Andrew Keen: Pathetic 2.0
(originally uploaded by jdlasica)
If Andrew Keen is a believer in the old saying that even bad press is good press, well, he’ll be amped by his coverage in the blogosphere today and in the near future.
I had planned on deconstructing his pathetic ass-kissing of pure capitalism and his simultaneous propagandizing of Web 2.0 as communism, but after reading Jeff Jarvis’ post, “Snobs.com,” there really isn’t much left for me to say.
Well, that’s never true.
Keen theorizes on the future of blogging, podcasting, etc:
In the Web 2.0 world, however, the nightmare is not the scarcity, but the over-abundance of authors. Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper.
My favorite twist on Keen (which Jeff so aptly points out) is that he both blogs and has a podcast site. Hell, the guy was a player wannabe in the first go round of Web 1.0. I’m not sensing a perspective with merit, I’m sensing bitterness. Check out this quote from Keen’s year 2000 Digital Hollywood conference bio:
Andrew Keen, Founder and CEO, AudioCafe: Andrew Keen is a leading visionary in the audio business with almost ten years of experience as an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry. Having single-handedly founded Audiocafe in 1997, Keen has driven the development of the site’s content and business development. His model of integrating commerce, community and content is now acknowledged as the most viable business model for building a successful Internet business model. From its origins in 1997, Keen has built an Internet site well branded and respected throughout the audio, music and Internet industries. As the Founder of the company, Keen has personally recruited the entire management team at Audiocafe — including Eric Hall (President), the founding COO/CFO at Yahoo! and an executive at a number of other successful Internet start-ups, and James S. Thompson (COO), an experienced senior executive and veteran entrepreneur with five start-ups under his belt. Keen has also [blah, blah, blah…]
Keen is “an entrepreneur, salesman and writer in the industry” who apparently created the “model of integrating commerce, community and content [which] is now acknowledged as the most viable business model for building a successful Internet business model.” The audacity of the claim isn’t the only thing that has me rolling; “commerce, community and content” are all foundational elements of the Web 2.0 that he disses.
Does the added voice of his neighbor scare him that much?
Maybe Andy’s simply afraid that he won’t be able to recruit from a world full of endless talent to prop his career; after all, we all can’t have such spiffy titles to chose from.
Tags: Adam Smith Problem, Andrew Keen, blogging, business, communism, community, internet, Jeff Jarvis, podcasting, Social Bookmarking, World 2.0.
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I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
General Jack D. Ripper: Dr. Strangelove
These idiots are hammers that see everythig as a nail…or more precisely cold war hawks that see everything as damn dirty Reds. Anything that smacks of shared burden and dispersed value as must be the work of Satan. They should be seen as quaint throwbacks and crackpots, but in the current political cesspool these morons are taken seriously.
essays like this reek of “suck up to the way things are/were” in a desperate effort to find a daddy warbucks to provide a comfortable corner office with a cushy paycheck to keep the machine rolling. web 2.0 = marx? you’re right tex, the pundits love this type of authority. i can hear rush limbaugh now:
and so the dance continues…
There will always be a freshly-milled crop of twenty-somethings that use college as a spring-board to power instead of back-door to late-night keggers and awkward sexual encounters (some do both, eh W?). Men, woman, black, white…whatever…lips that lick the boots of power know no sex or color…it’s a sort of transcendence. A reverse metaphysics embracing the crass and material instead of the divine. May they all get a painful and long-lasting terminal disease.
Dance? Yeah, let’s mosh the fuckers…
damn skippy.
Since Alan Turing, there has been little to no software innovation in England.
Absolutely none. Their approach is too rigid and process oriented versus the agility, efficiency, and creativity we have in the US.
If we left software development up to the arrogance of English development philosophy, figuratively speaking; we would be using M-1 rifles, rusty WWI-era tanks, and steam powered ships.
Instead, European, Asian, and American developers have given us M-16 assault rifles, stealth bombers, and nuclear submarines.
