Andrew KeenReseñas

I like the ideas, but Keen wandered a bit too much for me.

A great topic with way too much filler and very few relevant bits of information :/

A scathing attack on the tyranny of the new social media. The author counterposes Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, in which everything is measured in a cost-benefit balance, against John Stuart Mill's counter-argument that what is important is the exercise of individual will and liberty. The author warns us against letting the new social media like Facebook and Twitter, with their inexorable pressure to be hyper-visible on the internet and amass thousands or millions of followers, or more likely engulf us in disappointment and self-deprecation, take over our sense of self, and suggests that a more human way of living is to live privately and with a small circle of physical friends. The author is to be lauded for fighting consistently against the tide of social visibility, although both society and economy look like being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of instant connectivity that is the feature of the world wide web.

Another hard-hitting book in Keen's series on the Internet and the World-Wide Web. Here he documents how free access to digital media has laid low whole sectors of the economy like analog photography (think Kodak, which basically defined photography for the amateur), film making (YouTube), then popular music, newspapers and journalism, and book publishing and distribution (think Amazon). He equates this storm of destruction to the end of Western creative civilisation itself, as the creator can no longer impose their property rights on their work or get an adequate financial return. There is also the problem that much of the information posted is neither backed up by scholarship nor has undergone adequate expert or peer review, hence its integrity and truthfulness is open to question. The author suggests that there has to be some sort of social, and governmental, control over these media.

The internet and ease of publishing your own sites, blogs, videos, and other productions, gives every citizen the power to use, and misuse, mass communication media. The author bemoans the death of traditional professional media like the newspapers, peer-reviewed and formally published books and encyclopedias, and commercial music and film industry, and he is afraid that this opening up will sooner or later end in a collapse of the rational knowledge-based creative civilisation, as self-propagated untruths and half-truths proliferate.

A significant work, suggesting ways in which societies will overcome the iron hold of the internet and new media, that have spelt the demise of traditional creative arts and led to a few internet giants taking over much of the business.

According to the author, somehow, the fact that there are no longer tens of thousands of people developing film photographs is a bad thing. It is not explained why, it just is. Because jobs. I'm often an old man yelling at a cloud myself but this is just weak. Internet is bad, but not because it stopped film photography or popstars minting millions for their labels.

The bad quality of writing is absolutely shocking. The author needs an editor - he endlessly repeats the same points and even sentences. The whole book is a single rambling incoherent rant with no structure, just the author flying around the world talking to people who actually know things. The tone oscillates randomly between incomprehensibly upbeat predictions and despondency and dire lecturing and doom prophesying. The author pontificates on technologies he knows very little about and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You can't solve technical problems when you don't understand the technology. Smugly using analogies from history is not going to be useful.

Where would we be without the internet and the world wide web in particular? Since its conception in the 1960’s (yes really that long ago) it has grown at an exponential rate and has come to permeate our entire lives in a variety of different ways. In its short existence, it has had bubbles as investors have rushed into schemes, made people fortunes as well as almost become as essential as shelter, food and water. For every laudable use for the net to connect like-minded people across the globe there are many dubious activities; theft, fraud, deception and trolling spring to mind. What you also have now is a consolidation of power as the huge monoliths of the web, Facebook, Google, Amazon have brazenly bullied, bought and pushed their way to the top of the virtual pile.

With this concentration of power has come a pervasive surveillance by the state and private companies of every activity that we do online. There is a concentration of wealth in these people that own and run these organisations too. The negative effects that this is having is only just starting to become visible and from what Keen describes is happening in San Francisco with the polarisation of the rich and poor, it is not going to be pleasant as it affects the wider society. He has written an interesting take on the state of the net and some of the subjects reported in the book are quite eye opening. Whether or not we are too late to do anything about it, time will tell. 3.5 stars

An interesting book. He has some interesting points to makebut it is also a bit of a rant.

"while brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales, Amazon employs 14 people to generate the same $10 million sales revenue. Amazon...is a job killer rather than a job creator, having destroyed a net 27,000 jobs in the American economy in 2012." Google, likewise, needs to employ only 46,000 people to generate its 2014 $400 billion in revenue. Instagram, had 13 full-time employees when it was sold for a billion dollars; the app, meanwhile, forced Kodak to lay of 47,000 workers.

That about sums up the depressing argument of this excellent book.

