The Great Seduction

June 19th, 2007

Nick Carr's Big Switch

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 9:15 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Information Technology, Revolution, Computing, Andrew Keen

Nicholas Carr, amongst the most incisive and profound critic of information technology, will be in Silicon Valley tonight (7.00 pm), at Campbell’s Barnes and Noble bookstore in conversation with ZDNet honcho Dan Farber, Edgeio co-founder/CEO Keith Teare, and Gillmor Gang ringleader & Podtech exec Steve Gillmor, and me. While the event is ostensibly to discuss my dastardly/bastardly Cult of the Amateur (a term Nick himself coined), I would rather do the big switch myself and talk about Nick’s forthcoming new book, The Big Switch (to be published by Norton). Here’s Nick on his sweeping new tome:

A hundred years ago, businesses began dismantling their waterwheels, steam engines, and generators. After producing their own mechanical power for centuries, they suddenly had an alternative. They could plug into the newly built electric grid and get all the electricity they needed from central stations. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just transform how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic, social, and cultural changes that brought the modern world into existence.

Today, a new technological revolution is under way, and it’s following a similar course. Companies are beginning to dismantle their private computer systems and tap into rich services delivered over the Internet. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility. The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft, SAP, and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did.

Wow! I have a strong suspicion that The Big Switch is going to be as profoundly surprisingly as Does IT Matter, the controversial book that originally made Carr’s name as an information technology guru and sceptic. Rather than talk about the inanity of Web 2.0’s blogs, splogs and flogs, tonight, I hope we’ll also get a chance to talk about the profound social ramifications of cheap, utility-supplied computing. I think Nick is right. We really are on the verge of a new industrial revolution. Unlike Silicon Valley’s much hyped user-generation content revolution, Nick Carr’s big switch is for real. I can’t wait to hear more about it tonight.

June 3rd, 2007

Don't Look Back

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 10:52 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Innovation, Steve Jobs, Hewlett-Packard Co., PC, Bill Gates, Entertainment, Computer, Andrew Keen

How to innovate? That was both the spoken and unspoken question on everyone’s minds at the Wall Street Journal’s memorable D Conference last week in Carlsbad. How can we radically improve the experience and value of interacting with one’s digital device? What is the next chapter in the evolution of information and entertainment technology? What, if anything, comes after the personal computer and the Internet? What’s the next act, the new new big thing?

The great masters of innovation dominated the event, expertly choreographed and prodded by the WSJ’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. They were all there (or almost all) at D this week, the legendary figures who have built the industry: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, John Chambers, Steve Case and Eric Schmidt. And the captains of traditional media spoke too — the CEOs of Viacom, Time Inc, CBS and the President of News Corp. And, if that wasn’t enough, political innovator John McCain kicked the event off and cinematic innovator George Lucas showed up to remind the audience that there was more than a slight difference between videos of exploding coke bottles on YouTube (which he described as “circus”) and Star Wars. D’s audience was stuffed with star business, technology and entertainment innovators too, including a few — like Martha Stewart and Frank Quattrone — guilty of over-innovation.

So what did these champion innovators tell us about innovation?

Uber-innovator Steve Jobs stole the show on this one — at least in terms of his advice. Don’t look back, Cupertino’s great seducer pulled the strings of the D audience. Apple went rotten in the Nineties because the company became fixated with the past rather than the future. So when he came in the second time to repeat his magic, the biblical Jobs confessed, he shifted their gaze, swiveled their heads, and commanded his Apple army to look forward rather than back.

Ironically, at D this year, we had a maturing industry as much focused on the past than the future. The event was dream for technology history mavens. The highpoint was the joint appearance of Gates and Jobs, the two most illustrious figures in contemporary digital pantheon, waxing lyrically about their collective past. It was the Bill and Steve show, compelling stuff for geek nostalgists, but not necessarily helpful for those of who looking forwards rather than backwards. We even got an audible sob and a noticeable tear from Jobs when quoting the lyrics from the Beatles “Two of Us” :

You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead

But there may be less romantic reasons for technologists to be shedding a tear too. As Walt Mossberg, reminded Jobs and Gates, the personal computer or its operating systems hadn’t changed substantially over the last decade. Mossberg made the same point to Eric Schmidt too about Google’s search interface. This hadn’t changed significantly either over the last five years. Indeed, one of the most eagerly anticipated new company launches at D — Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo — a search engine that replaces the algorithm with an editorial staff of real human-beings — is challenging revolutionary digital with the fake-subversion of analog.

