The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen

  73 Moises Naim, The End of Power: From Boards to Battlegrounds and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

  74 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), p. 113.

  75 “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly.com, September 30, 2005.

  76 Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 202.

  77 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap,” TechCrunch, September 9, 2013, techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/the-data-factory.

  78 Anoushka Sakoul, “Concentrated Cash Pile Puts Recovery in Hands of the Few,” Financial Times, January 22, 2014.

  79 John Plender, “Apple, Google and Facebook Are Latter-Day Scrooges,” Financial Times, December 29, 2013.

  80 Ibid.

  81 Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (New York: Heinemann, 2009), pp. 62, 73, 74, 175.

  82 Stephen Silberman, “The Geek Syndrome,” Wired, September 2001.

  83 Rebecca Savastio, “Facebook Founder Zuckerberg’s Asperger’s Problem,” Las Vegas Guardian, September 5, 2013.

  84 Nicholas Carlson, “Coping with Asperger’s: A Survival Manual for Mark Zuckerberg,” Business Insider, July 25, 2008.

  85 Austin Carr, “Facebook Everywhere,” Fast Company, July/August 2014.

  86 Felix Gillette, “The Rise and Inglorious Fall of MySpace,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 22, 2011.

  87 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 16.

  88 Carr, “Facebook Everywhere.”

  89 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, p. 305.

  90 Carr, “Facebook Everywhere.”

  91 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, p. 316.

  92 Ibid., p. 332.

  93 Ibid., p. 313.

  94 “Journal That Published Facebook Mood Study Expresses ‘Concern’ at Its Ethics,” Associated Press, July 3, 2014.

  95 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, p. 314.

  96 Charlie Warzel, “Your Next Phone Will Be the Ultimate Surveillance Machine,” Buzzfeed, November 27, 2013.

  97 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, p. 199.

  98 Ibid., p. 210.

  99 Matthew Sparkes, “Young Users See Facebook as ‘Dead and Buried,’” Daily Telegraph, December 27, 2013.

  100 Maria Konnikova, “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,” New Yorker, September 10, 2013.

  101 Charlie Warzel, “Americans Still Don’t Trust Facebook with Their Privacy,” Buzzfeed, April 3, 2014.

  102 Alexandra Sifferlin, “Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself,” Time, January 24, 2003.

  103 Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, p. 36.

  104 Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), p. 5.

  105 Evan Spiegel, LA Hacks Keynote Address, April 11, 2014.

  106 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 83.

  107 Marc Andreessen, “Why Bitcoin Matters,” New York Times, January 21, 2014.

  108 Ibid.

  109 Colin Lecher, “How Did a $10 Potato Salad Kickstarter Raise More than $30,000?,” Verge, July 7, 2014.

  110 Sarah Eckel, “You Want Me to Give You Money for What?,” BBC Capital, May 1, 2014.

  111 Ryan Lawler, “Airbnb Tops 10 Million Guest Stays Since Launch, Now Has 550,000 Properties Listed Worldwide,” TechCrunch, December 19, 2013.

  112 Sydney Ember, “Airbnb’s Huge Valuation,” New York Times, April 21, 2014. See also Carolyn Said, “Airbnb’s Swank Digs Reflect Growth, but Controversy Grows,” SFGate, January 27, 2014.

  113 Thomas L. Friedman, “And Now for a Bit of Good News . . .” New York Times, July 19, 2014.

  114 Will Oremus, “Silicon Valley Uber Alles,” Slate, June 6, 2014.

  115 See Dan Amira, “Uber Will Ferry Hampton-Goers Via Helicopter This July 3rd,” New York, July 2013, nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/uber-helicopter-uberchopper-hamptons-july-3rd.html.

  116 Jessica Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2013.

  117 Paul Sloan, “Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and Beyond),” CNET, December 19, 2011, news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57345138-93/marc-andreessen-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond.

  118 Mark Scott, “Traffic Snarls in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber,” New York Times, June 11, 2014.

  119 Kevin Roose, “Uber Might Be More Valuable than Facebook Someday. Here’s Why,” New York, December 6, 2013, nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/uber-might-be-more-valuable-than-facebook.html.

  120 Erin Griffith, “Meet the Uber Rich,” Fortune, June 5, 2014.

  Chapter Three

  1 In his afterword to the 2000 edition of Neuromancer, the American science fiction writer Jack Womack speculated that the book might have inspired the creation of the World Wide Web. “What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about,” Womack wrote.

  2 Michael Keene, “Rochester Crime Rates,” Examiner.com, February 4, 2010. For data on Rochester’s very high 2012 murder rate, see Karyn Bower, John Klofas, and Janelle Duda, “Homicide in Rochester, NY 2012: Comparison of Rates for a Selection of United States and International Cities,” Center of Public Initiatives, January 25, 2013.

  3 Rory Carroll, “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure . . . and the ‘Walking Dead’ It Leaves Behind,” Guardian, June 28, 2014.

  4 “How I Failed,” Cultivate Conference, New York City, October 14, 2013, cultivatecon.com/cultivate2013/public/schedule/detail/31551.