What drew me to this book was the title. How is the Internet not the answer? So I read it and found out exactly why. Keen's argument is pretty straight-forward. Rather than doing what it promised, the internet is doing the opposite by dividing people more than before. The internet also demolishes the economies of everyone not lucky enough to be in the small inclusive club of people in Silicon Valley.

Starting with the history of the internet, it talks about the development of TCP/IP and other formative technologies and the development of the World Wide Web system of hyperlinks. This part was pretty interesting.

Each chapter talks about a different aspect of the internet, but most of it centers on the impact it has on the economy and the impact it has on people. It spends one chapter talking about the loss of privacy and another talking about how a lot of the billionaires in Silicon Valley treat other human beings. It is quite eye-opening and vomit-inducing. This vomit would be squarely in the rage category, though. It is really irritating to hear about someone that has a massive fleet of cars, a private jet, and a solid gold house when plenty of people in the surrounding city can't even pay their bills. I'm not exactly against someone being successful, but this vapid consumerism really tries my patience sometimes. The loss of privacy as I mentioned before is mostly due to people Instagramming themselves or Googling things.

Another thing I don't understand is what the point all is. If all things can be made off of something like a 3-D Printer and manufacturing people lose their jobs, what will everyone do all day? Will we become like those huge fat people in Wall-E? Is that what people from Silicon Valley want to happen? From this book, yeah, that is what people from Silicon Valley want.

Anyway, this book was well done. I enjoyed it, but don't really like the harsh reality it portrays.

Parts of this are dead-on and Keen found a sympathetic reader in me when he attacks the blogosphere and the contemporary assumption, "My life is interesting! It is, it is, it is!" He has nailed the overall obsession with the self, with the idea that one opinion is as good as any other, that what one already knows is all one needs to know. He also seems to think Facebook is a cesspool--point to him. What's a bit off about Keen's polemic is his pining for the days in which the clerks at local record or book shops could assist customers by making recommendations. (I can find my own music and books, and there isn't even enough time to listen to or read a quarter of what I want.) He also has a soft spot for print journalism and lends credibility to tired and ideologically-bent papers like the old grey lady. But he's right about the crucial thing: all of the people online who think they are authors, musicians, or filmmakers just because they've posted something are contributing to an ethos in which some seventh-grader is seen as just as good a writer as Melville. That goes for reviewers, too--including this one.

Es schadet gewiss nicht, wenn ein Buch wie dieses die „schöne neue Welt“ von Google, Face-book, Uber etc. kritisch beleuchtet. Spannend fand ich die These des Autors, dass sich eine neue Feudalgesellschaft wie im Mittelalter herausbildet, deren Oberschicht – die CEOs des Silicon Valleys – ebenso von der Realität der einfachen Leute abgehoben sind wie damals der Hochadel. Meiner Meinung nach hätte aber deren Umgang mit den Userdaten etwas mehr Platz eingeräumt werden müssen, während viele andere Angaben im Buch nur mässig rele-vant sind. Der grösste Schwachpunkt des Buches ist vielleicht, dass es sich nicht entscheiden kann, ob es eine Polemik oder ein Sachbuch sein will: Für eine Polemik ist es viel zu lang, zu viel sich wiederholendes „Google-Bashing“, und für ein Sachbuch zu einseitig und subjektiv.

Dining with the Cognoscenti

Tech has created at least as many problems as it has solved, and there are more on the way. Andrew Keen has sacrificed his stomach, meeting with experts in every field in restaurants around the world to discuss the ways out. This rambling tour of the world touches down where thinkers have identified potential solutions. They all have their opinions and some are acting on them. But it is totally scattered and no seismic shifts are evident. Even the universal basic income, which has support all over the world, is still stuck in the pilot project stage, despite endless proof of concept. So the fixes are not very specific.

The framework for How To Fix The Future is Thomas More’s Utopia, now 500 years young. Keen keeps referring to aspects of it, showing how More’s ideas do or do not apply to our situation today, as well as how little things have changed. He is particularly enamored of Holbein’s map of Utopia, which can be viewed as human skull. Keen refers to it numerous times.

Basically, there are no new solutions, just old ones coming back to life. Musicians are striking against the streaming services. Uber, Lyft, UPS and Fedex drivers want recognition as full employees, not just “independent contractors”. Schools are focusing on developing inquisitive humans (as opposed to test takers). More millennials are purchasing their music and news. Estonia and Singapore are making a lot of data public, and protected from fraud by date stamps. All over the world, small steps are appearing. But for every Redfin, paying real estate agents a living wage plus benefits, there is a Walmart, keeping employees part time, minimum wage, and relying on Obamacare for their health benefits. For every Freada Kapor Klein, there is a Martin Shkreli.