God save the queen, indeed.
Andy’s just having a tantrum… cause he’s a loser.
I do not understand how Andrew Keen links Web 2.0 with communism. Is he showing his age and dimentia?
Nemo
he’s selling a book now. provocative bullshit.
While I grimace somewhat at the use of the term gate keepers for society, a voice of caution regarding responsible journalism is not all bad. To completely disregard Mr. Keen’s thesis is like ignoring safety precautions when using a chain saw. A chain saw is a great tool used properly. Used improperly the, the results can be a bloody mess for the user or an environmental disaster for the forrest. Caution and deliberation deserve consideration when reporting information on the internet or in th print media or televised news.
if the mainstream media could operate a chainsaw with any degree of consistency, i’d probably agree with you to a much greater degree, gary.
Andrew Keen may be English, but in order to fail big-time (with AudioCafe) I notice he had to go to America to find people dim enough to take him seriously.
stupid is as stupid does — sovereign borders has nothing to do with it.
Andrew Keen makes me laugh- how dare those feeble commoners express themselves! Oh, those pixel-stained techno-peasants will be the death of us all, by spreading their opinions so freely. O, woe is me!
Seriously, Andrew…if you ever listened to yourself, you’d shut up.
lol.
Mike
http://quicktrivia.com
Your comment about him flogging a book is spot-on. He’s another pathetic has-been, trying desperately to extend his 15 minutes of fame. If he weren’t on a book tour, his rantings would be totally unnoticed.
“I’m a sore loser.
I’m taking my toys and going home.
Wait until I write a book about you guys!”
Sorry. I was interpreting out loud again, wasn’t I?
His model is the most viable model for building a model? I’m guessing that, like all these blurb bios, he wrote that about himself in the third person. If this is professional writing, I think I can live with the amateurs.
It’s this take-the-other-unpopular side tack that Keen hopes will bring him the fame and recognition he apparently sought so long ago (2000!). I’d say it’s linkbait at its best. I mean, I found myself following links from the Boing Boing story to here. And also to the NY Times story…
He and Jared Leto should have a cup of coffee, cry over sensitive rock, and then take a walk on the beach. Two peas in a crazy-talk pod:
“I think that blogging should die a sudden death. It’s just ridiculous. It’s like a playground for four-year-olds. People say and do things in the world of blogs that they would never do in real life, and I think it’s a false experience. You know, it’s, like, eating too much candy. One of the things along those lines that bothers me about when people start citing blogs as news sources is that when people are writing on these blogs, they feel like they don’t feel they need to do any research or back up their opinions with facts or anything, you know what I mean? Times have changed. It used to be, to be a writer you had to have experience and talent, and learn a craft. Now anybody with an opinion, which is anyone and everyone, feels that it’s worthy. Technology is allowing people to have access to things where before it required very great skill. So there will be some interesting developments from that, and also some things that are pretty worthless. Pretty soon anybody with a cell phone is going to be able to be a news reporter. The blog is yesterday’s parachute pants. It’s here now but it’s gone tomorrow.”
Source: http://www.stereogum.com/archives/wheres-the-beef/jared-leto-hates-your-blog.html
Each of these posts is a real “zinger,” but I no one seems to have anything interesting to say. By contrast, Andrew Keen has written a book. I’m not saying that makes him the authority, but it means he put together his ideas into a coherent finished work that’s for sale to those who are interested. I was interested. I bought his book and I buy a lot of his ideas. What I find on blogs is usually fragments of self-indulgent grunts that don’t make much sense overall.
blogs tell a story over time — tags bind posts together into topical “books” (example), free of charge and of a bullshit marketing machine (where being “provocative” sells).
but thanks for the grunt, eric.
…another real “zinger.”
Why so defensive, Sean?
no, really, thanks for the “grunt.”
