Author: Andrew Keen
Title: “The Internet Is NOT the Answer”
Publication: 2015, Atlantic Monthly Business, ISBN
978-0-8021-2313-8, 270 pages, hardcover (also ebook), Preface (“The Question”),
Introduction (“The Building Is the Message” --
insert the adverb “not”), Conclusion” (“The Answer”), and eight chapters
The author had authored “The Cult of the Amateur: How
Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture” (Jue 26, 2007 here), which gives a
pretty good clue as to where he is coming from.
I could start like a literature professor making up a final
exam, by citing a few delicious quotes from the book, that could stimulate some
student essays:
On p. 95 he writes “Peter Thiel has everything: brains, charm,
prescience, intellect, charisma; everything, that is, except compassion for
those less successful than him.” Note:
“charm” is also a property of a sub-atomic particle or quark.
On. P. 105 he writes, “The truth is that networks like
Instagram, Twitter or Facebook is that their easy-to-use, free tools delude us
into thinking we are celebrities. Tet, in the Internet’s winner-take-all
economy, attention remains a monopoly of superstars. Average is over, particularly for
celebrities.” He then names Justin Bieber as an example. I just laughed. Bieber has covered his boyish body, even
forearms, with ugly tattoos because he has almost no expected Caucasian male
body hair (as my buddies at Fort Eustis would have said ungrammatically in
1969, “he’th’mooth”). Neither did Ronald
Reagan. And article in Christopher
Street back in in 1985, in those grand old days of print journalism that Keen
says is dying, there was indeed an article that proposed “better men” as role
models for the public, gay or not. In
fact, I’m reminded of a June 1999 piece in the Weekly Standard (when
conservative print commentary was still somewhat in flower) by David Skinner,
“Notes on the Hairless Man”, where he talks about “men without chests” and
describes our fascination with the immature – which indeed the Internet has
fed.
On p. 200 Keen writes “The libertarian fantasy of private
companies usurping government is, I’m afraid, becoming a reality”.
The opening “Question” is more a statement, a gripe, that
the Internet has promoted the new instantiation (java-style) of monopolists,
and exacerbate economic inequality. The
“answer” is rather like that from George Soros, commenting on how to prevent
another 2008 financial crisis in banking and securities, “better
regulation”. Not more, but
“better”. It sounds rather
innocuous. Keen also says younger adults
need to learn from history. I’ll echo
that. Most well-educated gay men now in
their 20s have no real concept of what I lived through.
For much of his book, Keen is simply reiterating what has
happened repeatedly from times before the industrial revolution. Technology, all the way back to the printing
press, destroys jobs, and also shakes up an existing political power structure
(often religious in the past), in order to displace it with a new one that will
create its own problems. In the 19th
century, passenger railroads destroyed the stagecoach. Then the private auto destroyed most
passenger railroads in the US, but not in Europe and Japan, which provides
another lesson (hint: population density matters). He gives many examples, such as the
decimation of the city of Rochester NY, home of Kodak, which lost out to the
digital revolution in photography.
In my own career field, mainframe computing, it would seem
that “client server” and Internet technology “destroyed” it, but the picture is
complicated, in large part by the waves of business mergers and consolidations
that started under Reagan that started well before the Internet revolution, and
more so by short-sighted personnel practices that became common after Y2K
In fact, the new wave of big successful Internet companies
that “run our lives” followed the “dot com bubble bust” where the Web 1.0 world simply
didn’t deliver to consumers what they wanted or had expected. Keen talks about how an “autistic” (or is he
an “extraterrestrial” alien from panspermia) Mark Zuckerberg conquered the
world peacefully by writing computer code, because he seemed to give young
adults what they thought they wanted – more sharing. And it turned out to have a dark side.
Indeed, we could credit Facebook (in combination with what
I did first, by setting up a free “do ask do tell” compendium that simply would
not go away because, to quote one of Reid Ewing’s lost videos – “it’s free”)
with the end of “don’t ask don’t tell” for gays in the military, because, in
large part, Zuckerberg made double lives impossible, almost by intergalactic
regal pronouncement. (Jupiter is indeed
rising, or is it Saturn’s moon, Titan?) I
think he probably knew about my work when he was a freshman at Harvard and the
military policy garnered constant attention by the ban of recruiters on campus.