So, at an event at which the great digital innovators celebrated innovation, the next big wave of innovation wasn’t clear. That’s worrying for those of us who value the exceptionalism of the digital business. Without constant innovation, digital will become routinized. Without revolutionary innovation, American personal computers will go the way of the American automobile. Silicon Valley will rust into Detroit. And the real innovators will move onto something else like biotech or green innovation.

Is there anything new out there in the digital universe beyond the absurdly over-hyped iPhone (just another expensive phone with music), inane user-generated-content sites and yet more search engines? Fortunately, there is. If Jobs can quote the Beatles on the past, then I can quote Bob Dylan (from “Ballad of a Thin Man”) on the future:

Because something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones

Actually, Mister Jones, I do know what is happening. If you scraped away the Bill and Steve show at D this year, the future could be seen. Or, more accurately, the future could be felt. The future, I suspect, is touch. The future is the integration of the computer into our physical reality. The dangerously metaphysical Second Lifers have it the wrong way around. The future is not a spiritual immersion into a fake world, but the immersion of the personal computer in our real world. The awkwardly oracular Bill Gates hinted at this when asked about his vision of digital life in five years time.

I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around, and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that…. I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. …. You’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet, and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment, and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information [on it]. Your desk can be a surface [where] you can sit and manipulate things.

Gates is wisely looking forwards rather than backwards here. Note, in particular, his faith in the “tablet form factor” and his notion of that our “desk can be a surface where you can sit and manipulate things.” What Gates is predicting that we’ll be able naturally write on our computers (ie: they will become like paper) and our desk will be a place in which the digital will spill into real life. Gates is saying that our whole desk will become a personal computer. The analog will be digitalized. The computer will become genuinely personal.

Ironically, the one company at D unambiguously showing off the future was Hewlett-Packard, the original Silicon Valley garage operation who have surfed wave after wave of digital innovation. At D this year, HP was displaying a stunning 16 ft wide by 8 ft tall fully interactive touch screen. The logical extension of their latest TouchSmart PC, this screen is a more natural, more human than the traditional computer screen. HP were also displaying visual content that moved seamlessly from screens onto the world around them, thus fusing together their displays with real life. And HP are promising many more technological breakthroughs which will allow other tactile gestural interactivity with our computers. This, rather than exploding coke bottle videos or flashy phones — might well be the future of digital. Tactile interactivity is what can make technology friendlier, more intuitive to all of us. This is what will seamlessly integrate digital into our analog lives.

Note to Walt and Kara: this year was really wonderful — but, next year at D, let’s look forward rather than back. Please select speakers — from innovative HP, for example — for whom the new new thing isn’t just memories.

May 30th, 2007

Does Internet democracy work?

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 2:11 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Internet, Debate, Democracy, Andrew Keen

How effective is democracy on the Internet?

A few weeks ago, I challenged Jeff Jarvis, one of Web 2.0’s most fervent democratizers, to debate my forthcoming book Cult of the Amateur. Jarvis, who regards me as the digital anti-christ and a “Stalinist“, wasn’t sure if he wanted to debate me. So he instigated a debate about the debate on his Buzzmachine blog. This debate about the debate turned into a debate about the debate about the debate.

Meanwhile, no debate. The chaotic mechanics of pure web democracy tied Jeff in knots. Alas, the Internet was deprived of an intellectual exchange between two people with diametrically opposed ideas about the value of citizen media.

So where is Joe Stalin when we need him most?

Fortunately, however, not everyone that I challenged to a debate was as indecisive as Jarvis. I am very proud to have been involved in a really energetic and intellectually arresting debate with Kevin Kelly, which is being published all this week on Jewcy.

Kelly is no less critical of my ideas than Jarvis. But at least he was able to make the decision to debate me independent of the crowd. The Buzzmachine debate about the debate debacle reveals that pure democracy on the Internet works better in theory than in practice. Sometimes even radical democrats like Jeff Jarvis need to make their decisions independent of the crowd. If you are going to debating with Stalin, it makes sense to make bold decisions like Uncle Joe too.

May 23rd, 2007

Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind?

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Algorithm, Google Inc., Eric Schmidt, Life, Andrew Keen

So Eric Schmidt, the Chauncey Gardiner of Silicon Valley, is at it again. This time, the wise old fool wants to organize my daily life. The Google CEO (Chief Eccentric Officer) confessed to the Financial Times today:

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Does Eric want his algorithm to sniff the armpits of my mind? Does he seek to read me like a book so that he can organize not only my daily life, but my work life, my second life, my unconscious life and my erotic life? Is Eric so lonely, so desperate for intimacy that he wants to know me better than myself? Yes. Google’s Chief Eccentric Officer wants to be my shrink, my lover, my alter-ego, my subconscious, my pre-conscious. Eric wants to be me; or, more accurately, he wants to know me better than I know myself.

