Andrew Keen

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pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The Internet Is Not the Answer Also by Andrew Keen The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us The Internet Is Not the Answer Andrew Keen Atlantic Monthly Press New York Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Keen Jacket design by Christopher Moisan Author photograph by Michael Amsler All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ref= eastmankodakcompany&_r=0&pagewanted=print; online.wsj.com/article/AP6b640447eb8a41418c01e4110720d4e4.html. 47 Larson, “Kodak Reorganization Approval Affirms Move from Cameras.” 48 For an introduction to the Eastman House collection see Photography from 1839 to Today: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY (London: Taschen, 1999). 49 Greg Narain, “The New Kodak Moment: Why Storytelling Is Harder Than Ever,” Briansolis.com, November 21, 2013. 50 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, p. 115. 51 Ibid. 52 Neate, “Kodak Falls in the Creative Destruction of the Digital Age.” 53 Ibid. The comment was made by Robert Burley, a professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto, whose work on the collapse of film photography, The Disappearance of Darkness, was shown at the National Gallery of Canada in late 2013: gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/upcoming/details/robert-burley-disappearance-of-darkness-5324. 54 John Naughton, “Could Kodak’s Demise Have Been Averted?

., epilogue, pp. 240–51. 38 Williams, “The Agony of Instagram.” 39 Rhiannon Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter, “Smug Shots and Selfies: The Rise of Internet Self-Obsession,” Guardian, December 6, 2013. 40 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic, July/August 2008. Also see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York; Norton, 2011). 41 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (Penguin, 2011). See also my June 2011 TechCrunchTV interview with Eli Pariser: Andrew Keen, “Keen On . . . Eli Pariser: Have Progressives Lost Faith in the Internet?,” TechCrunch, June 15, 2011, techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/keen-on-eli-pariser-have-progressives-lost-faith-in-the-internet-tctv. 42 Claire Carter, “Global Village of Technology a Myth as Study Shows Most Online Communication Limited to 100-Mile Radius,” BBC, December 18, 2013; Claire Cain Miller, “How Social Media Silences Debate,” New York Times, August 26, 2014. 43 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap.” 44 Derek Thompson, “Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists,’” Atlantic, October 1, 2010. 45 James Surowiecki, “Gross Domestic Freebie,” New Yorker, November 25, 2013. 46 Monica Anderson, “At Newspapers, Photographers Feel the Brunt of Job Cuts,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2013. 47 Robert Reich, “Robert Reich: WhatsApp Is Everything Wrong with the U.S.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

ALSO BY ANDREW KEEN The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us The Internet Is Not the Answer First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2018 by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. Copyright © Andrew Keen, 2018 The moral right of Andrew Keen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

In contrast with smart cars, the future will never be able to drive itself. None of us, not even the Antichrist of Silicon Valley, have superhuman powers. But by working together, as we’ve done throughout history, we can build a better world for our children. This book is dedicated to them. They are why the future matters. Andrew Keen Berkeley, California July 2017 INTRODUCTION WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE The future, it seems, is broken. We are caught between the operating systems of two quite different civilizations. Our old twentieth-century system doesn’t work anymore, but its replacement, a supposedly upgraded twenty-first-century version, isn’t functioning properly either.

“Digital Transformation of Industries: Demystifying Digital and Securing $100 Trillion for Society and Industry by 2025,” World Economic Forum, January 2016. 2. “System Crash,” Economist, November 12, 2017. 3. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Viking, 2016) Chapter One 1. For more on Wiener, Bush, and Licklider’s role in the creation of the internet, see Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Grove Atlantic, 2015), 14–18. 2. For an excellent overview of the nineteenth-century origins of privacy, see: Jill Lepore, “The Prism: Privacy in an Age of Publicity,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013. 3. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 4, no. 5, December 15, 1890. 4.


pages: 286 words: 82,065

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

The team at AOL is thinking hard about content and folks like Michael Silberman at New York Magazine and Renee Jordon at Readers Digest’s Taste of Home are exploring new and exciting ways to mix created, contributed, and curated content. Of course curation isn’t without its critics. Mark Cuban is perhaps the most colorful, calling all curators “vampires,” and enjoying all the media attention that Count Dracula commands. And Andrew Keen, whose rant against amateurs has given him a permanent spot on the dais, sides with Cuban, and suggests that curation is just another attempt of the liberal elite to control the conversation under cover of democracy. But there’s no shortage of those who argue to point passionately: Seth Godin is happy to poke holes in Cuban’s thesis.

