by Andrew Keen
It’s a conversation that needs to take place in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, and the other centers of digital power in our networked world. The time is now ripe for this. Some of the more responsible entrepreneurs, academics, and investors are finally recognizing that the Internet—the technological revolution they believed would make the world a radically better place—hasn’t been an unmitigated success. Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz warns about the increasing inequality of our digital age. Union Square Ventures’s Fred Wilson worries about the dangerous new monopolies of our digital economy. New York University’s Clay Shirky is troubled by the tragic fate of journalists in a world without print newspapers. Charles Leadbeater says the Web has lost its way. Emily Bell frets about our new media one percent economy. Marc Andreessen is concerned with the impact of anonymous networks on civic life. MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman worries that the Internet’s “Original Sin,” its reliance on free advertising’s supporting content, has transformed the network into a fiasco. Distinguished bloggers, writers, and journalists like Dave Winer, Astra Taylor, John Naughton, Dan Gillmor, Om Malik, and Mathew Ingram all fear the power of large Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Jeff Jarvis is disgusted by the plague of trolls, abusers, harassers, lunatics, imposters, and assholes on the Internet.
“What society are we building here?” Jarvis asks.68 And that question should be the beginning of every conversation about the Internet. Like it or not, the digital world is reshaping our society with a bewildering speed. The fate of employment, identity, privacy, prosperity, justice, and civility are all being transformed by networked society. The Internet may not (yet) be the answer, but it nonetheless remains the central question of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
On my way out of the club, I passed by some words inscribed on a black marble slab. WE SHAPE OUR BUILDINGS; THEREAFTER THEY SHAPE US, they said. Outside, a cold fog had drifted in from the Bay. It felt good to be back in the anonymous city—that reassuring place of self-erasure and self-invention. I shivered and, dodging a couple of networked Uber limousines, hailed a licensed yellow cab.
“So what’s that new club like?” the driver asked me as we sped off down Battery Street toward San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) district, where the new offices of Internet companies like Twitter, Yelp, and Instagram are destroying local businesses.
“It’s a failure,” I replied. “An epic fucking failure.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sometimes one gets lucky. In March 2013, at Julia Hobsbawm’s Names Not Numbers conference in the delightful little town of Adeburgh on the Suffolk coast, I had the great fortune to meet the Atlantic Books CEO Toby Munday. Over copious cups of tea at a little café on the seafront, Toby convinced me to write a book synthesizing all my ideas about the Internet. The book was originally entitled Epic Fail. But having sold the American rights to Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove Atlantic in New York, Morgan wisely convinced us to change its name to The Internet Is Not the Answer.
Toby is a great salesman. “It’ll be easy,” he promised me in Aldeburgh. “Just summarize evrything you know about the Internet.” But books, of course, are anything but easy and The Internet Is Not the Answer is as much Toby and Morgan’s book (at least its good bits) as mine. Morgan was a particularly insightful editor, encouraging me to concentrate on the book’s historical dimension and its structure. Thanks also to the teams at both Grove Atlantic in New York City and Atlantic Books in London. especially the excellent Peter Blackstock who has worked tirelessly with me throughout the editorial process. Many thanks also to my agent, George Lucas; to my researchers, Sophia Dominguez, Brittany Sholes, Quan Nguyen, and Nico Appel; and to Dodi Axelson for kindly setting up my visit to the Ericsson offices in Stockholm.
I also got lucky in early 2010 when I recieved a call from my friend Keith Teare, Mike Arrington’s cofounder at TechCrunch, who was setting up the TechCrunchTV network. Keith recommended me to Paul Carr and Jon Orlin at TechCrunchTV, and my show Keen On . . . was the first program on the network, running for four years and including over two hundred interviews with leading Internet thinkers and critics. In particular, I’d like to thank Kurt Andersen, John Borthwick, Stewart Brand, Po Bronson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Nicholas Carr, Clayton Christensen, Ron Conway, Tyler Cowen, Kenneth Cukier, Larry Downes, Tim Draper, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Walter Isaacson, Tim Ferriss, Michael Fertik, Ze Frank, David Frigstad, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Peter Hirshberg, Reid Hoffman, Ryan Holiday, Brad Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Kelly, David Kirkpatrick, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Robert Levine, Steven Levy, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew McAfee, Gavin Newsom, George Packer, Eli Pariser, Andrew Rasiej, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Schroeder, Tiffany Shlain, Robert Scoble, Dov Seidman, Gary Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Micah Sifry, Martin Sorrell, Tom Standage, Bruce Sterling, Brad Stone, Clive Thompson, Sherry Turkle, Fred Turner, Yossi Vardi, Hans Vestberg, Vivek Wadhwa, and Steve Wozniak for appearing on Keen On . . . and sharing their valuable ideas with me.
NOTES
Preface
1 The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2007), and Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (New York: St. Martin, 2012).
