THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.(Critical essay)

• Author: Stove, R.J.
• Position: 173717050
• Pages: 64(6)

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture

By Andrew Keen

(New York City: Currency, 2007)

Hardback: 228 pages

Fifty years ago, the United States' best-selling non-fiction authors included Vance Packard. A typical Packard book would have a brilliant title--The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, The Waste Makers, The Naked Society--and would be filled with laboriously compiled statistics, presented in crystal-clear prose. Whether his particular target happened to be manipulative advertising, planned obsolescence (a phrase he did not invent, but certainly popularised), the myth of a classless America, or governmental threats to privacy, he did commendable work in puncturing his countrymen's bent towards Panglossianism.

Judging by The Cult of the Amateur, Packard's mantle seems to have fallen on Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who aims to give us a salutary fright about where the Internet in its current, post-dotcom-crash form--"Web 2.0", he calls it--has already taken us. For writing The Cult of the Amateur, Keen has endured almost incredible abuse from his enemies, who have delighted in publicly upbraiding him as "disgraceful", "fascist", "communist", "Luddite" (he owns four computers), "control freak", and even, do you mind, "monarchist". It is hard to resist the claims on one's attention of any pundit with so varied a nomenclature. Yet several other reasons exist to read this volume with respect and heedfulness.

Keen deals with the Internet horrors most often publicised: cyberspatial porn in general, cyberspatial childporn in particular, and credit-card-related identity theft. He includes one especially chilling tale about a modestly successful Oklahoma website developer whose credit card details had been secured by an identity thief, and who thus was assumed to be running a wickedly expensive New York brothel. (Only one identity thief in every 700 is hapless enough to get caught.) For this reviewer, though, Keen's most valuable insights comprise his laments over a less dramatic, much less often discussed problem: the way in which the Internet has gravely weakened--perhaps beyond repair--the whole notion of artistic copyright and, indeed, the wider concept of intellectual property.

Why, it might be asked, would anyone want to eliminate copyright and intellectual property? The answer lies in one magic noun: "democratisation". Whenever two or three utopian nerds are gathered together, Pavlovian drooling over "democratisation" is in the midst of them. Keen includes bloodcurdling recollections of attending a 2004 male-bonding utopian nerd get-together--with the improbable name of FOO Camp--in northern California's Sonoma Valley. "Democratisation" dominated the proceedings to the exclusion of all other factors, including sanity. Keen's account reads like a primal-scream session for cashed-up Chinese Red Guards with West Coast accents. Forget about scholarship, experience, standards: all that boring old stuff is just...