The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen

  Zuckerman’s biblical metaphor is an apt description of the Internet’s fall from grace. Facebook, for example, a company that was supposedly designed to unite the world, is so guilty of taking advantage of children’s images in their ads that a number of US privacy, consumer-rights, and children’s nonprofits, as well as parents of exploited teenagers, like the filmmaker Annie Leonard, are involved in a bitter legal dispute to shield kids from this disgraceful exploitation. “You probably won’t even know when your family is suddenly starring in a commercial. Neither will your kid, unless she enjoys fine print more than status updates,” Leonard wrote in 2014. “But contrary to what Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe, there’s not a fine line between a selfie and a sponsored post.”57

  Speaking of fine lines and original sin, Google, with its suite of free products such as Search, Gmail, its Google+ social network, and YouTube, is the most sophisticated of these big data companies at marketing itself as a selfless nonprofit while simultaneously grossly exploiting its innocent users. Google is already integrating our posts and our photos into advertisements that are then viewed by the billion people who access the two million sites on its display advertising network. Google, whose intentions, like those of Facebook, were no doubt good, is now quite literally transforming us into display ads for their advertising business. We are not only the unpaid product in this economy, but also are becoming the billboards for displaying Google’s advertising. Once upon a time, companies paid people to walk up and down the street wearing so-called sandwich boards that displayed advertising. Now we all do it for free.

  As Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt confessed to the Financial Times back in 2007, Google wants to know us better than we know ourselves so that it can tell us not only what jobs we should take but also how we want to spend our day.58 “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been,” Schmidt told the Atlantic’s editor James Bennet in September 2010. “We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”59 This is the real reason why Google spent $500 million in 2014 on the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind—a technology that, according to The Information’s Amir Efrati, wants to “make computers think like humans.”60 By thinking like us, by being able to join the dots in our mind, Google will own us. And by owning us—our desires, our intentions, our career goals, above all our buying habits—Google will own the networked future.

  The Silicon Valley insider and technology critic Jaron Lanier argues “the future should be our theater.”61 But the problem with the data factory economy is that we have become the show that is being played in somebody else’s theater. And unlike professional actors, we aren’t even being paid for our labor. No wonder Lanier is nostalgic for a time when we were optimistic about the future.

  I miss the future, too. And to rediscover my enthusiasm for it, I need to go back a quarter century, to a place called Berwick Street in Soho, London.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CATASTROPHE

  OF ABUNDANCE

  The Narrow Stump

  I grew up in England. No, not the England of Winston Churchill’s exclusive gentleman’s clubs or Downton Abbey’s bucolic aristocracy and their unnaturally cheerful servants. Rather than a nostalgic costume drama, my England was London. And my London was Soho—the square-mile district in London’s West End that is not only the historic center of the city’s fashion business, but also the heart of its independent movie and music industries.

  As a kid growing up in the swinging London of the late sixties and seventies, I got to see a much more entertaining show in Soho than anything a Downton Abbey–style TV drama could muster. My family was in the rag trade and owned a store on the edge of Soho, so I had the good fortune to spend much of my adolescence wandering around its abundant clubs, cafés, and records stores, and its other, more adult attractions. They were the glory years of the English recorded music industry—a period of remarkable creative fecundity in which London in general and Soho in particular appeared, to me at least, to be the center of the creative universe. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Elton John, and David Bowie all played at Soho clubs like the Marquee and recorded albums in Soho’s Trident Studios. Eric Clapton and the Sex Pistols lived there for a while, while the Kinks’s 1970 hit “Lola” was set in a particularly adventurous Soho sex club.

  My family owned a store called Falbers Fabrics, on the corner of Oxford Street, Europe’s busiest shopping street, and Berwick Street, a narrow stump of a street that ran down into the strip clubs and massage parlors of what is euphemistically known as “Old Soho.” Berwick Street had a special place in my family’s history. It was the street on which my great-grandfather, Victor Falber, an immigrant entrepreneur from the Polish town of Plock, first set up shop in the early twentieth century—a time when almost everyone, from aristocrats to servants, made their own clothes. He was a woolens and silk market trader, carting his goods every day from London’s East End to Berwick Street market and selling to dressmakers who would then invest their labor in creating finished clothing. Later, my great-grandfather’s business would graduate to a physical store, first at the bottom of Berwick Street and then as “Falbers Fabrics,” one of London’s best-known fabric retailers, on Oxford Street. And even today, the name Victor Falber remains imprinted on a Berwick Street wall. Outside 12 Berwick Street, there is a marble plinth above the offices of the building’s current tenant, a creative agency that produces viral online videos. V. FALBER & SONS, it still says, the ghostlike reminder of a makers’ economy in which clothing was self-made rather than mass-produced in a factory.