  5 “‘Fail Fast’ Advises LinkedIn Founder and Tech Investor Reid Hoffman,” BBC, January 11, 2011.

  6 “Failure: The F-Word Silicon Valley Loves and Hates,” NPR.org, June 19, 2012, npr.org/2012/06/19/155005546/failure-the-f-word-silicon-valley-loves-and-hates.

  7 Eric Markowitz, “Why Silicon Valley Loves Failure,” Inc., August 16, 2012, inc.com/eric-markowitz/brilliant-failures/why-silicon-valley-loves-failures.html/1.

  8 MIT Technology Review, September/October 2013, technologyreview.com/magazine/2013/09. The young entrepreneur featured on the cover was Ben Milne, the founder and CEO of a digital payments startup called Dwolla, who, the magazine claimed, was seeking to “demolish” the finance industry. Milne seems to think of himself as a big-time demolisher. On his own Instagram page, for example, he posted an image saying: “MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS.” instagram.com/p/epyqnEHQwg.

  9 David Wills, Hollywood in Kodachrome (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p. xiii.

  10 Ibid. Kodachrome film was also used to make eighty Oscar winners of the Best Picture award. See Rupert Neate, “Kodak Falls in the Creative Destruction of the Digital Age,” Guardian, January 19, 2013, theguardian.com/business/2012/jan/19/kodak-bankruptcy-protection.

  11 Ellen Gamerman, “I Snap Therefore I Am,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2013.

  12 Ibid.

  13 John Naughton, “Could Kodak’s Demise Have Been Averted?,” Guardian, January 21, 2012.

  14 Jason Farago, “Our Kodak Moments—and Creativity—Are Gone,” Guardian, August 23, 2013, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/photography-photography.

  15 Nick Brown, “US Judge Approves Kodak Plan to Exit Bankruptcy,” Reuters, August 20, 2013, reuters.com/article/2013/08/20/us-kodak-idUSBRE97J0W820130820.

  16 Julie Creswell, “Kodak’s Fuzzy Future,” New York Times, May 3, 2013, dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/after-bankruptcy-a-leaner-kodak-faces-an-uphill-battle.

  17 Derek Thompson, “What Jobs Will the Robots Take?,” Atlantic, January 23, 2014.

  18 Daniel Akst, “Automation Anxiety,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2013.

>   19 “Coming to an Office Near You . . .” Economist, January 18 , 2014.

  20 Martin Wolf, “If Robots Divide Us, They Will Conquer,” Financial Times, February 4, 2014.

  21 Tim Harford, “The Robots Are Coming and Will Terminate Your Jobs,” Financial Times, December 28–29, 2013.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 113.

  24 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), p. 198.

  25 Carole Cadwallader, “Are the Robots About to Rise? Google’s New Director of Engineering Thinks So . . .” Guardian, February 22, 2014.

  26 Samuel Gibbs, “What Is Boston Dynamics and Why Does Google Want Robots?,” Guardian, December 17, 2013.

  27 Lorraine Luk, “Foxconn Working with Google on Robotics,” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2014.

  28 Dan Rowinski, “Google’s Game of Moneyball in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” ReadWrite.com, January 29, 2014.

  29 Chunka Mui, “Google Car + Uber = Killer App,” Forbes, August 23, 2013.

  30 395,000 at UPS (pressroom.ups.com/Fact+Sheets/UPS+Fact+Sheet) and 300,000 at FedEx (about.van.fedex.com/company-information).

  31 Claire Cain Miller, “FedEx’s Price Rise Is a Blessing in Disguise for Amazon,” New York Times, May 9, 2014.

  32 David Streitfeld, “Amazon Floats the Notion of Delivery Drones,” New York Times, December 1, 2013.

  33 Charles Arthur, “Amazon Seeks US Permission to Test Prime Air Delivery Drones,” Guardian, July 11, 2014.

  34 Katie Lobosco, “Army of Robots to Invade Amazon Warehouse,” CNNMoney, May 22, 2014.

  35 George Packer, “Cheap Words,” New Yorker, February 17, 2014.

  36 “John Naughton, Why Facebook and Google Are Buying into Drones,” Observer, April 19, 2014.

  37 Reed Albergotti, “Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Emily Young, “Davos 2014: Google’s Schmidt Warning on Jobs,” BBC, January 23, 2014.

  40 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?,” Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013, oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.

  41 Derek Thompson, “What Jobs Will the Robots Take?,” Atlantic, January 23, 2014.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Erik Larson, “Kodak Reorganization Approval Affirms Move from Cameras,” Bloomberg, August 21, 2013, bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/kodak-bankruptcy-reorganization-plan-approved-by-new-york.html.

  44 “Kodak, Smaller and Redirected, Leaves Bankruptcy,” Associated Press, September 3, 2013.

  45 Julie Creswell, “Kodak’s Fuzzy Future,” New York Times, May 3, 2013, dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/after-bankruptcy-a-leaner-kodak-faces-an-uphill-battle.

