Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and blogger, recently argued that the roots of the Web 2.0 movement creepily echoed the concept of self-realisation underlying Marxist philosophy. Keen describes Web 2.0 as a utopian project to construct new technologies which allow individuals to publish and promote their creative endeavours in music, art, or other forms of print media. The reduction of barriers to entry that this entails has had a radical effect on the traditional media. Keen portrays the movement as ideologically driven by a broad grouping of Silicon Valley veterans, fusing the dynamics of the 60s counter-culture with the techno-utopianism of the 1990s. It is an awkward fit as the New Left is shoehorned with libertarianism and the diversity of the figures cited lends doubt to the utility of the argument beyond a straw man network effect:
Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the ’60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google’s Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle.
Keen is aware of his own leanings. Web 2.0 is drawn as an ideology and a political endeavour in order to level the playing field and allow his cultural conservatism to come into play. With arguments that echo those hurled at the development of mass media at the beginning of the twentieth century, Keen laments the passing of a common culture, the rise of mediocrity and the destruction of the existing elite. The future is drowned by dross. With the rise of more enthusiasts and more voices, Keen laments that the role of the media is lost and that personalised media will reflect individual preferences, losing sense of a wider world.
Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent…..Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural “flattening.” No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion — Socrates’s nightmare…..
……One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.
It must be such a chore to be one voice amongst many.
Oh dear, what dross. I think this is one political interpretation too many.
I don’t know about democratisation of the media by the Web. There is nothing democratic about Samizdata.net, for example. And Jimmy Wales describes Wikipedia not as a democracy but as a monarchy. It’s more like giving individuals more control over their environment, which is not the same as democratisation.
What a curiously Sillicon Valley centric view Keen has. Web 2.0 is not confined to that area only. As for Larry Lessig, Craig Newmark, Chris Anderson and Tim O’Reilley – count me in, that’s the company I keep these days.
Iread Philip Chaston’s post twice and it still made no sense. Gimme more bandwidth and I’ll know how to use it.
I agree with Adriana – this interpretation is way over the top. Democratision of the media (via blogs) and loosing sight of a wider world. Is this chap for real?
People will always talk about the wider world (what else is there?) they just won’t have to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the two or three official opinions peddled by the msm. The future of media, to the extent that it is heralded by the blogosphere, is in fact a move away from ‘democratisation’.
Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley.
Bullcrap. It’s eactly the opposite.
The only thing that’s being “democratized” (anarchized would be more accurate) is the new low barriers to entry. And those were never very selective with regard to talent.
What Mr Keen doesn’t understand is, if you raise the size of the bell curve, you get more dross, but also more and better elite.
Laurence Lessig, the champion of open source intellectual property rights, might be rather taken aback to be branded as a communist, as cited in the quote you give, Philip! For all that I have problems with some of Lessig’s ideas on IP, he is hardly a socialist.
I’m certainly praying for no more Bonos
Look no further than this software, the software for adding comments to you blog, for why the whole Web 2 VC bubble-ette is a load of junk.
Looks like some web 2’ish content filter which tries to assess the ‘meaning’ of my post and has decided that a even toned piece about Mr Keens complete lack of any real Valley business experience, and his background in trendy lefty academia, is spam.
Being very familiar with the technology of NLP, KE and KR software I am not going to waste my time trying to debug this junk. At least with brute-force key-word scanners you at least stand a chance of working around the flaws in the softwares architecture…
God, I hate pseudo-AI software produced by some twits with PhD’s from Stanford or MIT…
To quote Father Jack.. semantic web me arse..
Samizdata…. get a different spam filter…
Where is that ‘elite media’ of which he speaks?
So let me get this straight: basically, this gentleman is arguing that this new crowd of ‘sociallynetworked intaerwebnet2.0’ bears striking and concerning similarities with this worst of all utopias that is Marxism, pointing at communitarian litanies (or even full blown Communists), and the only reaction is to jump at his throat as if he was a deviationist overtly critical of the party line?
Interesting.
I also notice that he’s not attacked on the core of his argument, but rather on his (secondary) fondness for big media (on which I would argue that – just like the 2.0 webies – he’s only partly wrong). Indeed, seeing how quickly he is dismissed on this ground (only) as a reactionary elitist pig advocating the old order to restore the privilege of the big bourgeois media class is, well, very interesting too.
Thanks to Philip Chaston for the spotlight on Andrew Keen, I will certainly be reading him from now on. He’s only partly wrong, but the other half certainly rings a bell in my own experience: just like the Marxists claimed they were leading The Struggle For The Working Class but ultimately didn’t give a damn about the workers, I could point the finger at many a Web2.0 evangelist (Oops, almost wrote ‘activist’) mouth filled with The Struggle to Empower The Individual who couldn’t care less about individuals.
Well, not unless the workers/the individuals are still “under the yoke” that is – and remain so.
dissident frogman: disagreed with your idea that things which “empower the individual” must necessarily be intended to. Commerce allows user and vendor to each define their own best interest, and meet wherever the two coincide.
