Alex Hochuli
posted 3 July 2007

Andrew Keen is not a happy man. It’s been more than half a decade since the dot-com-bubble burst and Web 2.0 was born, and Andrew Keen is no longer a ‘believer’. Instead, Silicon Valley has left him disillusioned and bitter, a temper amply demonstrated at a sold-out evening book-launch at the ICA. Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur, has done the rounds, as has Keen himself, with articles and reviews popping up on both sides of the pond. He’s been styled as the interweb’s own agent provocateur, an insider who has committed the ultimate treason and joined up with the cynics. Judging by the quality of the digital-drivel being spoken by web-enthusiasts, the movement certainly does need its dissenters.

Adopting the same polemical tone that infuses his writing, Keen began by drawing attention to an interesting object; not his armoury of arguments, but those who now find themselves in Keen’s crosshairs: that noxious melange of old hippies, business entrepreneurs and technology geeks, who all share ‘a messianic faith in the economic and cultural potential of the internet’. The curious coterie of Web 2.0 proselytisers who so irk Andrew Keen draw on 1960s counterculture, 1980s capitalism and 1990s technophilia to construct their utopia of a fully networked society. Their world is one in which traditional bastions of expertise are replaced by ‘noble amateurs’, best exemplified by the small army of Wikipedia editors. This has been branded by Keen as ‘digital Darwinism’ – a survival of the noisiest – or, alternatively, ‘digital narcissism’. The latter appellation refers to a new economy in which everyone is a cultural producer but where actually ‘no one is listening’, so absorbed we all are by our below-par amateur creations – be it blogs, garage bands or MySpace pages.

Andrew Keen is himself a web entrepreneur, one who made it in the ‘1.0 era’ which ended in early 2000 when the bubble-burst and so many went bankrupt. Keen’s business, he tells us, was one of the victims of that crash. However, unlike those who adapted to the 2.0 era, Keen has not embraced the new economy like those he disparages. The end of the past decade was characterised by Old Media using the internet as a new medium. At that time, a certain degree of technological sophistication was needed to publish content, which meant that the core internet companies were often established institutions from the ‘real world’ or those with the capital to hire techies. Web 2.0, on the other hand, is a mere platform – a place where anyone can publish and where the main players are purveyors of empty vessels. Anyone who blogs on typepad or blogger knows what this means. Keen, however, is not sold on the idea.

His fundamental contention is that ‘talent is scarce’. Under the old rules, only the best were monetised. Old media had, over time, developed a system in which the cream rose to the top. Meanwhile, the mediocre were ignored and so much of what was consumed by the rest of us was, to extend the metaphor, cream. Now what little excellence is produced tends to be buried under swathes of amateurish rubbish. Worse, this new wave of web content we surf daily is making the Old Media business model unsustainable. We are, apparently, facing a genuine structural crisis of Old Media. This means that people like Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times columnist and Keen’s interlocutor on the evening, are not being read. Now, it seems, comment is free – and nothing is sacred.

Keen could not disguise his sheer incredulity at this situation. What will happen to intellectual property? No one is being paid for what they produce! How can Web 2.0 possibly develop a realistic business model? Now that everyone has the capacity to sell, no one sells! But actually, incredulous is not the right word – Keen is frustrated. This frustration finds an outlet in his polemic against the champions of the new economy, Keen’s erstwhile associates. And the author is explicit about this: ‘My targets are the libertarians of the left and the right’. These are the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and philosophers who believe that either Web 2.0 is heralding a new public sphere – the digital commons – or a new economy – every free-marketeer’s wet dream of autonomous individuals interacting freely through financial transactions in the (virtual) marketplace.

No doubt these ‘liberal communists’ (a term appropriated in ironic fashion by trendy-techie patrons of conferences such as the World Economic Forum in Davos or TED in Monterrey) need taking down a peg or two. The vision promoted by the zealots of ‘frictionless capitalism’ (and its attendant concepts, the ‘end of labour’ and the ‘end of scarcity’) is utterly unsubstantial and contradictory. In the words of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, ‘according to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation.’ So for all their naïve optimism and faith placed in ‘virtual production’, the real world carries on. On this question, Zizek is unremitting: ‘The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops’.

Andrew Keen shares in the revulsion at the internet entrepreneurs’ vacuous enthusiasm for what might best be termed ‘celebratory democracy’. But the above interpretation is not what motivates Keen’s critique. In reality, Keen is not challenging the ‘nethusiasts’, to coin a term, on the basis of their naïve, utopian pseudo-radicalism, but rather is just lambasting the internet. In this, Keen makes the same error as his antagonists – he places far too much emphasis on the technology itself. Keen sees a strong, direct causal link between Web 2.0 and the Old Media’s loss of nerve (and much else besides). So, social fragmentation? Web 2.0. Trivialisation of culture? Web 2.0. Impoliteness? Personal financial insolvency? Global warming? Al Qaeda? Web 2.0.