Keen separates fixes into five buckets:
-government or legal regulation (more accountability, and anti-trust activity)
-competitive innovation (encouraging and democratizing startups against the winner-take-all)
-social responsibility by citizens (relying on tech billionaires to do the right thing)
-consumer choice (including trade unionization)
-education (more physical activity, less screen time)

Keen admits these fixes are not star-crossed. They won’t necessarily work or change the world, and they provide their own risks. But for Keen, who has been criticizing the internet for years, this is a turnabout.

David Wineberg

Keen's book, published in 2007, is a ranting polemic against Web 2.0 and the sad fact that there is no journalistic integrity anymore in an arena where anyone can say anything virtually without consequence. Keen comes off as a self-righteous elitist throughout the book, pretty much casting everyone as stupid, but he made a few pretty good points with respect to the monstrous amount of non-vetted materials released every day.

His argument against Wikipedia has some merit, particularly in light of problems actual people have with correcting entries about their own works or personal profiles. Sure, Google has its problems - dated hypothesis...perhaps in 2006 the search engine algorithms returned pages based more on popularity than authority, but if there is any monetary interest to the result returns, Google will show you those first now.

I thought he was really off base in his diatribe against all the "losses" sustained by the RIAA and MPAA due to piracy. Maybe the recording industry is losing some money, but the success of the digital cash cows of iTunes and similar belies their complaints. And Hollywood is still making barrows full of revenue.

Irrespective of the content, Keen got demerits from me when he said that The Great Gatsby was a masterpiece (disagree), and called Peter Jackson a "movie maestro" (and not a treasure destroying hack), but that's my amateurish opinion that I'm sharing on this world wide web.

cult makes a point or two, but it's really just a petulant rant and shouldn't be taken any more seriously than any of the other amateur content Keen hates.

¿Por qué todos asumimos sin dudar que la nueva economía de internet será nuestra salvación y que la crisis actual es el paso indispensable hacia un nuevo paradigma? Cuando parece que todas las respuestas las tenga Google, Andrew Keen pone encima de la mesa los peligros de internet y trata temas como la falta de privacidad y el gran poder de los datos que en este momento están fuera de control. También reflexiona sobre el modelo de sociedad que ha creado internet, una sociedad narcisista y desigual en la que es más importante el momento que la reflexión, la imagen que la persona, el avatar que la realidad.

While I do not agree with most of Keen's opinions, it was interesting to learn about how he reached his position regarding how the internet has taken away traditional jobs.

Poor Keen. Smart, but a long way from being wise, or even sensible. He cherry picks examples while praising the skills of balanced neutral research and reporting which can only, one surmises, be obtained by following exactly the same academic and career path that Keen puts so much store by. He is, purely and simply, an intellectual snob - and not a particularly bright or insightful one. Just one example of his shallow trawling of his own mind makes the point... he deplores user generated video on the internet, suggesting it has done no more for humanity than swamp us in kitten videos, but forgets to mention the effect of internet posted videos of police and military brutality that have lifted entire nations out of their torpor. The message for Keen is: there is trash in the world - get used to it. And stop adding to it. I'm glad I paid twenty cents for this book, although that was about 19 cents too much.½

Entertaining and polemical read. I have some sympathy with Andrew Keen's central hypothesis his background in this world means that he clearly knows his enemy. His viewpoint is one that should be heard amid all the puff and splendour that surrounds the main internet companies.

However, I found the book to be a bit loose. In his desire to write a barn storming take down of the new elite, he regularly drifts into sloppy writing, questionable statements and repeated ad hominem attacks. Despite his claims that he can see some good in the internet, he doesn't seem willing to engage with the possible benefits of certain platforms (e.g. Uber or AirbNb) but rather is content to present negative stories as proof that they are a bad thing.

Would recommend Jaron Lanier as a more thoughtful alternative.

“Surveillance is the internet’s main business”

Andrew Keen is angry. He hates what the internet has done to us. His hatred is thoroughly developed, and morphs into a totally rational, historical conclusion: this internet age is no different than feudal society or the era of Trusts 150 years ago. The inequality, the fantasy worlds of wealth, the hubris, the arrogance, the selfish navel gazing – all repeating before our Google-Glassed eyes. It’s a dark truth he explores with seemingly thousands of aspects and examples. The pacing is consistent and blistering.

