The Taste Makers Were Warned

After I decided that I needed to investigate more traditional means of living, I naturally began to look for others who might belong in my tribe. Enter Andrew Keen.

Mr. Keen is a writer, thinker, and professor with the interesting opinion that Internet 2.0 - the social internet of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube - presents about as many problems as it creates. He has compared today's technology-soaked world to the Gilded Age, when companies grew big and rich while distributing negative externalities around the country.

Mr. Keen is no luddite, he insists, but, rather, someone who supposes the current system can be improved upon. In my own review of his work, I was fascinated to find this speech he gave to Googlers back in 2007.

In it, Mr. Keen warns the very people who were creating today's tech landscape about all of its many foibles. This includes the possibility that bad actors will manipulate people; that news media will suffer and die; and that culture, in general, will see a dumbing down of discourse.

Of course, the brilliant minds at Google were having none of it, as you will see in the linked video. They questioned Mr. Keen's notion that Internet 2.0 is fundamentally different from more traditional media forms. But, then, we know by reading the papers remaining today who was right and who was smug, don't we?