Oh Eric, stop sniggering into your algorithm. This is a serious matter. I thought you were a businessman rather than a looney. How can you possibly know what I want to do tomorrow when I don’t know that myself. And how can you know what job I want, when I’m perfectly happy as an unemployable layabout?

What’s going on here? Here we have a company with a market cap of north of $150 billion. It’s the hottest thing in technology. And the straight faced Chief Eccentric Officer, Silicon Valley’s very own Chauncey Gardiner, tells the leading global financial newspaper that he wants his algorithm to tell us what we should do with our lives.

Next thing you know, Eric will be telling me what book I want to write next. Let me guess. It’s a book about Eric and his algorithm. It will be entitled One Flew Over the Googleplex.

May 22nd, 2007

Outsourcing The News

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 9:37 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Andrew Keen

The San Francisco Chronicle has just announced a 25% cut in its editorial team. Will that mean 25% less news in the already hard news deprived Chronicle? Or will the remaining 75% of Chronicle journalists be working 50% harder to produce the same amount of news?

Alternatively, the Chronicle could always outsource its news reporting, paying developing world wages (by the hour) for first world news. What? Journalists in India reporting Bay Area news? Technology reporters in Bangalore reporting on Silicon Valley?

Don’t laugh (or cry). This is exactly what James Macpherson, the publisher of the Pasadena Now website, is doing. Macpherson has hired Indian journalists based in India to write about Pasadena’s (CA) City Council.

Welcome to the brave new world of journalism 2.0, where the bottom line has replaced accuracy as the key determinant of editorial policy. What’s next? The only thing cheaper than Indian journalists are unpaid amateurs. So Macpherson should take the next logical step. After all, why pay Indians when he could do a pure revenue share with anonymous bloggers (who could, for all anyone knows, be members of Pasadena City Council).

Come to think of it, that’s the best idea of all. Why not actively recruit council members or politicians or business people to report on their own activities. And monetize this by charging them for the privilege. Then publishers wouldn’t have to worry about paying those annoying journalists anything. News would get automatically monetized. And everyone — except the tragically misinformed reader — would be laughing all the way to the (online) bank.

May 10th, 2007

Bubbe is back

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 10:07 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: San Jose, Media, Photograph, Bubbe, Andrew Keen

So there I was, on the BART train, reading the newspaper-that-Rupert-is-lusting-after. I'd just finished Mossberg's piece of hot air on the Helio (yawn) and was flipping through the other sections. I came to the Personal Journal and saw an interesting article about FDA approval for cancer vaccine. And then my eye caught the photograph in the center of the page. It was a photo of an old pale woman, standing in her kitchen, with a big plate of strudel in her hand. A very pale old woman. Too pale to be anything but from the Pale.

At first, I thought it was my long deceased grandma — Yetta Keen from the Swiss Cottage ghetto of North London. Even though it was just a photo, I could smell Grandma Yetta's oily chicken soup bubbling out of the newspaper. And then I came to my senses. Even in this age of citizen media, when one has to fight to keep one's face out of the press, my dead Grandma Yetta had no reason to be in the Wall Street Journal. And I was right. It wasn't Grandma Yetta. But I was close.

So who was the familiar old Yiddisher woman staring out at me from the newspaper?

It was Bubbe! The self-broadcasting cooking maven I'd met in San Jose, at the Video-On-The-Net event. Bubbe from just outside Boston. Bubbe with the Internet tv show, Feed Me Bubbe. Old Bubbe who had become my surrogate grandma for a few minutes at the San Jose conventional center.

Bubbe has come a long way since San Jose. Now a front page star on the Wall Street Journal, she has become the pin-up for alter-kucker media. The article, by Jessica E. Vascellaro was entitled "Using YouTube For Posterity". It was about the value of Web 2.0 media for self-broadcasting old people. Bubbe isn't alone. Vascellaro writes about a 92-year-old housebound piano builder called Paul Gordon who made a eigh-minute clip of himself playing jazz on his piano. Now, it seems, all the old folk want to be on the Internet. They want to record their songs and their recipes. It's the real history of old, interesting people. It's preserving legacies that would otherwise be lost forever. And it's fun.

And what's so bad about that? 