But overall, the Web’s sharing ecosystem seems to be in place for entrepreneurs looking to build niche-content businesses. But what about the moral question? Is aggregation immoral? On that, the results seem less clear-cut. THE MORALITY OF AGGREGATION One of the most vocal critics of the emergence of Web content is Andrew Keen, author, pundit, and publishing curmudgeon. Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur, set the Internet world on edge. A self-described polemic, it took aim at the sheer volume of “amateur” content on the Web. Keen argued, as I have in these pages, that the sheer volume of unfiltered content left readers unable to find contextual editorial.

Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another too.” And while Keen sees the amateurization of content creation as a sign of society’s drift from quality to mediocrity, Shirky sees no problem between mass participation and high-quality professional quality content. As he told Andrew Keen in a recent interview, “When I say, ‘Publishing is the new literacy,’ I don’t mean there’s no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work—its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most important, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore. It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World—that’s Web Squared. <Andrew Keen> web 2.0: the second generation of the internet has arrived and it’s worse than you think Originally published in The Weekly Standard (February 14, 2006). Writer and entrepreneur ANDREW KEEN is the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing Our Culture (2007). Keen founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and is currently the host of the “Keen On” show on Techcrunch.tv. His new book about the social media revolution, Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto, will be published by St.

Steven Johnson, “The Internet,” in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005), pp. 116–24. Copyright © 2005 by Steven Johnson. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Andrew Keen, “Web 2.0,” in The Weekly Standard (February 14, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Andrew Keen. Reproduced by permission of the author. Katherine Mangu-Ward, “Wikipedia and Beyond,” in Reason magazine (June 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Reason Foundation. Reproduced by permission of Reason Foundation. Jakob Nielsen, “Usability of Websites for Teenagers” (January 31, 2005) and “User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly” (February 4, 2008), published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox (http://www.useit.com).


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

WE-THINK ‘We-Think is a riveting guide to a new world in which a whole series of core assumptions are being overturned by innovations on the web. Leadbeater draws a series of remarkable conclusions’ Matthew D’Ancona, Spectator ‘An important book, even for sceptics like me. We-Think is inspiring in its analysis, I urge you to read it’ Andrew Keen, Independent ‘I was gripped. The book’s theme is as big and as bold as it gets … should be compulsory reading for all who seek to understand the driving force of this century’ Management Today ‘Helps readers to frame some of the important questions for the coming decade’ Director CHARLES LEADBEATER is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation and creativity in organisations.

We have another fifty years of change of this kind to come and the scale of the upheavals may be even greater as the technology becomes widely adopted and gains momentum. A third small but vociferous group are people who say the web is already having a big impact on society and it is mainly bad for us. The chief proponents of this view are the polemicist Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Carr in his thoughtful The Big Switch, Larry Sanger, one of the co-creators of Wikipedia and the brain scientist Susan Greenfield. These critics worry the web is uprooting the authority of experts, professionals and institutions which help us to sort truth from falsehood, knowledge from supposition, fact from gossip.

They instead go for low-cost solutions such as Grameen and M-PESA that mobilise participants in their millions. Will We-Think be good for equality? Yes. Freedom In Thomas More’s Utopia, which is more a warning of the risks of living in an ideal society than a blueprint for one, there are no police because the citizens keep an eye on one another. Critics of the web such as Andrew Keen, author of the polemic Cult of the Amateur, allege that this is exactly what the web is creating: a user-generated police state, in which everyone keeps track of everyone else. In the US a social-networking site now allows people to knit together information from published sources – addresses, the electoral role, business listings – to create maps that show who lives in which house in an area and what they do.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

My point of course is not that we can or should simply sacrifice RO culture to enable RW. Instead, the opposite: in protecting RO culture, we shouldn’t kill off the potential for RW. Differences in Value (As in “Is It Any Good?”) In June 2007, the backlash against RW culture was born. In a short and cleverly written book titled The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, a writer and failed Internet entrepreneur, launched a fullscale attack on precisely the culture that I am praising. The core of his attack was that “amateur culture” is killing “our culture.” The growth of this kind of creativity will eventually destroy much that we think of as “good” in society.