  In comparison with the vertiginous ups and downs of San Francisco’s Battery Street and Rochester’s Factory Street over the last twenty-five years, the fortunes of Soho’s Berwick Street haven’t dramatically changed since 1989. Had you strolled down Berwick Street in 1989 and then, having fallen asleep for a quarter of a century, taken that same half-mile stroll once again in 2014, things wouldn’t have appeared, on first glance at least, to be much different from before. You’d still find a traffic-clogged street packed with stores, clubs, pubs, and restaurants popular with both tourists and the workers employed by Soho’s many media and fashion companies. And you’d still find a vibrant open-air market at the south end of the street, with tradesmen loudly hawking their fruit and vegetables, flowers, and cheap household goods.

  But, if you looked carefully enough, there are some things on Berwick Street that have indeed changed over the last twenty-five years. In 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, Berwick Street was known as the “Golden Mile of Vinyl.” The street was then famous for its more than twenty specialty record stores, covering every genre of music—from bluegrass, reggae, and electronic and house to soul, funk, jazz, and classical. These stores had all been opened after the introduction of Sony and Philips’s compact disc format in the early eighties—beginning in 1984 with Reckless Records, a store that became so popular that five years later, it opened a sister branch in Chicago.

  It was a golden age of media. Back in 1989, Berwick Street not only hosted what the Independent newspaper called the “greatest concentration of record shops in Britain”;1 it was also the center of independent musical life in London. Abbey Road, the St. Johns Wood street a few miles north of Soho immortalized on the cover of the eponymous 1969 Beatles record, might be the most famous musical street in London, but Berwick Street isn’t too far behind. An Abbey Road– style photograph of the street was even featured on the cover of Oasis’s album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, one of the most successful records in British music history, which, after its release in October 1995, was selling two copies a minute in the HMV superstore on Oxford Street.2 Today, however, neither the HMV superstore nor the Golden Mile of Vinyl exists. Reckless Records—where a cover of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is nostalgically displayed in its window—is still there. But in 2014, there were only four or five other record stores left on Berwick Street. The glory years are over. Like Victor Falber
and his makers’ clothing economy, the Golden Mile of Vinyl is now history.

  As an avid music collector, I spent many happy hours wandering up and down Berwick Street in the eighties. BUY SELL TRADE, all the stores advertised on their windows. It was my introduction to the “buy, sell, trade” economics of scarce creative goods. Just as my great-grandfather sold valuable woolens or silk in Berwick Street market, so the merchants on the Golden Mile of Vinyl sold valuable musical recordings like the LP version of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? or the seven-inch single of the Kinks’s “Lola.” Price was determined by demand. The scarcer the product, the more demand from buyers, the higher the price. And if you didn’t think the price was right, then you could always go next door and buy there. It was a perfect market.

  It was a perfect cultural experience, too. The former Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson invented the idea of the “long tail” to describe the supposed cornucopia of self-produced cultural goods available on the Web. But Berwick Street, that narrow stump of a Soho street, was the real long tail of musical diversity—existing years before Anderson came out with his theory. If you searched hard enough on the Golden Mile of Vinyl and in Soho’s many other independent record shops, you could dig up the most obscure recordings. And if you couldn’t find what you were looking for, or weren’t sure, then the stores employed real human beings, rather than algorithms, to answer questions and give recommendations of what to sample and buy. These human beings weren’t infallible, but they were much more likely to come up with serendipitous recommendations than algorithms that know our entire purchasing history and thus just tell us what we already know.

  Back in 1989, I would often come to Soho, not only to buy and sell music but also to meet with friends who were founding record labels, running clubs, spotting talent, or managing young artists. Like so many other people in my generation, my ambition was to get into the music business. Jaron Lanier describes the future as a theater. But twenty-five years ago, the future looked to me like a concert hall. And I wanted a seat in its front row.

  Twenty-five years ago, the future of the recorded music industry appeared as richly abundant as Soho’s cultural economy. “Perfect Sound Forever,” Philips and Sony boasted about their new CD format. And this digital audio technology had indeed triggered a golden age of new labels, genres, artists, and audiences. Technology, it seemed, was a force both for the creative and economic good. Everyone was replacing their vinyl records with the more convenient and cleaner-sounding CDs and the eighties were extremely profitable years for the recorded music industry, creating many thousands of new jobs and investment opportunities. HMV had even invested in the largest music store in the world on Oxford Street, a three-story, 60,000-square-foot building that had been opened by Bob Geldof in a October 1986 ceremony that not only attracted “tens of thousands of people” but also shut down Europe’s major shopping street.3

  Back then, the economic promise of the music business certainly offered a vivid contrast to the sad fate of my family’s fashion fabric business. It had gone bankrupt in the mideighties, a victim of rapidly changing technology and fashion. An off-the-rack dress shop had replaced Falbers Fabrics on Oxford Street. Women, it appeared, no longer had the time or interest to make their own clothes—especially given the wide availability of cheap, ready-to-wear clothing now flooding the market. My mom, who never really recovered from the loss of her grandfather’s business, went to work as a lowly sales assistant in a department store. And my dad became a cabdriver, before finding clerical work with a family friend.

  In 1989, the writing was on the wall. Both for the music and fashion industries. Or so it seemed back then, anyway.