Nothing really. Nothing at all. So maybe I shouldn't be such a reactionary fartface when it comes to all this citizen media. I have to admit that I would like my kids to watch old Grandma Yetta on YouTube. Yes, even I have to confess (sshh, don't tell Jeff Jarvis) that not all Web 2.0 media is bad. Especially a media in which bubbly Bubbe is the star.

May 6th, 2007

Buy Microsoft, buy Yahoo!

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 9:21 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Web, Web 2.0, Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp., Andrew Keen

Two things happen in metaphysical economies — markets in which everything is based on faith & there is no concrete economic reality:

1. Hyped media companies (Broadcast.com, Napster, AOL, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc etc) get radically over valued.
2. Media companies valued on traditional economic criteria (Time-Warner, Yahoo & Microsoft) get radically undervalued.

That's exactly what is happening in the Web 2.0 bubble — a classic example of a metaphysical economy. The evidence of overvalued, overhyped Web 2.0 companies is everywhere — from the surreal YouTube acquisition to the ludicruous idea that Facebook is worth north of $1 billion. In five years time, 99% of all these social network, virtual reality and user-generated-content businesses will have disappeared. At this week's On Hollywood, for example, start-up after start-up presented identically orthodox ideas about how to create value from the democratized Internet. This poverty of innovation amongst Web 2.0 entrepreneurs is stunning. It will require another cycle, what some people are now calling Web 3.0, to successfully implement the business potential of Web 2.0 technology. Given the cyclical nature of things, don't expect to see this till around 2015.

And, on the other hand, in the Web 2.0 metaphysical economy, traditional media companies are being radically devalued. Take, for example, the rumors of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. These companies — imagine them as a couple of dowdy old ladies at a young swingers club  — are being pushed together by a financial community that is Web 2.0 and Google fixated. All roads, in this new advertising centric Web economy, supposedly lead to the Googleplex in Mountain View. To be fair to Google, of course, the company itself is not part of this metaphysical economy. Yet, as Dave Winer has convincingly argued, the Web 2.0 is "nothing more than an after market for Google." So no Web 2.0 boom, no after market froth for Google. And like the collapse of AOL's advertising revenue after the  of the Web 1.0 economy, Google's advertising revenue will suffer immensurably when the  2.0 economy collapses.

So how should we value Yahoo and Microsoft? By their numbers. What is forgotten, in all the hype over Google, is that Yahoo and Microsoft still are two of the most popular sites on the Internet. According to Nielsen/NetRatings for March 2007, Yahoo! had 108 million and Microsoft 135 million unique users. The challenge, of course, is to innovatively translate these users into revenue. But, as Yahoo's Jeff Weiner said at last month's Web 2.0 Conference, it's never wise to count Microsoft out. The same is true of Yahoo. In contrast with the majority of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, both Microsoft and Yahoo have innovation in the blood. So whether or not they merge or strategically align, my counter intuitive advice is to buy Microsoft and buy Yahoo.

May 2nd, 2007

Virtual reality in Hollywood

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 5:44 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Hollywood, Virtual Reality, Andrew Keen

On Hollywood is getting weirder by the panel. First there was golden girl Arianna and her colonialization of the media universe. Then I wandered into a panel ominously entitled "What's in store for Virtual Worlds?"

So what is in store for virtual worlds? Virtual reality, that's what we are all peering into — at least according the panelists. I heard that virtual reality is becoming an extension of people's "real" selves. The theory is that we are no longer distinguishing between our online avator and our physical beings. To quote a guy on the panel from a company appropriately named Doppleganger, we are "disaggregating from our physical limitations."

Life is going elsewhere. The thing-in-itself is migrated online. Reality is being digitalized. The world is being replaced by a blank screen.

This surreal panel was held in a room named the "Cinegrill" in the basement of Hollywood's historic Roosevelt Hotel. After a few minutes of virtual reality talk, I began to look around the room. There must have been around fifty people in the audience — digital entertainment executives, Hollywood wannabe moguls, media journalists, bloggers, posers like myself. Only three of them (and I counted, I promise) were looking at the four executives up on the stage of the Cinegrill. The others were peering at their electronic toys — laptops, BlackBerries, phones, Treos. Nobody was paying attention to what was happening in the Cinegrill. Everyone had been consumed by their screens.

Life isn't going elsewhere — it has already gone. Second life is becoming first life. That big bang you just heard is our final disaggregation from physical limitations. 

And tomorrow I'll get my own dose of virtual reality. I'm appearing on stage with Justin from JustinTV. I'll finally get to do a debate with a live camera. OnHollywood will become InHollywood.