As I’ve described, the original algorithm built its recommendations upon the links it found already existing on the Web; later, the algorithm also adjusted its recommendations based upon how people responded to the results Google returned. In all of these cases, the value Google creates comes from the value others have already created. Some draw a downright foolish conclusion from the fact that Google’s value gets built upon other people’s content. Andrew Keen, for example, a favorite from chapter 5, writes, “Google is a parasite; it creates no content of its own.”13 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 127 8/12/08 1:55:16 AM 128 REMI X But in the same sense you could say that all of the value in the Mona Lisa comes from the paint, that Leonardo da Vinci was just a “parasite” upon the hard work of the paint makers.

Free speech values should still weigh in the balance, driving regulation away from restrictive measures when alternative, nonrestrictive alternatives exist. 2. Andrew Odlyzko, “Content Is Not King,” First Monday 6 (2001), available at link #38. 3. Stewart Baker, “Exclusionary Rules,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2004. 4. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 64. 5. Ibid., 27. 6. Ibid., 131. 7. Ibid., 15. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 305 8/12/08 1:56:22 AM 306 NO T E S 8. I’ve enumerated some errors on my blog. See Lawrence Lessig, “Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur’: BRILLIANT!” Lessig Blog, available at link #39. 9.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.

CHAPTER 6: Personal, Communal, Public, Civic 161 Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software: Lea Graham, “MS Ballmer: Linux Is Communism,” The Register, July 31, 2000, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/ (accessed January 10, 2010). 162 Robert McHenry, “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia,” Technology Commerce Society Daily, November 15, 2004, http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=111504A (accessed January 10, 2010). 162 compared bloggors to monkeys: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amatuer: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (New York: Broadway Business, 2007): 2. 163 a slim volume called Experiences in Groups: W. R. Bion, Experience in Groups and Other Papers (New York: Routlege, 1991). 165 The video starts simply enough: “Couch Surfing,” Current TV, July 21, 2007, http://current.com/items/76406002_couch-surfing.htm (accessed January 10, 2010). 167 Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings: Pippa Bacca and Siliva Moro, “Progretto,” Brides on Tour, http://bridesontour.fotoup.net/progetto.html (accessed January 10, 2010). 167 Shortly after leaving Istanbul, Pippa Bacca was abducted: Laura Kind, “A Plea for Peace in White Goes Dark,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/31/world/fg-pippa31?


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

Perhaps the surest sign of a Yelp review’s significance is the vehemence it can inspire: A restaurateur in Ottawa’s famous ByWard Market, for example, was found guilty of libel and sent to jail after she launched an aggressive Internet smear campaign targeted at the author of a critical review. It’s this devotion to, and obsession with, a flattened critical world—one where amateurism and self-promotion take the place of the “elite” critical voices we once relied upon—that leads writers like Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) to baldly state: “Today’s internet is killing our culture.” We get mob opinion instead of singular voices; crowdsourced culture. Consider the Unbound Publishing project, which democratizes the selection of which books get written. Authors pitch ideas to users, who then choose whether or not to fund the writing of said books.

A restaurateur in Ottawa’s famous ByWard Market: “Marisol Simoes Jailed: Co-owner of Kinki and Mambo in Ottawa Gets 90 Days for Defamation,” Huffington Post, accessed January 16, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/16/marisol-simoes-jailed_n_2146205.html. “Today’s internet is killing our culture”: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007). “the filter bubble”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). Google announced that Google Maps: Evegny Morozov, “My Map or Yours?


Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

—Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody Try writing a book that is partly about photocopies and mimeographs, and everywhere you go someone is bound to ask, “Are you going to write about zines?” It started to bother me. Although the pressing relevance of amateur cultural production online seems clear—whether elaborated enthusiasti- cally by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture, for instance, or excoriated by Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur—the question about zines that kept coming up wasn’t about the Internet at all, at least not explicitly.1 Asking about self-­published, homemade, small-­run amateur publications sounded like pure nostalgia to me, or worse. I detected pie-­eyed cultural studies, trapped in celebrations of subcultural resistance as cultural critique.