I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
“What I find on blogs is usually fragments of self-indulgent grunts that don’t make much sense overall.”
i’m just thanking you for your “grunt,” eric, that’s all.
jeesh.
I guess you couldn’t figure this out, but I obviously wouldn’t consider my own comment a self-indulgent grunt. I like to think that I said something (or was at least trying to say something) that made sense, and that would draw out a thoughtful response—not an insulting jab.
ha! now who’s getting defensive?
What part of that was defensive?
This is a waste of my time. See ya.
eric, you said “each of these posts is a real ‘zinger’”… i assumed that you meant the comment thread… unless you were talking about posts across the web about keen and his bullshit, which would mean that you came here armed with an agenda to defend, and you aren’t referring to the “posts” in the comment thread above.
i didn’t think that until now. why? because for some god forsaken reason you can’t seem to understand the simple premise that when you trash a form of *technology* for the content that gets published by its mechanisms — while using its mechanisms to do said trashing — you are automatically lumped into the same shit you generally bemoan.
get it?
now do yourself a favor and go read a book and become learned.
Have you read his book?
What book would you recommend I read. I love to read. I try to read as many interesting books as I can.
(BTW, man-to-man, if you talked that way to me in person, you’d have another thing coming…)
i add to, develop for, purchase from and iterate the internet for a living. i’ve heard enough of his debates with people i respect and interviews here and there that have convinced me that i’d rather not put a dime in his pocket.
i’ve got an entire bookcase of half-finished books more deserving of my time anyway.
I see…
That’s impressive about your bookcase full of books. I get my books mostly from the public library, and I read them all the way through to the end (usually, unless I don’t like them).
great. have a nice day.
You too. Time to get back to “iterating the internet…”
Anyone who’s worked in publishing understands the necessity of the gatekeeper function.
A publisher who prints say, four or five new novels a month will get _tens of thousands_ of unsolicited manuscripts. The majors get hundreds of thousands.
If you think the quality of fiction in the bookstores is low, try reading this avalanche of dreck sometime — known in the business, and for good reason, as the “slush pile”. It makes the most vapid of formulaic hackwork look like Tolstoy by comparison.
Apparently a substantial percentage of the population think they can write. They can’t.
The overwhelming bulk of it is unspeakable; mostly in a boring and pedestrian fashion, but often working its way up into the realms of the barking mad.
600-page epics about undersized paper bags with self-esteem problems; a bildungsroman about someone who was shipwrecked on an island as a child and raised by the family goat. “Being raised by a goat had took its toll of him”, and I quote.(*)
Publishers pay people (’first readers’) to wade through the slush. If it weren’t for these heroic souls (kept going by the desire to work their way up to editorial level; ie., to deal with real writers) the general public would have to do it — and would give up long before they got to the worthwhile 0.000002%.
I wouldn’t do a first-reader’s job for any money, or at least not for considerably more than I make as a novelist. No, on second thoughts, not for any money short of enough to comfortably retire on in six months or less, in which case I’d go right back to writing novels.
I see no reason to believe journalism is substantially different. Or any other job worth doing, for that matter, above the Affix A to Widget B level.
So Keen is right; and, of course, the torrent of invective (the phenomenon is accurately described as “mobbing”) to which he’s subjected on the Web simply proves his point. Everyone loves flattery; few like, or will tolerate, a genuine critic.
(*) one of the publishers I work with keeps the ripest examples in their “funny file”, and a friend shared these with me. There’s a party game at our get-togethers; you hand around chunks of this stuff and read it aloud. The one who can keep a straight face longest wins.
“Publishers pay people (’first readers’) to wade through the slush. ”
hm… interesting. what function do you think hardcore digg readers are serving for the rest of us too busy to check through everything submitted to digg?
yeah, it’s the same concept.
the web is iterating towards an existance where the traces of interaction and feedback can be presented to new users as an aggregate perspective of quality.
keen understands this aspect of technology, but doesn’t honestly critique the mechanisms of the underlying technology that’s moving to replace so many gatekeeper functions; instead he uses provocative language to label and disparage people.
web developers are marxist communists.
right…
keen is a caricature.