He spends a lot of time and effort mourning the passing of Kodak, which worked at perfecting film. Today we don’t care much about photo quality; we just post photos of next to nothing, in their billions. But Kodak is hardly a poster child. The same can be said for numerous other formerly precious legacy systems. In the sixties, it was all about sound quality. The measure of your household was in your stereo components. Today, we accept lousy mp3 quality over pathetic earplugs without a second thought. Our appreciation and priorities change, and the internet era is no different.

But Keen seems to live in an imaginary world that used to have full employment, where everyone was polite, civil and honest, and trolls hid in English woods. The truth is, the internet simply exposes more of our inherent, narcissistic, selfish, self-centered and shortsighted selves. Greed and theft are not proprietary to internet entrepreneurs. The whole basis for the American economy is smuggling and theft, as in my review of the superlative Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America.. Apple hiding billions from the taxman is nothing new. Keen comes to the same conclusion by the end of the book.

He is wrong about our knowledge of history too. Keen trots out the canard about millennials and history: how they don’t mix. Millennials live in the present only, and history as recent as the Berlin Wall is otherworldy if known at all. But it has always been this way. Keen says he is accused of elitism, and justifiably. He is better educated, more perceptive and analytical than the hoi polloi he defends. They have never put things in historical perspective, and claiming the internet has taken this away from them by keeping everything short and superficial is wrong.

He seems most concerned by the net unemployment from Kodak giving way to the minimalist Instagram and its ilk. But he ignores the massive crowdfunding that has helped create thousands of businesses, not just individual jobs. Same for ebay, amazon, etsy and alibaba. They have spawned literally millions of businesses that could not have existed before the web. Meanwhile, Kodak had to go, like the inkwell makers and whalebone corset companies before it.

The parallels with robber barons, the monopolists and the lords of the past are apt and fit like a glove. Today’s internet giants are fiercely against unions, against government interference (unless there’s money available), above the law, and all for their own (unprecedented) wealth and power. The internet they wield is all about bottomless oceans of personal data that would make the Stasi jealous, but it’s just a byproduct they milk for profit. That people volunteer all this data, from social media to tracking devices like mobiles would move a spy to tears. That we have accepted this way of life is totally consistent with history. It’s the new opiate of the masses.

Keen is correct: the internet is not the answer. What we need is a new question.

David Wineberg

Keen founded Audiocafe.com and looked as if he might be one of the rich kids of the net before, in 2004, seeing the light. In this impassioned polemic, while obviously still retaining much of his enthusiasm for the good things that the net might prove to be, he warns us of all the aspects we prefer to ignore -- i.e., he tries to shake us out of our collective state of denial over the dangers not so much of digital piracy (although he has plenty to say on this) or the oceans of hardcore porn engulfing our children (plenty on that too) but of the very "democratization of knowledge" that we're supposed to accept as a good thing. As he points out repeatedly, there's a very good reason why human society grew to contain experts whom lay people (who might themselves be experts in other spheres) could consult on matters involving specialist knowledge: we do not rely on the wisdom of crowds if we need surgery to remove a brain tumour, so why do we expect it could serve us any better when we look up the Wikipedia entry on neurosurgery? Yet the existence of Wikipedia, with the often scanty and unreliable knowledge of its contributors and editors, is driving the companies that, employing an army of specialist writers and editors, produce (or used to produce) conventional encyclopedias; soon our culture will have entirely replaced reference works containing largely reliable content with a compendium filled to a great extent with amateur suppositions and, too often, deliberate falsifications but with the single benefit that it's easy to access and free.

It's not just Wikipedia, of course, that concerns Keen: Wikipedia is merely an example of how the internet is destroying knowledge: what it's offering is not so much a democratization as mob rule, with the mob very often having no more brains than a lynch mob. Keen was writing slightly too early to deal with the grievous effect that the internet-driven proliferation of misinformation, pseudoscience and claptrap concerning -- i.e., denying -- anthropogenic global warming is having on our decision-making; but he fingers all the elements of that fiasco: the oil-industry-funded astroturf groups that are everywhere, credited by hundreds of millions globally who have never so much as heard of sourcewatch.org or snopes.com; the tendency of too many of us to believe the voice that shouts loudest rather than the one that knows what it's talking about; the rapid decline of professional, responsible journalism, which has to be paid for, in the face of "citizen journalism" (i.e., amateur, often partisan or corrupt or ignorant or bigoted, fulminations), which is free; the perils of an overabundance of information sources (even if there wasn't the problem of there being nothing obvious to distinguish their relative reliability, especially if you've become so punch drunk from the bombardment of false information that your critical faculties are deadened); the fact that this tsunami of false information and untruth is not educating us but actually making us more ignorant -- yet, even in that state of ever-increasing stupidity, more convinced that our opinions are as good as anyone else's. The list could go on.