Allegory is the meat of computational “layers” and of interface, according to Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 54. A F T E R W O R D : A M AT E U R S R U S H I N 1. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Keen decries “the pajama army” (47). 2. Oscar Harpel, Harpel’s Typograph, Or Book of Specimens, Containing Useful Information and a Collection of Examples of Letterpress Job Printing, Arranged for the Assistance of Master Printers, Amateurs, Apprentices, and Others (Cincinnati, OH: 1870); Robert C.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Unpaid amateurs have been likened to monkeys with typewriters, gate-crashing the cultural conversation without having been vetted by an official credentialing authority or given the approval of an established institution. “The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace,” according to Andrew Keen, obstinately oblivious to the failings of professionally produced mass culture he defends. The Internet is decried as a province of know-nothing narcissists motivated by a juvenile desire for fame and fortune, a virtual backwater of vulgarity and phoniness. Jaron Lanier, the technologist turned skeptic, has taken aim at what he calls “digital Maoism” and the ascendance of the “hive mind.”

Is transparency an unambiguous good? Should all information be free, to everyone, everywhere? The United States government had been caught off its guard and the audience was electrified by the possibilities of networked people power. Onstage a series of panelists including Arianna Huffington, Douglas Rushkoff, Esther Dyson, and Andrew Keen gave short presentations, their remarks occasionally punctuated by questions from the floor. “Information flow is corrosive to institutions, whether it’s record labels or a state ministry,” Mark Pesce, a regular commenter on technology, rapturously proclaimed from a large screen on the stage, his head beamed in over a choppy video connection.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

In fact, most of us are simply making comments about the columns written by other bloggers, who are commenting on still others. Just because we all have access to blogging software doesn’t mean we should all be blogging, or that everyone’s output is as relevant as everyone else’s. Today’s most vocal critic of this trend, The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen, explains, “According to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 34 percent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’—a thousandfold growth between 1996 and 2006—spewing their (mis)information out in the cyberworld.”

., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity,” Gallup Politics, August 13, 2010, www.gallup.com/poll/142133/confidence-newspapers-news-remains-rarity.aspx. 24. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, September 22, 2011, www.people-press.org. 25. Kasun Ubayasiri, “Internet and the Public Sphere: A Glimpse of YouTube,” Central Queensland University, 2006, and updated, on EJournalist.com, http://ejournalist.com.au. 26. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Crown, 2007), 48. 27. Mark Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010. 28. David Frum, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?” New York, November 20, 2011. 29. Tommy Christopher, “Van Susteren Explains Why Anti-Fox Clip with Occupy Wall St.


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Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

I believe that these contradictions are related to the increasing bureaucratization of Wikipedia. I also think that they stem from the fact that, in the absence of formal hierarchies, the Wikipedia community substitutes local power-knowledge differentials. Wikipedia’s system of parahierarchy and its sources of social status are behind this. Andrew Keen, when criticizing the nonexpert character of Wikipedia, insists that the Wikipedia cult of the amateur leads to “less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information” (2007, p. 16). While this statement is unverifiable, one thing is certain: the nonexpert or at least nonprofessional (in the sense of formally certified knowledge) character of Wikipedia is indeed its distinctive feature.

Hive Minds, Schmucks, Losers, and Other Misconceptions About Wikipedia Some say that the contemporary Internet in general, and Wikipedia in particular, promotes amateurs and everyday Joes—that Wikipedia’s “hive mind mentality” and “digital Maoism” suppress human intelligence and dilute individual judgments and tastes (Lanier, 2006). Andrew Keen, the author of the ominously titled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (2007), even states in an interview that no normal person would give away labor for free and anonymously and that “only schmucks would do that. Or losers” (quoted in Parvaz, 2011). As one of those schmucks or losers, and possibly both, I am certainly biased, but I must point out that this argument is rooted in the traditional point of view of attributing professionalism to formal position rather than to skill and evaluation of the actual outcome (which, as already mentioned, in the case of Wikipedia matches the commercial competi- T h e K n o w l e d g e R e v o l u t i o n a t t h e G a t e s    1 8 3 tion standards).