Introduction
1 Carolyne Zinko, “New Private S.F. Club the Battery,” SFGate, October 4, 2013.
2 Renée Frojo, “High-Society Tech Club Reborn in San Francisco,” San Francisco Business Times, April 5, 2013.
3 The Battery describes itself on its website: “Indeed, here is where they came to refill their cups. To tell stories. To swap ideas. To eschew status but enjoy the company of those they respected. Here is where they came to feel at home on an evening out.” For more, see: thebatterysf.com/club.
4 Liz Gannes, “Bebo Founders Go Analog with Exclusive Battery Club in San Francisco,” AllThingsD, May 21, 2013.
5 Zinko, “New Private S.F. Club the Battery.”
6 Ibid.
7 “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Twain originally said. See Alex Ayres, Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations (New York: Dover, 1999), p. 35.
8 Julie Zeveloff, “A Tech Entrepreneur Supposedly Spent $35 Million on San Francisco’s Priciest House,” Business Insider, April 16, 2013, businessinsider.com/trevor-traina-buys-san-francisco-mansion-2013-4?op=1.
9 Anisse Gross, “A New Private Club in San Francisco, and an Old Diversity Challenge,” New Yorker, October 9, 2013.
10 Timothy Egan, “Dystopia by the Bay,” New York Times, December 5, 2013.
11 David Runciman, “Politics or Technology—Which Will Save the World?,” Guardian, May 23, 2014.
12 John Lanchester, “The Snowden Files: Why the British Public Should Be Worried About GCHQ,” Guardian, October 3, 2013.
13 Thomas L. Friedman, “A Theory of Everything (Sort Of),” New York Times, August 13, 2011.
14 Saul Klein, “Memo to boards: the internet is staying,” Financial Times, August 5, 2014.
15 Mark Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age,” New Republic, June 17, 2014.
16 Craig Smith, “By the Numbers: 30 Amazing Reddit Statistics,” expandedramblings.com, February 26, 2014.
17 Alexis Ohanian, Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed (New York: Grand Central, 2013).
18 Alexis C. Madrigal, “It Wasn’t Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster,” Atlantic, April 2013.
19 Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age.”
20 Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook and Engineering the Public,” Medium, June 29, 2014.
21 Pew Research Center, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.: The Overall Verdict: The Internet Has Been a Plus for Society and an Especially Good Thing for Individual Users.”
22 Esha Chhabra, “Ubiquitous Across Globe, Cellphones Have Become Tool for Doing Good,” New York Times, November 8, 2013.
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br /> 23 Julia Angwin, “Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good?,” New York Times, March 3, 2014.
24 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. xi.
25 Ibid.
Chapter One
1 “Ericsson Mobility Report,” 2013.
2 Mat Honan, “Don’t Diss Cheap Smartphones. They’re About to Change Everything,” Wired, May 16, 2014.
3 Tim Worstall, “More People Have Mobile Phones Than Toilets,” Forbes, March 23, 2013.
4 “More Than 50 Billion Connected Devices,” Ericsson white paper.
5 Michael Chui, Markus Loffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.
6 Matthieu Pelissie du Rausas, James Manyika, Eric Hazan, Jacques Burghin, Michael Chui, and Remi Said, “Internet Matters: The Net’s Sweeping Impact on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity,” McKinsey, May 2011.
7 See: “Data Never Sleeps 2.0,” infographic from the data company Domo, domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-2.
8 Clive Thompson, “Dark Hero of the Information Age: The Original Computer Geek,” New York Times, March 20, 2005.
9 James Harkin, Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are (London: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 19.
10 John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), p. 52.
11 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1948).
12 Harkin, Cyburbia, p. 22.
13 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
14 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 65.
15 “Science, The Endless Frontier,” a report to the president by Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945.
16 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 70.
17 Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 34.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 38.
20 Paul Dickson, “Sputnik’s Impact on America,” PBS, November 6, 2007.
21 Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, p. 20.
22 Ibid., p. 15.
23 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 95.
24 “I was driving one day to UCLA from RAND and couldn’t find a single parking spot in all of UCLA nor the entire adjacent town of Westwood,” Baran recalled. “At that instant I concluded that it was God’s will that I should discontinue school. Why else would He have found it necessary to fill up all the parking lots at that exact instant?,” Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, p. 54.
25 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 92.
26 Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, p. 55.
27 Ibid., p. 56.
28 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), p. 22.
29 Ibid., p. 16.
30 Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, pp. 41–42.
31 Ibid., p. 263.
32 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, p. 39.
33 Ibid., p. 249.
34 Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 186.
35 Larry Downes and Chunka Mui, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998).
36 Ibid.
37 Outlook Team, “The 41-Year History of Email,” Mashable, September 20, 2012.
38 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996.
39 David A. Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: Perennial, 2000), p. 229.
40 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, p. 218.
41 Bush, “As We May Think.”
42 Gary Wolf, “The Curse of Xanadu,” Wired, June 1995.
43 Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 5.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., p. 6.
46 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2013), p. 105.