“the web is iterating towards an existance where the traces of interaction and feedback can be presented to new users as an aggregate perspective of quality”
That sounds like something from freshman comp trying to fill up a 5-page essay. (could go in the “funny file”)
Digg is a neat idea, but I’m always very disappointed with what I find there (if not depressed). It seems to be an impressive junk collector.
You say Keen is a caricature. A caricature of what?
sorry to confuse you, eric; keen is a caricature of a critic.
I’m not confused, Sean. You’re half-baked ideas are very carelessly put together, so I need to ask questions in order to pick apart what you mean to say.
sorry to burst your bubble, captain pseudo-intellectual, but the term “caricature” doesn’t *need* a qualifier. as in:
meaning, since andrew keen is taking such a provocative, hard-lined, oppositional stance to everything and everyone “2.0,” he’s lost all credibility as a critic.
he’s now a big, bloated head shouting into the wind.
which somewhat resembles your contributions here, on a blog post that’s 18 months old and on a blog whose last post published close to two months ago.
i get emails notifying me of new comments; what’s your excuse?
I didn’t know Web 2.0 had already expired…
…or “iterated”…
What’s your excuse for trashing a book you haven’t even read and then prancing around pretending to be a hot-shot web developer “iterating” the internet?
let me help you out a bit, eric:
1) i’m not trashing the book; i’m trashing andrew keen
2) i’m not pretending to be anything; you’re bringing that to the table.
3) us folk who get paid real money by real clients often use the term “iterate” to describe the process of moving from a first pass sketch to a final specification over a period of reviews (multiple “iterations” of a deliverable). i can understand your confusion, though.
Oh, no… You’re not doing anything. So why so defensive?
I think Keen’s perspective should be welcome to the Web 2.0 world. I refuse to attack him or question his motives, but I do think he provides a welcome relief to all the hype. By the way, I think he is dead wrong on a number of fronts, particularly his belief that professional journalists are somehow able to dispense objective truth while amateur bloggers just spout opinion. Hogwash.
See my full analysis at http://www.collaborativeye.com/collaboration_journal/slouching-towards-mediocrity.html
I am a little concerned by the massive explosion of egos that fill alot of blogs. “I am smarter than you” “No, correction, I am smarter than you.” People like Mr. Keen, want the commoners to take a knee. Well, I am not buying into that garbage. Not every blog or site is absolutely on point. However,to assume that person over the age of 12, cannot distinguish that on their own is SILLY. Take the pissing contest somewhere else.
I write on financial topics for a living. It takes me a while to research a topic, and then I write it up into about 1400 words. Then my editor sends my articles first through financial review and then editorial review. Then the articles get published and I get paid.
The pay isn’t a lot, but it does give me an incentive to get the article completed on time and at a decent level of quality. There’s another place that I used to write for that didn’t pay, but I haven’t sent anything to them in three months. As a rule, the more prestigious online and offline publications in my industry pay for content, so that’s who I write for as that’s who I want to be associated with. They also do a better job at editing, promotion, and distribution.
I agree with Andrew Keen to some extent, but I think he hasn’t quite gotten his arms around the issue. Mainstream media is in no danger if copyright laws are enforced. Most people would rather spend their time reading quality. Blogs that consistently deliver quality will morph into mainstream media by necessity and you’ll likely see a few very large online publications being bought by Time Warner or something similar.