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The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

(2008), p. 59. 86 International Telecommunications Union, ‘The World in 2014: ICT Fact and Figures’ at <http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2014-e.pdf> (accessed 29 March 2015). 87 Sara Radicati, ‘Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018’, at <http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2014-2018-Executive-Summary.pdf> (accessed 19 March 2015). 88 On sites such as <https://www.flickr.com>, <http://www.slideshare.net>, <https://www.youtube.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 89 <http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html> (accessed 23 March 2015). 90 <http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggers-and-blog-readers.html> (accessed 23 March 2015). 91 <https://about.twitter.com/company> (accessed 19 March 2015). 92 <http://www.statista.com/statistics/274050/quarterly-numbers-of-linkedin-members/> (accessed 19 March 2015). 93 <http://wikipedia.org> (accessed 23 March 2015). 94 A important literature on mass collaboration emerged in the mid-2000s. See e.g. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics (2006), Charles Leadbetter, We-Think (2008), and Cass Sunstein, Infotopia (2006). For a more critical view of the subject at that time, see Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (2007). 95 Greg Kroath-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet, and Amanda McPherson, ‘Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring it’, Sept. 2013 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publication/linux-foundation/who-writes-linux-2013> (accessed 24 March 2015). 96 Daren Brabham, Crowdsourcing (2013). 97 Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), 23. 98 Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan, 182. 99 See <http://www.retailresearch.org/onlineretailing.php> (accessed 24 March 2015). 100 <http://www.ebay.com>. 101 Trefis Team, ‘eBay: The Year 2013 In Review’, 26 December 2013, at <http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/12/26/ebay-the-year-2013-in-review/> (accessed 24 March 2015). 102 See Dov Seidman, How (2007), 39; original emphasis. 103 Some popular texts of that era were Patrick Winston, Artificial Intelligence (1984), Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation (1983), Donald Michie and Rory Johnston, The Creative Computer (1984), and Edward Feigenbaum, Pamela McCorduck, and Penney Nii, The Rise of Expert Company (1988). 104 Richard Susskind, Expert Systems in Law (1987). 105 Phillip Capper and Richard Susskind, Latent Damage Law—The Expert System (1988). 106 Richard Susskind and Chris Tindall, ‘VATIA: Ernst & Whinney’s VAT Expert System’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Expert Systems Conference (1988). 107 We have answered this question at length in Richard Susskind, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Law Revisited’, in Jon Bing: A Tribute, ed.

We now have the means to share expertise much more widely across our world. We should also have the will. 1 This is the strongest version of liberation discussed in section 5.5. 2 The ‘new gatekeeper’ theme echoes concerns about the future of the Internet in other works, such as Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It (2009), Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015), and Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion (2012), and To Save Everything, Click Here (2013). 3 The term ‘enclosure’ is borrowed from James Boyle. He defines it as ‘the process of fencing off common land turning it into private property’. See James Boyle, ‘The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Private Domain’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 66 (2003), 33–4.


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The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Both are in the top ten most influential organisations as measured by the number of high-level lobby meetings with the European Commission. Google has met with representatives from the Commission from nearly every portfolio, including agriculture and humanitarian aid. Uber has increased its lobby spending sevenfold since 2015, although from a low base.” See also Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future (Atlantic, 2018), p.69. 5 Hamza Shaban, ‘Google for the first time outspent every other company to influence Washington in 2017’, Washington Post, 23 January 2018. 6 Matt Burgess, ‘Google’s DeepMind trains AI to cut its energy bills by 40%’, www.wired.com, 20 July 2016. 7 Synced, ‘Tech Giants Are Gobbling Up AI Startups’, www.medium.com, 4 January 2017.


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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

While they may be crying all the way to the bank, these millionaire turncoats do a good job of explaining how their platforms surveilled users and then leveraged the information they collected to turn people into more extreme versions of themselves. Of course, most of them were making arguments lifted from the works of people like Sherry Turkle, Cliff Nass, Howard Rheingold, Andrew Keen, Evgeny Morozov, Astra Taylor, Richard Barbrook, Jerry Mander, Cory Doctorow, Marina Gorbis, dana boyd, Nick Carr, Mark Bauerlain, and even Raffi. Tech critics have been writing about the impact of social media manipulation on our psyche and society for decades. It’s great that the developers responsible for these misdeeds are finally agreeing with these assessments, even if they need to feel as if they’ve discovered the downsides all by themselves—like brand-new intellectual property.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

For some, “citizen journalism” is an oxymoron, right up there with military music and jumbo shrimp. They pine for the old days when the major papers determined what news was “fit to print” and millions of readers trusted their judgment. Now via the Internet you get “all the news” whether it’s fit to print or not. And for skeptics like Andrew Keen this democratization creates a problem, namely a vast heap of mediocrity that crowds out the good stuff and confuses consumers. In his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, Keen argues that user-generated content is destroying journalism and, for that matter, society.

