来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年12月8日
“You’ve exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
“你超出了所有人的期望。”这句话是作家露易丝·凯莉的《InScape》系列小说的主人公坦塔(Tanta)经常从她的老板那里听到的。由此产生的多巴胺激增足以让她的膝盖颤抖，并加强了她对雇主InTech的忠诚。
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that wiped out nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
InTech不是一家普通的科技公司。它还是地方政府，在一场摧毁民族国家的全球灾难之后，InTech承担了政府的角色。公民权利已经被最终用户许可协议所取代，违反社区准则你就会被处决。
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
像她的大多数公民同事一样，坦塔将公司的价值观完全内在化，以至于你对一个人最糟糕的评价就是他们“不太符合公司精神”。
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
在该系列的第二本书《弃儿》(Outcast)中，坦塔的任务是找到一个出卖公司机密、极其没有公司精神的内奸。但有一个转折：首先，她需要摆脱公司专制统治用来要求公民雇员忠诚的话语。
This is the point at which the series pivots to satire, linking the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
在此处，这个小说系列转向了讽刺，使我们联想到这种邪教般的员工文化不仅存在于凯莉的反乌托邦未来，也存在于我们现在的生活。从马克•扎克伯格的“快速行动，打破常规”的劝告，到迪士尼(Disney)坚持所有员工都应被视为“演员”，企业已经在使用特定的措辞进入员工的头脑。凯莉拥有心理学学位，这显然使她能够对企业的这种做法进行滑稽模仿。
The thread running through InScape series is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair.
贯穿于《InScape》系列小说的主线是说服技巧的不可阻挡的进化。当然，用文字作为武器与广告和政治一样古老。问题是这种重复将在哪里结束。在《弃儿》中，最终的结果是你的雇主决定你的生死，而你认为这公平合理。
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.
可怕的是，如果语言作为一种精神控制形式在理论上是可能的，那么你可以肯定，某位高管已经指派了一个工作组来做这件事。这就是我们现在生活的世界。但至少我们可以通过科幻小说来嘲笑它。