  Business 0.02

  My Internet career began in the summer of 1996. It was about a year after the Netscape IPO. I was living in San Francisco and had a job as an advertising salesman at a publication called Fi: The Magazine of Music and Sound. Founded and published by Larry Kay, a wealthy music lover and the former chairman of IHOP (the International House of Pancakes restaurant chain), Fi had hired illustrious music writers like Gary Giddins, Allan Kozinn, Fred Kaplan, and Robert Christgau to build what Kay hoped would become the New Yorker of music commentary.

  But when Kay called me into his office one afternoon in the summer of 1996, it wasn’t to talk about music. He was an old-fashioned corporate type, a suit-and-tie kind of businessman, who today would be persona non grata in the Battery. Back then, Kay barely knew how to use a computer, let alone Netscape’s Web browser. He even had his secretary type up his emails when he wanted to communicate electronically with Fi’s hip writers. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t talk about the Internet, as everyone in San Francisco was doing by mid-1996.

  Kay waved a newspaper article at me. Titled “Business 2.0,” it was one of those breathlessly evangelical, new-rules-for-the-new-economy-style midnineties pieces that presented the Internet as a magical place, a promised land in which the old economic rules of buying, selling, and trading no longer applied. With its infinite storage space, infinite opening hours, and infinite global reach, the Web offered infinite potential to change everything, the article claimed. By borrowing the same “2.0”-style language that software developers used to describe their products, this article presented economics as if it were software. It imagined that business was akin to an online app and could thus be understood as a cycle of perpetual upgrades, new versions, and fresh releases.

  But this interpretation of digital progress was foreign to a seasoned businessman like Larry Kay. “Business 2.0,” he said, shaking his old head wearily at me. “What the hell does that mean?”

  In the summer of 1996, everybody in San Francisco—with the exception of a few “Business 1.0” dinosaurs like Larry Kay—believed in the future of a networked economy. None of us really understood what evangelical terms like “Business 2.0” meant, but we were all seduced by their seemingly infinite promise. Especially me. So, in answer to Kay’s question, I pitched him all the standard clichés of the time about the economic potential of the Web. I explained how it was an “interactive” and “frictionless” medium for distributing content in which large media companies would be “distintermediated” by agile Web startups. Quoting Web idealists like John Perry Barlow, I promised the magazine publisher that “information wants to be free,” although I had no evidence that information had volition and could demand its own emancipation. Most of all, I presented the Web as a virtual Soho. The Web would create an “abundant” cultural economy, I promised, a cornucopia of music, photographs, writing, and movies where everyone would eventually be able to see, watch, and read anything they chose.

  The pitch launched my Internet career. Larry Kay put me in charge of establishing a Web strategy for Fi. A few days later, he called me back into his office. Kay had made his fortune selling scrambled eggs and buttermilk pancakes to hungry Americans, so he remained perplexed by the Web’s slippery economics.

  “This Business 2.0 thing,” he asked, looking at me quizzically, as if there was something blatantly obvious that he’d somehow missed. “How do we make money out of it?”

  By now, I’d become an expert on the economics of the Internet. At least in theory. “Advertising,” I explained, forgetting the buy, sell, trade principles I’d learned in Soho. “All the revenue, Larry, is in advertising.”

  It wasn’t hard to be an Internet expert back then. Especially in theory. In the first Web gold rush of the midnineties, nobody—except Amazon—was selling anything online. Even advertising. The traditional buy, sell, trade principles of conventional business had been replaced by a “giveaway” economy. The point was to get your content online and give people everything that they wanted. “Eyeballs,” as everyone described audience, were the holy grail; the more eyeballs, everyone assumed, the more revenue. It was taken for granted, treated as a matter of faith, like believing in Santa Claus or Webvan, that the advertising revenue would eventually flow from eyeballs. And we were all doing our best imitations of
Santa Claus back then. Every website—from Netscape and the New York Times to Yahoo—was giving away its online product to “consumers” for free. It was a gift economy—all gift and no economics. As if every day were Christmas.

  Chris Anderson later wrote a book in support of this “economy.” Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it was called, even though Anderson’s publisher did have the good sense to charge $26.99 for the book. And, it almost goes without saying, Anderson himself was well compensated for writing this seductive nonsense—getting a reputed $500,000 advance on future sales of a book that advised fellow writers they could build their “brands” by giving away their creative work for nothing on the Internet.

  After a few months, I caught the full startup virus and left Fi to launch my own Internet company, AudioCafe. It was an easy virus to catch, especially given all the investment money suddenly sloshing around San Francisco. Back then, it really did seem as if the Internet was the answer. The Web “changed everything” about the music industry, I promised my investors. It created a global distribution platform for music, it empowered bands to record and distribute their own creative work, and it revolutionized the physics of merchandizing, I explained. Above all, by turning atoms into bits, the Web did away with scarcity and made music infinite, limitless, and abundant. Whereas those music stores on Berwick Street were physically constrained in how many CDs or vinyl records they could carry, a website could, in theory, carry all the music in the world. And so AudioCafe was designed as an online combination of a Soho club and store, a place to read reviews, listen to music, and interact with musicians. We hardly had any revenue. But we did have eyeballs.