Many bloggers (28 percent) are now professionals in that they make a living from blogging. They are professional in another sense too: 40 percent of these commercial bloggers have worked within traditional media.34 They have formal journalism experience, training, and credentials. This fact undermines the critique of Andrew Keen. Rather than professionals being displaced by rank amateurs, it turns out the professionals are simply shifting employers—from the mainstream media to new media, self-employment, and new entrepreneurial journalistic ventures. Moreover, when it comes to the so-called balance of the mainstream media it is all too easy to get misty-eyed and think that the news that was “fit to print” was only determined by some lofty standard.


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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Of course, if one’s knowledge of history is reduced to tweet-length CliffsNotes, it’s natural to feel triumphant and unique, to believe one is living in truly exceptional times—an intellectual fallacy I call “epochalism.” It’s not a preserve of Internet optimists only; the pessimists love epochalism as well. After all, their criticisms matter only if the phenomena they are criticizing are seen as unprecedented. Thus, a self-proclaimed Internet pessimist like Andrew Keen can proclaim starkly that the growth of social media is “the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution” without bothering to produce much evidence. Keen simply presumes that the unprecedented scale of today’s transformations is self-evident—a hallmark assumption of epochalism.

Sol Schwimmer is suing me”: Woody Allen, The Complete Prose of Woody Allen (New York: Wings Books, 1991), 105. 35 “when we think of information technology”: David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2011), xvi. 36 “the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution”: “‘Antichrist of Silicon Valley,’ Andrew Keen Wary of Online Content Sharing,” Economic Times, May 29, 2012. 37 they don’t always capture the historical complexity: on the longitude problem, see Dava Sobel’s accessible history Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, reprint ed. (New York: Walker & Company, 2007).


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The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Williams’s point was that contrary to what viewers thought, they were not spectators watching shows but were instead eyeballs being sold to advertisers. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). 13 . Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (1953; repr., Laurel, NY: Main Road Books, 2001); Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Harper Perennial, 1978); Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2008); Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008). 14 .


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Ron Miller, “An Uber Valuation Comes with Uber Problems,” techcrunch.com, December 16, 2014. 39. “Organization: Uber,” www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber. 40. Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,” thenation.com, February 4, 2014. 41. Trebor Scholz, “Crowdmilking,” collectivate.net, March 9, 2014. 42. Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015). 43. Vivek Wadhwa, “The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry,” forbes.com, July 23, 2012. 44. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 45.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Chapter 5 1 Ellen Levy, interview with authors, September 20, 2009. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 For more about how monetizing intangible assets drives corporate wealth creation, see Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, Mobilizing Minds (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). 5 See John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The 2009 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change (San Jose, Calif.: Deloitte Development, June 2009). 6 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Broadway Business, 2007). 7 Ian Millhiser, “Clarence Thomas’s America,” Huffington Post, April 14, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-millhiser/clarence-thomas-america_b_186425.html. 8 Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” blog posting, March 13, 2009, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/. 9 Matthew B.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

This is the effect felt by media outlets challenged by mass amateurization. The basic problem of copying and distributing information, previously an essential service of the music and newspaper industries among others, is now largely solved thanks to digital networks, undermining the commercial logic of many industries that relied on previous inefficiencies. Andrew Keen, in Cult of the Amateur, describes a firm that ran a $50,000 campaign to solicit user-generated ads. Keen notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. This loss is obviously a hardship for the ad agency employees, but were they really worth the money in the first place if amateurs working in their spare time can create something the client is satisfied with?