May 2nd, 2007

Arianna is golden

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 12:00 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Media, Arianna, Andrew Keen

It takes a golden woman to get me out of bed at 5.00 am. And Arianna Huffington is golden, very golden. I caught the 6.30 shuttle this morning down to Burbank, to catch the golden girl live — speaking at On Hollywood. She didn't disappoint. Dressed in a gold top, the golden haired Arianna glowed this morning in Hollywood.

For those with dirty minds (like me), Arianna delivered glowingly suggestive content. She described new media as being ideal for "threesomes". Mel Gibson, she said, had "legs". While she confessed, intimately, that "for me, it's all about advertising–  unless its porn or weird porn, you don't charge for it." 

Her vision of the future of news media glowed too — at least, if you take Arianna at her word. She wants her Huffington Post to combine the best of traditional and new media. One the one hand, she is hiring top traditional journalists like ex Washington Post writer Thomas Edsell; on the other, she is partnering with NewAssignment, Jay Rosen's worthy citizen media organization, to create a farm-system for the main HuffPo site. All very commendable. She really appears to be combining the authority and experience of mainstream media with the energy and irreverence of the blogosphere.

But there's a problem. And that's Arianna herself. When you scrape all that gold away from HuffPo — the glamorous columnists, the venture capital investors, the millions of readers — it's Arianna's online newspaper, written by her friends and distributed under her ubiquitous name. Arianna has become the Randolph William Hearst of the early 21st century, building a media empire inseparable from her own personal brand. Now all we need is Orson Welles to chronicle her meteoric rise and… 

At one point this morning, Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal asked Arianna what she would do if she ran the New York Times. Arianna couldn't resist. She launched into an indiscreet attack on Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the Times should have run a real-time fact checker at the recent debate, publicly revealing Hilary's inaccuracies and lies. 

And that's the problem with the Huffpo and Arianna. Scrape all that gold away and what you have a woman with a very naked political agenda who is now running one the most powerful media operations in either new or old media. Arianna, naked or otherwise, knows what she wants (certainly not a Hillary presidency) and this immensely ambitious woman is using the Huffpo as a vehicle to pursue her own agenda. So scrape away all that gold and what you see is a new media that is increasingly putting massive power into the hands of contrarians (Huffington, Calcanis, Cuban etc etc). Arianna may be the golden girl of the Web 2.0 movement, but I don't want to hear her version of the news on my iPod, my television, my computer screen and my telephone.

May 1st, 2007

Zigger nation

Posted by Andrew Keen @ 10:33 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Business 2.0, Andrew Keen

Business 2.0 dedicates it's May 2007 issue to purveyors of unconventional business wisdom. Rip up the rules of management, we are told. It's the principle of permanent revolution applied to the free market. Be unconventional. Think differently. Be a contrarian. And then, you'll acquire business immortality like Mark Cuban or Jeff Bezos. Thus, the Time-Warner owned magazine invites us to:

Meet the contrarians, 11 business leaders who achieved success by zigging while the rest of the world zagged.

In addition to Bezos and Cuban, paragons of Business 2.0's contrarian entrepreneurs include schlumpy Craig, Arianna Huffington and Martha Stewart whose unconventional behavior landed her in West Virginia's Alderson Federal Prison Camp for five months. We are told that contrarians like Craig, Arianna and Martha are ziggers — while the rest of us, in contrast, are losers, zagging ourselves into obscurity:

The piece, of course, is supposed to transform us into a nation of ziggers. But what Business 2.0, Fast Company, Wired and the rest of the zigger-loving business media is doing, of course, is creating an orthodoxy around the ideal of unconventionality. So what happens when everybody thinks differently? What is the result of a business culture in which even the most unoriginal entrepreneur believes that they should be a contrarian? You get the overpowering conformity of Web 2.0 — a bubble of contrarianism, in which entrepreneurs attempt to counterculturally trump their rivals. It's a pastiche of Trotsky's permanent revolution — Stumbled Upon, Twittered, Dabbled, Digged ad nauseum.

So how does one really think differently in a contrarian business culture like Web 2.0? The only refuge is escaping into orthodoxy. I suspect that today's real ziggers are those intrinsically dull souls who simply can't think differently. The next billion dollar companies will be founded by young men (no women execs allowed) who believe in org charts, profits, sex with their secretaries and martini lunches. So next time you see a blue suited IBM clone, don't sneer. Instead, bow down to their orthodoxy. And beg them for a job.