Facebook also ended the “conflict of interest” concern that
I had about search-engine accessible amateur content written by people in
positions of authority – simply because everybody had to use it. But the presence of Facebook (almost parallel
to the old arguments about the “presence” of gay men in military barracks) in the world meant that
no one could have a sales career (like that of a life insurance agent)
without dedicating their online presence
to the benefit of their employer – to hock someone else’s wares. So Keen is right – the monopolization of the
Internet (financially) really turned it into a new instrument of social conformity. But perhaps the Internet has even destroyed
the old idea of making a living in sales (the way my parents’ generation could)
forever.

Keen brings up many real specific problems. It seems wrong that Uber drivers shouldn’t
obey the same rules as licensed taxi drivers.
When I see these new services about sharing one’s car for rental or home
as a hotel, I am of course reluctant to do this, because of the work required
and concern over security, but does that mean I am spoiled and unsociable? Right there, a moral paradox emerges.
He is right that piracy as problem, and as with many
Internet problems (preventing cyberbullying and keeping porn away from kids –
related to the COPA case to which I was a party) attempts of “better
regulation” tend to lead to overbroad laws that get struck down. Remember the SOPA bill in 2011, and the
Wikipedia black out in 2012? Remember
the overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz?
So how displaced people are seems to be a matter of where
you look. Most younger adults in my
orbit are finding jobs OK – in IT, in film, in new journalism (Vox media keeps
hiring). But most people in my orbit
competed better than average. So, I
think we get back to looking at the morality of some of this in terms of
personal compassion, not just policy.
Indeed, the “destruction” of unions and of the stable
manufacturing workplace was going on long before the Internet “gilded age” Remember the NYC crisis of 1975? (“Ford to City: drop dead!) I lived through this. We need to know our history.
And true, you can’t legislate “noblesse oblige”. But today’s “industrialists” are indeed
giving back billions. Look at the Gates
foundation, aimed at wiping out AIDS.
Keen’s comments do intersect my life. I used to collect vinyl classical records and
then CD’s, and I remember the days of the record store (like Tower Records, or
even old Record Sales in downtown Washington DC in 1962, cheaper than the
stuffy “Disc Shop” above Dupont Circle). My father complained that I was “married
to my records”, and you get my point: excess (and resistance of socialization)
happens in any level of technology (almost). Today, I think it’s fine to collect
mp3 files – if you pay for them on Amazon, keep them in the Cloud (and back
them up on just one optical CD) along with PDF program notes. It’s a lot easier to keep a collection than a
physical one every time you do a household move. I also built a large library of chess opening
books – that’s another discussion.
The book points out that "amateur" posters and even book authors often make little money from their work, because the host companies often keep most of the revenue (whether ads, for from book sales, as with supported self-publishing). On the other hand, most "amateurs" would not be able to get conventional trade publishers or movie studios to "publish" their work at all.
The Internet has worked out well for me, because I don’t
need to make money from my content. That’s
partly because I did save some money when I was working -- because I did save and was prudent in the
stock market – enough indeed to ride out one bad real estate misadventure. But it’s also because I did inherit from my
parents – all of which makes my “paradigm” more morally problematic. If I had to make a living today from the
Internet – it my content had to pay it’s own way, and not depend on being
subsidized by rentier wealth from earlier successes and even the family – it couldn’t
stay up. I would have to do “what other
people want”. And that would be morally
problematic in its own way. Again,
hucksterism is no longer an option, because of the Internet. Spying and privacy has been less a problem for me than for others because I didn't have children -- but that raises its own flip side.
If I had to "compete" in a normal way for "influence", by, say, running for office (which people have asked me why I don't do it) and asking people for campaign money, would that be morally better?
I did benefit from a court bias that looks at amateur individual
speech as “almost” as protected as the speech of establishment
journalists. In large part that is
partly the result of the DMCA safe harbor, Section 230, and rulings on the CDA
and COPA censorship attempts. It might not have gone that way. I might have had to do something else and
hold my nose.
Wikipedia attribution link for Rochester NY aerial. My last visit was in 1992, as I recall. Author is Chris Tomkins-Tinch, CC-SA 3.0 license, unported.
No comments:
Post a Comment