However, if copyright is not enforced, and the day comes that your average consumer can watch or read or listen to everything they want and strip the commercials, then big budget media of any kind will just cease to exist and even small scale work will be scaled back because there just won’t be any paychecks for anyone anymore. All that you’ll be left with is state-run media, the McDonald’s Cartoon Channel, and Ask-A-Ninja, and you’ll have more bad choices, but fewer good choices. That’s Andrew’s most important and most accurate point.
i agree with you, tristan, but it doesn’t seem to me that keen is making that point (well, at least not explicitly).
larry lessig and creative commons espouse choice in copyright — from allowing people/companies to assign full copyright on work to a handful of mashups of attribution, non/commercial use options to marking content as fair use in the public domain.
how does providing copyright choice equate with communism? how does revamping the copyright system into something anyone can use and understand explicitly, equate with theft?
personally speaking, i think it’s a brilliant idea to empower people in marking their work as fair use for the public domain or for use, but only with proper attribution. why not allow people to send work out into the wild of the web to propagate and take advantage of those viral mechanisms?
the problem i have with keen is that he sounds like a mixed-up luddite; he uses 2.0 technology to promote himself up into the mainstream while simultaneously trashing that very technology (and the people who are trying hard to make it work, legally).
if he has a problem with bloggers or anyone ripping off copyrighted work, why not set to proposing solutions, similar to how larry lessig “the communist” has?
if i were a betting man, i’d wager that his publisher knocked down his door with a cash money deal after his original article caused so many bloggers to link to his babble.
so his choice was simple: why do the hard work in making a system work to its utmost potential when you can get paid handsomely to trash the folks who are trying to do so. he’s so casual in his rants, he doesn’t even take a well thought out position in the process.
keen is an opportunist to the nth degree.
Wasn’t Picasso at some point an amateur? Bach, Wagner, Pollock, Aleckinsky, Spilliaert?
I find his attitude demeaning at best and damaging at worst. I am neither a blogger nor a technophobe but to dismiss someones creative output, in whatever medium, as, in some way, unworthy is ridiculous. You can change the channel, listen to another station, not visit an exhibition. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.
Hilarious. I just saw this guy on the Colbert Report. Interesting passive aggressive condescending “old school” dude.
Who can really argue with the free abundant advancement of the store of human knowledge? Cult of amatuers?
Would Lewis and Clark see today’s grade school children as a cult of amateurs on U.S. geography? No. They would see them as well advanced.
(Please note that I DO see the errors in our school system) - Not intended as a topic inflamer.
Here’s my take on Keen’s bitter, illogical book — and his fundamental misunderstanding of the word “amateur”:
http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/3137/54/
I came to Keen’s book with an open mind. I read the preface this morning and can already see that making his point requires him to turn a blind eye to the obvious.
He refers to major media outlets as “trusted news sources”, with no mention of the recent loss of trust that occurred on a large scale as a result of the major news outlets beating the drums of war leading up to the Iraq invasion.
He talks about bloggers and wikipedia editors having an agenda, yet makes no mention that major news outlets have similar pressures from owners and sponsers.
He bemoans the banality of youtube videos, and then follows it up with dire statistics of job losses in major media, including….People magazine.
Last week I attended a symposium sponsered by Pacific Gas and Electric that featured a speech by Richard Heinburg, who mentioned that while he was in town, he was contacted by KGO.
KGO bills itself as the most listened to radio station in Northern California. They wanted him to participate in a program they were producing regarding the spike in oil prices. KGO wanted to frame the debate as a Democratic view (Oil companies are engaging in price gouging) vs. a Republican view (OPEC is holding back on production).
As an expert in his field, Heinburg tried to explain to them that they were off base. The cause for the recent spike is simply supply and demand. Oil is in depletion and prices rise as emeging economies requiring more oil are attempting to acquire it in a marketplace of declining availability.
What Heinburg has to say would shed a light on what is arguably the most serious crisis we as a civilization will face in the coming years, namely the exhaustion of our ability to extract fossil fuels from the earth and use them to produce energy.
After explaining this to KGO several times, Heinburg was told thanks, but no thanks, depriving KGO listeners of an important perspective in the oil price story.
The purity of information is not completely determined by it’s source. This is why Keen’s arguement fails.