英用户支付60美元，或者为1.05亿月度活跃用户（不仅加入领英，而且经常使用该平台的用户）每人支付250美元。对一摞名片而言，这确实是高价。

Microsoft is, of course, buying more than that. Despite its patchy record of making acquisitions — including of Nokia’s mobile phone division and Skype, the telecoms service — at lofty prices and struggling to achieve promised benefits, Satya Nadella, its chief executive, has not lost his mind.

当然，微软的收购远不止于此。尽管微软的收购记录并不好看，经常以高价收购却难以实现承诺的收益——包括收购诺基亚(Nokia)旗下手机部门，以及通信服务Skype——但微软首席执行官萨蒂亚•纳德拉(Satya Nadella)并未失去理智。

Apart from data about every member’s career and background, it Microsoft gains knowledge of the network of executives and professionals they know — what sociologists would call their “weak ties” and LinkedIn calls “the economic graph”. It amounts to a hoard of data to be mined for advertisers and licensed to marketers so that salesprofessionals people can pitch to potential buyers.

除了每一位用户的职业和背景信息，微软还可以掌握他们认识的高管和专业人士网络——社会学家称之为“弱关系”，领英称之为“经济图谱”。它相当于海量数据库，可供广告商挖掘，也可向营销人员许可使用，以便专业营销人员精准找到潜在买家。

This is all pretty valuable in a faintly sinister way: LinkedIn gained $1.9bn of its $3bn revenues last year from “talent solutions”, or what is commonly known as headhunting. Most people like to be offered new jobs while companies like to know where they can recruit, for example, a Mandarin-speaking technology executive in New York with close connections in Beijing.

这些都具有稍显邪恶的价值：“人才解决方案”，即通常称的猎头工作，贡献了领英去年30亿美元营收中的19亿美元。大多数人喜欢别人给他们提供新的工作机会，而企业渴望知道从哪里招聘人才，例如如何在纽约招聘一名会讲普通话且与北京方面联系密切的技术高管。

Mr Nadella and Jeff Weiner, chief executive of LinkedIn, enthused about the deal in a torrent of buzzwords. It united “the world’s leading professional cloud with the world’s leading professional network” and would, in Mr Weiner’s words, offer “plentymore of top-of-the-funnel action”. Expect to find Linked-In contacts popping up in Word and Excel, and trawled by Cortana, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool.

纳德拉与领英首席执行官杰夫•韦纳(Jeff Weiner)用大量流行词汇称赞这笔收购交易。纳德拉表示，这笔交易“把全球顶尖的专业云端服务和全球顶尖的职业社交网络结合到一起”，而韦纳称，这将提供“更多面向最大客户群体的服务”。可以预想，将来Word和Excel中将弹出领英社交信息，微软的人工智能工具Cortana则会收集这些信息。

Microsoft needs something for its $26bn but itthe deal raises a fundamental question about the internet. How did we leap from business cards, with their privacy safeguards and individual autonomy, to this? Mr Nadella hastened to add thatsay nothing will be done without users’ permission but LinkedIn’s habit of constantly emailing perky updates about virtual strangers does not reassure.

微软的260亿美元需要回报，但这笔交易提出了关于互联网的一个根本问题。我们如何从隐私有保障、个人自主的名片跨越到社交网络？纳德拉仓促补充道，没有用户许可，绝不会动这些数据，但领英不断发邮件通知其实是陌生人的信息更新的习惯无法让人放心。

As LinkedIn’s user agreement (the legalese to which you consented without reading) puts it, users own their data but they grant “a worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish and process, information and content that you provide . . . without any further consent, notice and/or compensation”.

正如领英的用户协议（那些你未经过阅读就同意的法律术语）所表述的，用户对自己的数据拥有所有权，但“授予领英以下非专属权限：全球性、可转让、可再授权、无须取得您和他人同意、无需另行通知或补偿您或他人即可使用、复制、修改、传播、发表、加工您通过领英‘服务’提供的信息和内容的权利”。

This is data ownership but not as we knew it. Nor is it the way the internet was meant to work. “The internet was designed to be decentralised so everybody could participate . . . [Instead] personal data has been locked up in these silos,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the world wide web, said last week.

这是数据所有权，但不是我们了解的所有权。这也不是互联网应有的工作方式。万维网之父蒂姆•伯纳斯-李爵士(Sir Tim Berners-Lee)上周表示：“互联网的诞生旨在实现去中心化，让所有人都可以参与……（相反）个人数据现在被封锁在这些竖井中。”

In other words, instead of everyone in effect owning their own business cards and exchanging them, the modern internet economy operates by large companies requiring THEM to users to hand over all the their virtual cards and blending them on databases. Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook then make money by targeting advertisements and services, guided by the clouds of data, with users offered benefits in return.

换句话说，取代人人都手持名片进行交换的是，由大型公司运营的现代互联网经济要求用户交出所有的虚拟名片，并将它们融合进数据库。于是，领英、Facebook之类的公司就可以以云数据为指引、通过针对性的广告和服务来赚钱，同时为用户提供好处作为回报。

Sir Tim was speaking at a “decentralised web” summit in San Francisco, an event intended to rally software engineers to, in his words, “tweak internet architecture a little bit” and thus restore its peer-to-peer roots. He wants individuals to hold their data and choose how software interacts with it, not for Microsoft to bundle it all in “the world’s largest professional cloud”.

蒂姆爵士上周是在旧金山举行的一场“去中心化网络”峰会上发言，用他的话说，峰会旨在鼓励软件工程师“稍稍调整互联网架构”，从而恢复其个人对个人的本源。他希望个人掌控自己的数据，选择怎样与软件进行互动，而不是让微软把所有数据捆绑入“世界最大的专业云端服务中”。

It is similar to the idea behind the blockchain — that financial and other contracts could be settled across peer-to-peer networks rather than relying on a company or central bank to approve them. As he Sir Tim noted, “cyber space” was originally crafted as “one, big hippy encampment” free of traditional laws and commercial contracts, such as long and dense user licences.

这类似数据区块链背后的理念——金融及其他合约可以通过个人对个人网络达成，而无需依赖一家公司或中央银行的批准。如蒂姆爵士所指出的，“网络空间”最初被构建为“一片巨大的嬉皮士营地”，不受传统法律和商业合同（如冗长难懂的用户许可）的约束。

Whether Sir Tim can return the internet to its halcyon past is another matter. Hundreds of millions of people like the deal they get from LinkedIn, Facebook and others. They do not have to pay, unless they subscribe to premium benefits, and they obtain free access to some slick, useful applications.

蒂姆爵士能否让互联网重回昔日的宁静是另一回事。亿万用户喜欢他们从领英、Facebook及其他社交网络得到的协议。他们不必付费，除非订购高端服务，而且他们还可以免费使用一些巧妙又有用的应用。

But putting individuals back in charge of their own “economic graph” would not stop them from volunteering data when it suited them. It would be a familiar world in many ways, rather like having a business card.

但让个人重新掌控自己的“经济图谱”不会阻止他们在适当时自愿分享数据。那将在许多方面是一个我们熟悉的世界，就像拥有一张名片一样。