47 John Cassidy, DOT.CON: The Real Story of Why the Internet Bubble Burst (Penguin, 2002), p 19.
48 Naughton, A Brief History of the Future, ch. 15.
49 Ibid., p. 261.
Chapter Two
1 David Streitfeld, “Tom Perkins, Defender of the 1% Once Again,” New York Times, February 14, 2014.
2 Peter Delevett, “Tom Perkins Apologizes for Holocaust Comments, but It’s Hardly His First Controversy,” San Jose Mercury News, February 14, 2014.
3 “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?,” Letters, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014.
4 Delevett, “Tom Perkins Apologizes for Holocaust Comments.”
5 David Streitfeld and Malia Wollan, “Tech Rides Are Focus of Hostility in Bay Area,” New York Times, January 31, 2014.
6 Tom Perkins, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (New York: Gotham, 2007).
7 Ibid.
8 Jordan Weissmann, “Millionaire Apologizes for Comparing Progressives to Nazis, Says His Watch Is Worth a ‘6-Pack of Rolexes,’” Atlantic, January 27, 2014.
9 Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), p. 12.
10 Berners-Lee was specifically responding to the University of Minnesota’s spring 1993 decision to charge a licensing fee for its Gopher browser. See Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), pp. 72–73.
11 John Cassidy, Dot.Con: The Real Story of Why the Internet Bubble Burst (London: Penguin, 2002).
12 Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams, pp. 157, 209. See also “John Doerr #23, The Midas List,” Forbes, June 4, 2014.
13 Kevin Roose, “Go West, Young Bank Bro,” San Francisco, February 21, 2014.
14 Cassidy, Dot.Con, p. 22.
15 Jim Clark, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), p. 34.
16 Ibid., p. 68.
17 Cassidy, Dot.Con, p. 63.
18 Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams, p. 243.
19 Clark, Netscape Time, p. 261.
20 Ibid., p. 251.
21 Ibid., p. 249.
22 Ibid., p. 119.
23 Ibid., p. 67.
24 Thomson Venture Economics, special tabulations, June 2003.
25 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Random House, 1996).
26 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 1997).
27 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010).
28 Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, p. 156.
29 Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: Free Press, 1995).
30 Ibid., p. 47.
31 Ibid., p. 48.
32 “The Greatest Defunct Web Sites and Dotcom Disasters,” CNET, June 5, 2008.
33 Cassidy, Dot.con, pp. 242–45.
34 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 48.
35 Ibid.
36 Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolities,” AVC.com, July 22, 2014.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Matthew Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit,” Slate, January 30, 2014.
40 Stone, The Everything Store, pp. 181–82.
41 Ibid., p. 173.
42 Jeff Bercovici, “Amazon Vs. Book Publishers, By The Numbers,” Forbes, February 10, 2014.
43 George Packer, “Cheap Words,” New Yorker, February 17, 2014.
44 Steve Wasserman, “The Amazon Effect,” Nation, May 29, 2012.
45 Sarah Butler, “Independent Bookshops in Decline as Buying Habits Change,” Guardian, February 21, 2014.
46 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 243.
47 Ibid, p. 340.
48 Stacy Mitchell, “The Truth about Amazon and Job Creation,” Institute for Local Self-Reliance, July 29, 2013, ilsr.org/amazonfacts.
49 Simon Head, “Worse than Walmart: Amazon’s Sick Brutality and Secret History of Ruthlessly Intimidating Workers,” Salon, February 23, 2014.
50 Spencer Soper, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Fight for Unemployment Benefits,” Morning Call, December 17, 2012.
51 Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse Jobs Push Workers to Physical Limit,” Seattle Times, April 3, 2012.
52 Lara Stevens, “Amazon Vexed by Strikes in Germany,” New York Times, June 19, 2013. See also Ollie John, “Amazon Fires ‘Neo-Nazi’ Security Firm at German Facilities,” Time, February 19, 2013.
53 “Amazon workers face ‘increased risk of mental illness,’” BBC Business News, November 20, 2013.
54 Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse Jobs Push Workers to Physical Limit.”
55 Ibid.
56 “Amazon’s Power Play,” Editorial Board, New York Times, June 3, 2014.
57 Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit.”
58 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, p. 125.
59 “Yahoo! Still First Portal Call,” BBC News, June 5, 1998.
60 Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), pp. 69–120.
61 Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, p. 115.
62 Levy, In the Plex, p. 22.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., p. 32.
66 Ibid., p. 33.
67 Ibid., p. 73.
68 Ibid., p. 99.
69 Ibid., p. 93.
70 Ibid.
71 “Google’s Income Statement Information,” investor.google.com/financial/tables.html. See also Seth Rosenblatt, “Google Demolishes Financial Expectations to Close 2013,” CNET, January 30, 2014.
72 Danny Sullivan, “Google Still World’s Most Popular Search Engine by Far, but Share of Unique Search Dips Slightly,” SearchEngineLand, February 11, 2013.