There's a very telling anecdote here about the world-renowned expert on global warming who tried to correct various errors of fact in the Wikipedia article on the subject. He was countered by a Wikipedia editor who, unconcerned by his own ignorance, criticized the expert harshly for constantly "pushing his own POV". When the expert took this higher up within the Wikipedia structure, he discovered to his horror that everyone supported this opinionated buffoon.

The destruction of common knowledge and the consequent deterioration of our civil and political discourse are not Keen's only subjects. He's concerned also with what could loosely be termed the arts. Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap, applied to cultural material that had been selected and massaged by trained editors or their equivalents. With the "democratization of culture", with the internet offering an open mic night that never, ever ends, Sturgeon's 90% climbs almost exponentially. Consider: If you have 1000 books of which 100 are worth reading, the chances are (especially through recommendations by friends) you'll encounter much of the good stuff; but, if you have 100,000 books of which 200 have merit, it's quite likely that you and your friends may never encounter any of the good stuff. The internet (and other digital technology) having opened up the opportunity for anyone to "publish" their book, this is the situation we're confronting. And the knock-on effect of all this substitute culture -- the awful novels, the tuneless garage bands, etc. -- being available for free is that the businesses which used to filter out the garbage and find the good stuff for us are collapsing into bankruptcy, the expertise of their staff being permanently lost to our society. It's hard to feel much sympathy for the music industry, I know, after it treated consumers like shit for decades, but it did actually serve a useful purpose. And do we really want feature movies to vanish, leaving us with nothing but YouTube and reality TV to watch?

This book's not flawless -- it's often a bit repetitive -- but it's extraordinarily readable with lots of chewy anecdotal goodness, and its author has something of genuine importance to say: there are parts I'd dispute, but they're peripheral . . . and, anyway, it's one of the marks of a good book that it should make the reader think hard enough to formulate a counterargument. Even if you think everything's hunky-dory with the internet and the "democratization of knowledge" is a wunnerful, wunnerful thing -- in fact, especially if you think everything's hunky-dory with the internet and the "democratization of knowledge" is a wunnerful, wunnerful thing -- I'd give this book a try.

And every libertarian you know should be required to read the book's Chapter 3, "Truth and Lies", before opening their mouths yet again to lecture you on how freedom of speech is so important it should take precedence over all other considerations. Yes, obviously it's important; but at the moment it's being exploited by those who're stupid or actively malevolent, and some of its consequences -- like the campaign of AGW-denying falsehood -- may well destroy us.

An interesting, if scattershot, musing on privacy and culture.

The first broad sections of the book discuss the pervasive influence of social media, and their overwhelming popularity. His remarks are broad, pessimistic, and sometimes without lines of reasoning. X-website has this feature Y, therefore it is the death of non-digital Y.

He does include a staggering list of start-up social media outlets, and their plans on inserting themselves into modern life. It remains to be seen, however, if the modern consumer has a limit or tolerance to such intrusions.

I was more impressed, however, with the segments of putting too much our own information on the internet voluntarily. I know I've done as much here. One must wonder - in 2040, will we be combing through old Facebook accounts for attack ad material? If so, we will have to police our content now.

The book ends with a confused comparison to hippies and bohemians. For all of his prophecies of doom, it is overlooked that in order to avoid social media, you could simply turn off your laptop and your phone and go read or something.

In this book, Andrew Keen categorically dismisses the notion that anyone anywhere anytime could take it on its hands to publish their works without any credentials from an established authority. He argues that "what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment" and the consequence, of this uncontrolled content, Keen warns is chaos and disappearance of truth (p.16). Keen extends his argument to the dangers of too much democratisation in that it threatens the fabric of traditional quality controlled, edited, and guarded media. As a journalist Keen's focus seems to be on news, TV and music than on information organisation. Nonetheless, his widely cited book provides an insight into the dichotomy of the debate on Web 2.0. For social media lovers, it is very good that you also read contending perspectives. Though I don't agree with most of his arguments about Web 2.0, I enjoyed this beautifully written book.

The Yin to the Yang of 'The Wisdom of Crowds'.