The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (2007)
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the cult of the amateur and rew keen U.S. $22.95/Canada $29.95 ^^ a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon 1 I I Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that form the fabric of American achievement. Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns- our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies-are being overtaken by an avalanche of ama teur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our "cut-and-paste" online culture-in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated-threatens over two hundred years of copy right protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors. In today's self-broadcasting culture, where ama teurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes danger ously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videogra- phers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. (continued on back flap) (continued from front flap) The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite— Keen pioneered several Internet start-ups himself-he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly support ing a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions. Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the.-freewheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, The Cult of the Amateur is a wake-up call to each and everyone of us. andrew keen isa Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose writings on culture, media, and technology have appeared in the Weekly Standard, Fast Company, the San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, and on ZDNet. As the founder, president, and CEO of Audiocafe.com, he has been featured in Esquire, Industry Standard, and many other magazines and newspapers. He is the host of the acclaimed Internet show AfterTV and frequently appears on radio and television. He lives in Berkeley, California. www.TheCultoftheAmateur.com www.currencybooks.com Jacket design by Chika Azuma Author photograph o Catherine Betts (www.catrinbetts.com) Printed in the U.SA. amateur hour has arrived and the audience is running the show what the experts are saying about andrew keen's thought-provoking polemic: "My initial reaction to the book was: 'Geez, I have a lot of things to think about now.' For people immersed in the social communities of Web 2.0, this is bound to be a thought- provoking and sobering book. While I don't agree with everything Keen says, there is page after page of really interesting insight and research. I look forward to the much-needed debate about the problems that Keen articulates-which can't be lightly dismissed." -Larry Sanger, cofounder, Wikipedia, and founder, Citizendium "This is a powerful, provocative, and beautifully written stop-and-breathe book in the midst of the greatest paradigm shift in information and communications history." -Christopher M. Schroeder, CEO, HealthCentral Network (healthcentral.com), and former CEO and publisher, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive "Important... will spur some very constructive debate. This is a book that can produce positive changes to the current inertia of Web 2.0." -Martin Green, vice president of community, CNET "For anyone who thinks that technology alone will make for a better democracy, Andrew Keen will make them think twice." -Andrew Rasiej, founder, Personal Democracy Forum "Very engaging, and quite controversial and provocative. He doesn't hold back any punches." -Dan Farber, editor-in-chief, ZDNet "Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically educated technoscold-and thank goodness. The world needs an intellectual Goliath to slay Web 2.0's army of Davids." -Jonathan Last, online editor, Weekly Standard US $22.95 /$29.95 CAN ISBN: 978-0-385-52080-5 52295 9"780385"520805 the cult of the amateur the cult of the amateur how today's internet is killing our culture andrew keen Doubleday / Currency New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland A CURRENCY BOOK PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Keen All Rights Reserved Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.currencybooks.com CURRENCY is a trademark of Random House, Inc., and DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. All trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Book design by Chris Welch Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keen, Andrew. The cult of the amateur : how today's internet is killing our culture / Andrew Keen. — 1st ed. p. cm. 1. Internet—Social aspects. 2. Internet—Economic aspects. 3. Social change. 4. Information society. 5. Self-publishing. I. Title. HM851.K44 2007 303.48'33—dc22 2006103058 ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SPECIAL SALES Currency Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions or premiums. Special editions, including personalized covers, excerpts of existing books, and corporate imprints, can be created in large quantities for special needs. For more information, write to Special Markets, Currency Books, [email protected]. 13579 10 8642 First Edition For Elias, Zara, and Betsy. contents introduction 1 1 the great seduction n 2 the noble amateur 35 3 truth and lies 64 4 the day the music died [side a] 5 the day the music died [side b] 6 moral disorder HI 7 1984 (version 2.0) 154 8 solutions 184 notes 207 acknowledgments 215 index 219 the cult of the amateur introduction f I didn't know better, I'd think it was 1999 all over again. The boom has returned to Silicon Valley, and the mad Utopians are once again running wild. I bumped into one such evangelist at a recent San Francisco mixer. Over glasses of fruity local Chardonnay, we swapped notes about our newest new things. He told me his cur- rent gig involved a new software for publishing music, text, and video on the Internet. "It's My Space meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google," he said. "On steroids." In reply, I explained I was working on a polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy, and values. "It's ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule," I said, unable to resist a smile. "On steroids." He smiled uneasily in return. "So it's Huxley meets the digital age," he said. "You're rewriting Huxley for the twenty-first century." He raised his wine glass in my honor. "To Brave New World 2.0!" We clinked wine glasses. But I knew we were toast- ing the wrong Huxley. Rather than Aldous, the inspira- tion behind this book comes from his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist and author of the "infinite monkey theorem." Huxley's theory says that if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece—a play by Shakespeare, a Platonic dialogue, or an economic treatise by Adam Smith.1 In the pre-Internet age, T. H. Huxley's scenario of infinite monkeys empowered with infinite technology seemed more like a mathematical jest than a dystopian vision. But what had once appeared as a joke now seems to foretell the consequences of a flattening of culture that is blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur. This is no laughing matter. Today's technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren't quite typewriters, but rather net- worked personal computers, and the monkeys aren't quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creat- ing masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuber- ant monkeys—many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins—are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity. For today's amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unread- able poems, reviews, essays, and novels. At the heart of this infinite monkey experiment in self ^publishing is the Internet diary, the ubiquitous blog. Blogging has become such a mania that a new blog is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are blogging with monkeylike shame- lessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives. At the time of writing there are fifty-three million blogs on the Inter- net, and this number is doubling every six months. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, ten new blogs were launched. If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hun- dred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from poli- tics, to commerce, to arts and culture.