I don’t know, I spend more time than is healthy reading News Bump and posting my favorites at Delicioius which are both classic Web 2.0. They’ve both pointed me towards some great stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise found.
“I also notice that he’s not attacked on the core of his argument, but rather on his (secondary) fondness for big media (on which I would argue that – just like the 2.0 webies – he’s only partly wrong). Indeed, seeing how quickly he is dismissed on this ground (only) as a reactionary elitist pig advocating the old order to restore the privilege of the big bourgeois media class is, well, very interesting too.”
If I am missing something here I do beg your pardon, but it seems to me that whilst digital media forms have increased the scope of communication, they have not changed the basic dynamics of it.
While new personalised forms of media may generate ‘information feedback’ for each individual, this is merely an amplification of what already existed every time an individual chose to read the Telegraph rather than the Guardian because he agreed more with the editorials of the former paper than the latter. It was also possible for people to publish their own writings prior to the advent of blogs – how many people read those writings, or indeed read those blogs is simply a question of market demand, so to speak. I don’t see that this has fundamentally changed – some blogs are more popular than others just as some newspapers / novels / histories were more popular than others.
If digital media is a ‘democratisation’ and ‘flattening’ of culture, what then was William Caxton’s little invention? The beginning of the end of culture?
Julian:
Don’t know where exactly I formulated that idea, since I was rather taking aim not at “things which empower people” but at people who claim they do, when in fact it’s only a moral smoke screen for more nefarious intent (from simple narcissism up to a follow up on the full blown, age old Marxist attempt to bring down Capitalism). In short, people using the (idealized) Individual as a pretext, such as the (idealized) Worker was for the Marxists.
The great thing with that “digital revolution” however, is that 1) their rifles are virtual, 2) we can use them to fight back and 3) they can’t really seize the said weapons from us.
Well, at least that’s true for those of us who host their weapons themselves. Those kolkhozniki who blog or ‘social network’ with Typepad and the likes are pretty much at the mercy of the digital commissars providing them their rifle.
Viper:
Sure, of course. And by the same merit there’s no denying that the Soviet and Cuban revolutions “freed the working class” from Czarist and Baptista (ist? ism?) oppression. And gave work, a roof and medical care to everybody.
Mike:
And where exactly are we disagreeing?
the dissident frogman:
I took your remarks as critical of the criticism made here of Keen’s article. I therefore inferred that you had some measure of sympathy with what Keen says in his article whereas I, for the most part, have not.
Mike:
Funny, I had the feeling that your comment implied that this so-called revolution wasn’t one.
Sorry, my mistake.
I think he makes one good point. The democratization of “stuff” be it media or culture or … does harm elite control.
It’s hard to escape the notion that had, “ye average citizen” of – insert pre modern culture here – (Rome/Ancient Anthens/England/France) been as powerful as a modern citizen is today in directing “culture” in most of the west that: Vaux le Vicomte (a French chateau of great beauty), the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Bach’s music, etc… would not have been created.
The concentration of wealth, confidence and sustained elite tastes necessary for the creation of “high” art would not have existed.
Instead we have tended towards a “democratic elite” of rock stars , movie stars, and rather strange painters and performance artists and such.
Surely Fred that culture of what you speak was the “democratic elite” of culture in that time.
What the lower barriers of publishing (via the web) enables is the voice of everyone without a rich patron or large media outlet taking their cut and exercising editorial control.
Of course, whether anyone else chooses to listen/consume is a different matter.
I also am a bit confused as to the enabling of all to publish being seen as communist. It would seem to be the exact antithesis of what communism is about. It seems more a delightful anarchy to me.
Lusiphur, I think that was my point, however badly I expressed it, most of what we consider high art of the past today, was created by undemocratic elites, often paid for by people we would excoriate today as being tyrants, or oligarchs.
“The people” struggled on in pretty abject poverty relative to those creating the art and culture that we remeber as being emblematic of the time, and whatever “popular” culture they had is basically considered low folk art, at best.
Recently we’ve seen the effect of culture where millions can participate to pay for TV, music, movies, has created a “democratic” elite raised by popular tastes. ($$$) Has that created art that will survive the ages? (I don’t claim to know, but I’m skeptical.)
Now we’re see the start of things where the barriers to entry are so low that anybody can play. Will that improve things ? Some days I’m skeptical, others, given what’s out there now, I’m hopeful.
Interestingly Architecture is still an elite playground with limited number of wealthy patrons. And by and large modern “art” architecture sucks. And non “art” architecture is reductionist to the point you can be dropped anywhere in europe or north america in a modern commerical area and not know where you are till you see the signs. One steel framed building looks exactly like another. Efficient, boring, cheap, and pretty strong.
The less people have in common culture the more they seek to define their relationships through shared values. The more people produce and create the more they think about and question their values.
It’s a Socratic Utopia, and is likely to produce better ideas. Libertarianism is vastly more popular on the internet because the more interactive, open and diverse the information the more likely the best solution will be reached.