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Peter Holley, ‘Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned”‘, Washington Post, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/; Peter Holley, ‘Stephen Hawking just got an artificial intelligence upgrade, but still thinks AI could bring an end to mankind’, Washington Post, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/02/stephen-hawking-just-got-an-artificial-intelligence-upgrade-but-still-thinks-it-could-bring-an-end-to-mankind/; Derek Thompson, ‘A world without work’, Atlantic, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/; Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Atlantic, 2015); Brian Resnick, ‘Why Stephen Hawking is more afraid of capitalism than robots’, Vox.com, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/2/27/11119804/stephen-hawking-robots; Matthew Yglesias, ‘The automation myth’, Vox.com, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth. 30.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

On “one-to-many communication,” see also Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (New York: Verso, 1976) and Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008). 2. Further to Eisenstein as well as to Febvre and Martin, see Jeremiah E. Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 3 (2011): 1133–1172. 3. Andrew Keen, “Can the Internet Save the Book?” Salon, July 9, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/07/09/clay_shirky/. 4. Helen Waters, “Entering the Second Age of Enlightenment: Heather Brooke at TEDGlobal 2012,” TEDblog, June 28, 2012, http://blog.ted.com/entering-the-second-age-of-enlightenment-heather-brooke-at-tedglobal-2012/. 5.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

I am very grateful to the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London for making me an Honorary Research Associate, a privilege that allows me to use the excellent libraries of the University of London. Many people have been kind enough to offer information and advice during the writing of City, mostly via the dangerously distracting medium of Twitter. They include: Paul Bishop, Lewis Crofts, Steven Hall, Paul Halpern, Andrew Keen, Crystal Koo, Geoff Manaugh, Angela Meyer, Oli Mould, Maria Popova, Aaron M. Renn, Thomas Riepe, Jim Rossignol, Simon Sellars, Joel Toombs, Jon Turney, Will Wiles and Cindy Frewen Wuellner. Thanks to all of you. A note on the author P. D. Smith is an independent researcher and writer.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Lev Grossman, “You—Yes, You—Are TIME’s Person of the Year,” Time, December 25, 2006, http://content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171,1570810,00.html. 13. Jon Pareles, “2006, Brought to You by You,” New York Times, December 10, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/​2006/​12/​10/​arts/​music/​10pare.html?pagewanted=print. 14. See Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 15. See Greg Miller, “Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In with Timothy Leary’s Long-Lost Video Games,” Wired, October 1, 2013, http://www.wired.com/​2013/​10/​timothy-leary-video-games/. 16. C. W. Nevius interviewed Dave Barry after Barry came to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

See Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and their Consequences (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2014), 83. 5. David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things (New York: Scribner, 2014), 7. 6. Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Berkley: New Riders, 2006). 7. Andrew Keen, The Internet is Not the Answer (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), 13; Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 377 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 175; Gartner Newsroom, ‘Gartner Says By 2020, a Quarter Billion Connected Vehicles Will Enable New In-vehicle Services and Automated Driving Capabilities’, Gartner, 26 January 2015 <http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/ id/2970017> (accessed 30 November 2017).


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

A more interesting and more modern example comes from the story behind the development and the use of the Internet. It is also in part the story behind the creation of many intellectual property rights, rights that are at the base of some of the largest incomes and fortunes in today’s world. The Internet story has been told in a recent book by Andrew Keen (2015), 326 Termites of the State who pointed out that the Internet has been associated with, perhaps, the greatest creation of private wealth in the world Intellectual property, often linked to the use of the Internet, has allowed some “owners” of that property, such as Zuckerberg and Gates, to become billionaires many times over, while the basic infrastructure (the Internet) has been funded with public money and has had specific public goals in mind.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

He went on to write a book called Computer Power and Human Reason which argued that the limits to what we expect of computers should be ethical rather than technological or mathematical: ‘since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom’.90 In the meantime, there has emerged a small school of cybersceptics, reacting against the cyberutopianism of Silicon Valley and the technological determinism that often underpins it. There is, they point out, a vast ocean of rubbish, nonsense and lies online. (A similar complaint was made after the spread of printing in sixteenth-century Europe.) Nicholas Carr and Andrew Keen deplore the online ‘cult of the amateur’, which inordinately privileges mass participation over authority, openness over expertise, Wikipedia over Britannica.91 And the former, they argue, is eroding the latter. Jaron Lanier writes caustically of colleagues who believe that ‘a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom’.92 As we are tempted into what Nicholas Carr calls ‘the shallows’ of the online world, so we might all succumb to attention deficit disorder.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

—Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley “A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff’s serious scholarship is great cause for celebration.” —Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future “From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process.