Shameful Human of the Week: Andrew Keen

This week’s Shameful Human is author and professional internet-hater Andrew Keen.

To Andrew Keen, This whole web 2.0 thing, with its YouTubes and swarms of blogs, isn’t the time-wasting bliss you and I perceive it to be. No, it’s actually dangerous, and even Marxist.

You see, as Keen argued in his 2006 The Weekly Standard essay, the participatory internet “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer.” Sounds great, right? Sorry, but according to Andrew’s novel The Cult of the Amateur, all of this creative energy is putting hard-working experts out of business. Craigslist robs papers of their personals sections, Wikipedia takes jobs from encyclopedia editors.

Keen has rightly argued that web 2.0 “suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves.” Well, there’s no doubt that a lot of idiots produce a lot of shit on the internet. You’re reading a product of that dangerous phenomenon right now. Having said that, the internet is also a realm (relatively) free of corporate control, a place where true free enterprise can flourish, and a place that gives rise to new small businesses every day. There is nothing less Marxist than that.

Keen himself has participated in many internet start-ups. How he considers himself to be any different than the people making careers out of blogging and vlogging is beyond my comprehension.