Is it worth reading The Internet Not The Answer?

Book reviewed -  Keen, Andrew The Internet is not the Answer, (Atlantic books, London: 2015)

All quotes taken from The Internet is not the Answer unless otherwise stated.

I am discussing whether Andrew Keen’s The Internet is not The Answer is worth reading. The evangelists of the internet promised it would solve all our problems. Keen’s book argues the opposite drawing on the last quarter-century of the internet and all the negative consequences, from high unemployment to the loss of privacy. I’m saying that, yeah, this book is worth reading, although if you know the history of the internet it is worth skipping the first two Chapters which are pretty much standard timelines, (just slightly more cynical than normal). The first chapter is the history of the internet from Vannevar Bush until the Web 1.0 of the nineties. Chapter 2 continues with the history of the monetized, user-based Web 2.0; from the launch of  Google. Keen keeps stressing the good intentions these people had and how with each development the egalitarian dream dissolves a bit more.

Keen’s book slightly misnamed, although the catchphrase, “No, The Internet is not the answer” appears several times through the book, especially when concluding a thought. He is aware we can’t go back to his golden age of music and publishing. In the book Keen states, with a clever phrase, that he is “Nostalgic for a time when we were optimistic about the future. This is the reality for the time being.” (p.119)

Part of his problem is with the boy plutocrats and the rise of libertarian ethics which have emerged since the beginning of the World Wide Web. The story he wants to tell about the internet is the “important” one, not about the 1%, but “…the 99% who haven’t invested in Uber, don’t own Bitcoins, and aren’t renting out spare rooms in their castle on Airbnb.” (p. 74) He fails to go into detail about the sincerity of the libertarians, who are employing the rhetoric that favors them, but possibly caring only about their own egos, will abandon libertarianism when it suits them. Kim Dotcom (a man who Keen rightly dislikes) is a classic example of this, but Keen brushes over Dotcom criticizing the man's ego before fluttering to the next point. 

Keen has been called the Christopher Hitchens of Silicon Valley, in respect to his iconoclasm. There appears to be more similarities between Keen and Hitchens. Both authors write a good, interesting sentence but use this style often to show how much they know instead of what is relevant. Keen is a clear writer. He uses a colloquial, plain writing style, regularly starting sentences with No or Yes before dropping into the point he was making. Quite often he is answering questions asked two or three pages back. 

Keen especially seems easily distracted about his topic, like he is pointing at concepts from a tour bus where the passages are forced to look at the move onto the next sight only just having noticed the one they are own now. Jargon terms are introduced in quote marks everywhere, used once, and never appear again in the book.

l  “…replaced by a “giveaway” economy” (p. 127)

l  ““Eyeballs” as everyone describes audience.” (p. 127)

l  “…warned about this “native advertising” strategy.” (p.135)

While the book spends a lot of time hovering over the ruins of the Soho music industry and Rochester, New York, (the HQ of Kodak) Keen could have spent going into more detail about any of the topics he spent only half a page on.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the book sets out to be an overview of all the problems, but still seems narrow in scope. The book is mostly focused on the US. The Arab Spring is given only half a paragraph, and that is to point out that the great revolutions co-ordinated on social media have failed. Nothing is mentioned of how the counter-revolutions also employed social media. What is completely missing is the situation in China where the government is gradually managing to restrict every undesirable (from their perspective) possibility of the Internet. They have the big names of Silicon Valley kowtowing, while knock-offs thrive.

So go ahead and read The Internet is not the answer.  I will leave you with one thought from Andrew Keen…

“Rather than establishing trust a 2014 Reason-Rupe poll of Americans found Facebook was trusted with our personal data by only 5% of the respondents, significantly less than either the 35% of the people who trusted the Internal Revenue Service or even the 18% who trusted the National Security Agency.” (p. 68)