Andrew Keen: The Internet is Not the Answer
Andrew Keen is out with his new book, where much of his previous argumentation is bound together in a voice more persuasive and harsh than before — so, before anything else is said; this is a book to read and think seriously about. Keen, known to many as THE Internet contrarian, argues very convincingly how the Internet creates more problems than it solves, eradicates more jobs than it creates and portends to be a device for more openness and transparency when in fact it is the opposite. It´s time to wake up, he concludes. And it´s a wake-up call bolstered with a richness of sources, stories and reflections that compels any serious intellectual to either agree or disagree. There is little room left in the middle for the comfortably complacent.
Here is a note from The Guardian to set this blog post on a track. More will be added. Here is also a 1 hour interview or conversation from Triangulation 183. It is a new website to me, but the interview is quite decent.
From The Guardian
The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983, and for its first 10 years was almost exclusively the preserve of academic researchers, which meant that cyberspace evolved as a parallel, utopian universe in which the norms of “meatspace” (John Perry Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) did not apply. In fact, for most of the first two decades, the real world remained blissfully unaware of the existence of the virtual one.
And then Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and in 1993 Marc Andreessen released Mosaic, the first graphical browser, and suddenly the real world realised what the internet was and, more importantly, what it could do. What happened next was, with hindsight, predictable, though relatively few people spotted it at the time. It was later summed up by John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as “the greatest legal accumulation of wealth in history”. More succinctly you could say that what happened was that Wall Street moved west.
Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist. In the 1990s he founded a startup in the Bay Area and drank the Kool-Aid that fuelled the first internet bubble. But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians.