[iDC] Re: iDC Digest, Vol 30, Issue 22

Wed Apr 25 13:30:09 EDT 2007

> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:08:55 -0700
> From: Andrew Keen <ak at aftertv.com>
> Subject: [iDC] hi from andrew keen
> To: idc at bbs.thing.net
> Message-ID: <462E71E7.9080302 at aftertv.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi everyone -- My name is Andrew Keen and I'm the author of the
> forthcoming (June 5) CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How the Internet is killing
> our culture
> <
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385520808?ie=UTF8&tag=andkee-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0385520808
> >
>
> For more about my ideas, see my Internet writing at:
>
> CultOfTheAmateur <http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/>
> ZDNet <http://blogs.zdnet.com/keen/>
> Britannica <http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/author/akeen>
>
> A blogging critique of blogging, eh. What is the world coming to?
>
> Anyway, I've been invited by kind Trebor to join your newsgroup and
> discuss/defend/critique my ideas. Trebor will post my anti Web 2.0
> manifesto (aka: Adorno-for-idiots). So that should provide some lite
> afternoon reading for y'all.
>
> All the very best from sunny south-central Berkeley,
>
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:05:33 -0400
> From: Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net>
> Subject: [iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Andrew Keen)
> To: IDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID:
>         <r02010500-1048-E37FEF57F31C11DBBEEE001124E13D4E@[63.87.156.163]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Welcome to Andrew Keen. His "deliciously subversive new book," "The Cult
> of the Amateur" "exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory
> Web 2.0 and reveals
> how it threatens our values..." There is a parallel to Jaron Lanier's
> "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism." (Thanks to
> Bernardo Parrella for the link.)

Hi all, I've been lurking here for a while....

See my responses below....

THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen
>
> 1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism's most seductive
> delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology -- in the form
> of blogs, wikis and podcasts --  will
> enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie
> directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has
> something interesting to say.

I think it goes beyond just writers, artists, movie directors, and
journalists. Don't forget designers, academics, scientists, engineers,
finance and banking....

Our Digital Utopian Cult is capable of "deluding" amateurs in almost every
profession ;-)

2. The digital utopian much heralded "democratization" of media will have a
> destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. "Good taste"
> is, as Adorno never tired
> of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite ("truth
> makers") of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on
> behalf of the public, the value of a
> work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an
> ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

Yes, our cultural content was really of the highest caliber prior to the
Digital Utopian attack on taste. I look back fondly on such high quality
works-of-art produced by cultural taste making gatekeeprs. Examples include
great television shows like "Knight Rider","The A Team",  "The Dukes Of
Hazzard", and "Differen't Strokes"... or great music, books, magazines, etc
from the same time period, before the dreaded Digital Utopian era that is
upon us now....

3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as
> Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular
> space between Frankfurt,
> Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine
> reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version
> of "The Castle" or "The Library
> of Babel". This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction.
> But real life, like art, shouldn't be fantasy; it shouldn't be fiction.

Relax, it is highly unlikely that technology will in fact evolve unchecked.
As Neil Postman pointed out, "Technological change is not additive; it is
ecological."  Postman says:

"A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year
1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe
plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television,
America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to
every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church,
to every industry, and so on."

Among some people, the "ochlocracy" you fear will in fact probably emerge.
But this is not  the  fate of all people, nor all cultures, who employ these
digital mediums. I think this is very much an exaggeration of what is
actually happening.

If you really need something to worry about connected to the new digital
mediums, then think about how they enable thousands of little militant
groups to coordinate, transfer funds, and recruit people to attack the
global infrastructure of nation-state civilization. That is a much bigger
present danger than people "hiding from reality" in digital mediums, or
extending imaginary worlds into reality.

4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big
> media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and
> publishing houses has
> discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as
> Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the "Vertigo" three). It is most
> unlikely that citizen media will
> have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of
> equivalent prodigy.

Oooh, how unfashionable of you! :)  For every big media gem you can name, I
can produce hundreds of examples of total garbage. This whole point is a
re-circular argument, because for a long time, big media was the only game
in town. So, it ALL came from big media.

I think that it is definitely NOT "most unlikely" that networks of people
outside of the big media industries will discover and organically "brand"
artists of equivalent prodigy to those that you name above. This has
happened even before digital media existed, particularly in
underground/independent music and film, throughout the 1970's, 80's an early
1990's. The missing pieces for people to use digital mediums to create,
package, distribute, and sell content are rapidly being filled in. It will
be easier and easier for the next "Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald"
to take on much of of the function of the Big Media industry themselves.

