The Cult of the Amateur

How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

By: Andrew Keen

Narrated by: Andrew Keen

Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon 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 forms 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 amateur, 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 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

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 startups himself - he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

©2007 Andrew Keen (P)2007 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"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." (The Weekly Standard)
"Mr. Keen...writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred." (The New York Times)

Horrible

The voice of this sneering, pompous luddite makes you want to pop him in the nose. He must be preaching to the choir, because I found his reasoning to be utterly unconvincing. If I owned the actual paper book, I'd use it for kindling.

Half the facts from a bitter man

Did a Web 2.0 site once touch Andrew Keen in a bad place? This is the bitter story of a bitter man who once must have taken a wrong wrong step and was left alone and cold.

Much of his facts aren’t wrong, but the conclusions are from a single point of view with an agenda. (Two chapters are dedicated to criticize others who present things online in this manner with ‘hidden agendas.’ Hypocrite.)

On one hand he criticizes the knowledge of individuals on the internet, only to raise individuals he him selves approve of (like sales clerks in record stores) to enormous heights. What Andrew completely misses is that these people — like everyone else — are also present online. We must take it to themselves to find talent offline AND online. There is no difference, and we must all be critical of information regardless of the format and provider.