Facetiousness aside, Keen’s own alienation from this new, ‘user-generated’ phenomenon seems to drive him to dismiss, in toto, what may actually be a development of tremendous cultural, economic and political potential. Bryan Appleyard, no mean sceptic himself, seemed almost jubilant about these possibilities in comparison. Most striking was Keen’s overwhelming negativity. Almost nowhere could he find something immanent in the web’s hyperlinked ‘chaos’ which could lead society out of this apparent impasse. And yet he, by his own avowal, is not a particularly conservative man. Nor was his a luddite reaction against new technology. Despite his paean to the requisite cultural role of Old Media, Keen is very aware of certain sociological trends which lie beyond the web or recent technological developments.

At several junctures the author insisted that the ‘democratisation’ we are witnessing is actually creating a new oligarchy. Keen does have a point. This is a two-fold process: Old media flocks online and thus the web quickly comes to replicate existing hierarchies. Equally, in this brave new world where no money changes hands, (or rather, no one sees it happen) not all internet amateurs are created equal. That is to say, real world capital still confers its privileges. As no one has rights over what they produce, no one is paid. The predominant producers are thus those with the means to subsidise their non-monetised creations. This is less meritocratic than the Old Media model where, despite its faults, the most talented journalists got jobs as journalists. With Web 2.0, only those with the time and money to beaver away in front of their computer screens get noticed.

As Andrew Keen admitted himself, he over-romanticises Old Media, in particular its more high-brow variants. After all, there are some genuinely good blogs out there and one cannot ignore the rife ‘dumbing-down’ of Old Media. But there is more to it than this. Firstly, the traditional institutions were hardly meritocratic; and secondly, the ‘dumbing-down’ wrought by the structural crisis of the Old Media that Keen attributes to user-generated content actually predates the emergence of Web 2.0 – by years, a decade, even several decades, depending on who you read. Further, Keen’s narrow obsession with disparaging his ex-colleagues’ enthusiasms means he ignores the potential of the web to resolve some of its own symptoms.

In spite of his misguided critique, Keen correctly realises that something in contemporary society is amiss. The trivialisation and personalisation of culture which Web 2.0 facilitates – even accelerates – is indeed worrying. But again, this critique has been made, rightly or wrongly, since the 1930s. The internet is not the cause of societal fragmentation. Equally, the weakening of intellectual authority presents a problem, but neither the wiki technology that powers wikipedia, nor people’s stunning adoption of the user-generated encyclopaedia is at fault. Much of the academy, particularly in the humanities, has been relativising knowledge for a quarter of a century. Frustratingly, Keen has identified the relative absence of gatekeepers of knowledge as a problem, but he is simultaneously abdicating his own responsibility as a gatekeeper through his outright rejection of Web 2.0 and through his lack of engagement with society. Finally, Keen complains that the Silicon Valley utopians always cite their children as a source of inspiration. The future of innovation, apparently, is the kids. But this state of being in thrall to children and adolescents is not caused by the emergence of social networking websites and the like. No doubt, for those adults who have lost confidence in their own capacity for leadership and creativity, young people’s clever use and manipulation of new technology is impressive. But the root of the problem, again, lies elsewhere.

Oh well. This is a polemic, his point has been made – don’t let’s get too excited about the internet; there are negative social and cultural consequences – what does it matter if he gets it a little bit wrong. Well, it does matter. Every time Keen was taken up on points similar to those raised above, he largely concurred, accepted, relented; only to reiterate the thrust of his argument all over again. So, when it was put to him that the web was not on its own capable of such profound transformation, he largely accepted the point, only to then reiterate his dislike of all the user-generated nonsense. The fact that Keen demonstrates a certain astuteness in identifying social changes, and yet fails to investigate sufficiently the true nature of the relationship between the internet and the crisis of Old Media indicates a degree of laziness. And the knowing hints that he gave that is fully aware of the inaccuracy of his polemic evinces some dishonesty. So obsessed is he with riling the ‘Web 2.0 utopians’ that he doesn’t bother redirect his critique in a more fruitful direction.

Further, his consuming bitterness at his own (self-imposed) exclusion from these new developments and his (quite understandable) confusion at what is really going on in the virtual world results in a singularly negative reaction. His predominant response is to contain, hold back, reverse. It is therefore unfortunate that, while his concerns are shared by many, he is unlikely to attract the right allies in the fight for a confident, creative and intellectually serious society.

In reality, the ‘liberal communists’ Keen attacks and cynics like Keen himself have more in common than either would like to admit. Both see in this new technology a truly transformative device, for better or for worse. Neither seems prepared to do the hard sociological graft to understand the true origins of contemporary social change, preferring to delegate the responsibility to ‘technology’.

‘Celebratory democracy’ indeed promises little future, in the historical sense of the word. It is supposed to be all about ‘people’, but the reality is that it is more people’s party than people power. ‘Celebratory democracy’ is a mere revelling in infinite cultural creation, regardless of the quality of that creation. The absence of any lasting impact on the real world that celebratory democracy promises means that it is ‘democratic’ only in name. Andrew Keen may be aware of this, as some of the responses to questions put to him revealed. Thus, the potential is there for a compelling analysis of Web 2.0. As was pithily remarked by an audience member at the very end of the talk, ‘write a better book next time’.