5. Let's think differently about George Orwell. Apple's iconic 1984 Super
> Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four the
> message went. Yes, the "truth"
> about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother
> and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell's dystopia is the dictatorship of the
> State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the
> dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will think
> they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George Orwell).

The future will be whatever we make it.

6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically
> flattened market that they have christened the "Long Tail". It is a Hayekian
> cottage market of small
> media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson's
> "Long Tail" is really a long tale. The real economic future is something
> akin to Google -- a vertiginous
> media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable
> that they become one and the same (more grist to that
> Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).

Well, I would agree with you, except that we already live in that world. Big
Media have been trying to merge content and advertising for decades.

One of the phenomenon that you are overlooking here is that it is
increasingly possible to completely write content and service providers like
Google right out of the picture. I can now perform all of the web functions
that Google offers me with Open Source software. And, in fact, I do. The
only service I continue to use from Google is Gmail, which is pretty much
totally replaceable by Zimbra (and which will be replaced by Zimbra in my
case soon see: zimbra.com).

Open source software, plus decreasing costs in server hosting and bandwidth
are already making it possible for me to solve a lot of problems without
having to look at commercials. I have open source spreadsheet applications,
open source document sharing, open source calendars, open source project
management, open source content management systems, etc etc

7. As always, today's pornography reveals tomorrow's media. The future of
> general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com: the
> convergence of
> self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity -- a self-argument
> in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us, we have a
> responsibility to protect people from
> their worst impulses. If people aren't able to censor their worst
> instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more
> disciplined than themselves.

So, how do you propose we go about doing this censoring? Who decides who
gets censored, and how is it enforced? Should we stop using digital
technology, because of it's un-censorable nature? What if I think that the
people you think are wiser and more disciplined are really just a bunch of
buffoons? Who's right about who is actually wiser, you or me?

People are "protected" best first through literacy and understanding, in my
opinion.

8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and
> Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity
> of online community,
> individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of
> all, it's in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the
> virtue of human nature that lends
> the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas
> like young Marx and Rousseau.

I think it's too early to call.  Just as 1990 would have been too early fro
very many people to describe what the digital medium would have looked like
in 2007.  I can tell you that I have seen the power and possibility of
online community,
individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. I have
drank from this Kool aid, and I am a believer :). But, I have also
experienced the reality of how online community,
individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership can help
people collectively solve problems, innovate, collaborate, and bypass the
need for giant wasteful bureaucracies and greedy single minded corporations,
who could care less about the quality of human discourse, or about the
quality of life of individual people.

9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell's focus on language is the most
> effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought word-for-word,
> phrase-by-phrase,
> delusion-by-delusion.  As an opening gambit, let's focus on the meaning of
> four key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) author b) audience c)
> community d) elitism.

Yes, let's focus on these.

a) Author:

In the book "Get Back In The Box", by
DouglasRushkoff?<http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki?action=edit;id=DouglasRushkoff>
ISBN:0060758694 <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060758694>,
Rushkoff talks about "authorship". Which means that:

*"computers and networks offer everyone more opportunity to assume the roles
of authors in an increasing variety of venues."*
(ISBN:0060758694<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060758694>pg
61).

So, you may not like this property of the digital medium, but it is there,
and it will be used, and all of the content created via this medium will not
be mediocre.

b) audience: whether you like it or not, the digital medium affords people
the ability to be a multi-way audience. They are now the people who used to
be the audience. This leads me to think that the problem really is that you
are mad that these people escaped from their assigned place.

c) community  Since the dawn of human kind, people have gathered in
communities. So, surprise! People online also gather in communities...wow
big shocker there.

d) elitism= What I suspect to be at the root of this whole manifesto :)

10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be
> social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux.
> Everything will be in motion;
> everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was
> recognized by Plato. That's why he was of the opinion that opinionated
> artists should be banned from his
> Republic.

This assumes that the evolution of mediums and people is linear. That people
will stay the same while their mediums grow at an accelerating rate around
them. But, we find the opposite to be true. Mediums are an extension of
people. The co-evolve together. So, people adapt and change when new mediums
emerge. Neil Postman again:

"What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do
we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new
coloration to every molecule of water."

People can change and adapt, to technology, and your analysis of the
direction of people evolving with their technological mediums is based on
the way people *were* previously.

-- 
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Cel: +1-517-974-6451
AIM: Str9960
Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samrose
skype: samuelrose
email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
http://socialsynergyweb.com
http://socialsynergy.typepad.com
http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/FrontPage

Related Sites/Blogs/Projects:

http://p2pfoundation.net
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperation-commons
http://smartmobs.com
http://barcampbank.com
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