  46 For a helpful timeline of Kodak’s 2013 emergence from bankruptcy, see “Key Events in the History of Eastman Kodak Company,” Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2013, nytimes.com/2013/09/04/business/kodak-smaller-and-redirected-leaves-bankruptcy.html?ref= eastmankodakcompany&_r=0&pagewanted=print; online.wsj.com/article/AP6b640447eb8a41418c01e4110720d4e4.html.

  47 Larson, “Kodak Reorganization Approval Affirms Move from Cameras.”

  48 For an introduction to the Eastman House collection see Photography from 1839 to Today: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY (London: Taschen, 1999).

  49 Greg Narain, “The New Kodak Moment: Why Storytelling Is Harder Than Ever,” Briansolis.com, November 21, 2013.

  50 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, p. 115.

  51 Ibid.

  52 Neate, “Kodak Falls in the Creative Destruction of the Digital Age.”

  53 Ibid. The comment was made by Robert Burley, a professor of photography at Ryerson University in Toronto, whose work on the collapse of film photography, The Disappearance of Darkness, was shown at the National Gallery of Canada in late 2013: gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/upcoming/details/robert-burley-disappearance-of-darkness-5324.

  54 John Naughton, “Could Kodak’s Demise Have Been Averted?,” Observer, January 21, 2012, theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/22/john-naughton-kodak-lessons.

  55 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (New York: Harper Business, 2011). For an introduction to Christensen’s ideas, see my TechCrunchTV interview with him. “Keen On . . . Clay Christensen: How to Escape the Innovator’s Dilemma,” April 2, 2012, techcrunch.com/2012/04/02/keen-on-clay-christensen-how-to-escape-the-innovators-dilemma-tctv. For a more critical view on the cult of Christensen, see Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” New Yorker, June 23, 2014.

  56 “The Last Kodak Moment?,” Economist, January 14, 2012. economist.com/node/21542796/print.

  57 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 348.

  58 Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It (New York: Bay Back Books, 2010).

  59 Paul F. Nunes and Larry Downes, “Big Bang Disruption: The Innovator’s Disaster,” Outlook, June 2013, accenture.com/us-en/outlook/Pages/outlook-journal-2013-big-bang-disruption-innovators-disaster.aspx.

  60 Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes, “Big-Bang Disruption,” Harvard Business Review, March 2013, hbr.org/2013/03/big-bang-disruption.

  61 Ibid.

  62 Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2014), p. 193.

  63 Jason Farago, “Our Kodak Moments—and Creativity—Are Gone,” Guardian, August 23, 2013, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/photography-photography.

  64 George Packer, “Celebrating Inequality,” New York Times, May 19, 2013.

  65 Ibid.

  66 “The Onrushing Wave,” Economist, January 18, 2014, p. 25.

  67 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap,” TechCrunch, September 9, 2013.

  68 David Brooks, “Capitalism for the Masses,” New York Times, February 20, 2014.

  69 Ibid.

  70 George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes: The Libertarian Futurism of a Silicon Valley Billionaire,” New Yorker, November 28, 2011.

  71 Ibid.

  72 Ibid.

  73 Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.

  74 Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 7.

  75 Eduardo Porter, “Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality,” New York Times, April 15, 2014.

  76 Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, “The Global Decline of Labor Share,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014.

  77 Thomas B. Edsall, “The Downward Ramp,” New York Times, June 10, 2014.

  78 Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), p. 53.

  79 Ibid., p. 229.

  80 Ibid., pp. 198–200.

  81 Joel Kotkin, “California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude,” Daily Beast, October 5, 2013.

  82 Paul Krugman, “Sympathy for the Luddites,” New York Times, June 13, 2013, nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print.

  Chapter Four

  1 Kara Swisher, “The Money Shot,” Vanity Fair, June 2013.

  2 Steve Bertoni, “The Stanford Billionaire Machine Strikes Again,” Forbes, August 1, 2013.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Swisher, “The Money Shot.”

  5 Systrom denies that there was a bidding war between Facebook and Twitter. But, according to Nick Bilton, the author of the bestselling Hatching Twitter (New York: Portfolio, 2013), there was on
e. See Nick Bilton, “Instagram Testimony Doesn’t Add Up,” New York Times, December 16, 2012, bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagram-testimony-doesnt-add-up-2/?_r=1.

  6 Emil Protalinski, “Thanksgiving Breaks Instagram Records: Over 10M Photos Shared at a Rate of Up to 226 per Second,” Next Web, November 23, 2012, thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/11/23/instagram-sees-new-record-during-thanksgiving-over-10m-photos-shared-at-a-rate-of-226-per-second.

  7 Emil Protalinski, “Instagram Says Thanksgiving 2013 Was Its Busiest Day So Far, but Fails to Share Exact Figures,” Next Web, November 29, 2013.

  8 Ingrid Lunden, “73% of U.S. Adults Use Social Networks, Pinterest Passes Twitter in Popularity, Facebook Stays on Top,” TechCrunch, December 31, 2013.

  9 Sarah Perez, “An App ‘Middle Class’ Continues to Grow: Independently Owned Apps with a Million-Plus Users Up 121% Over Past 18 Months,” TechCrunch, November 8, 2013.

  10 Ingrid Lunden, “Instagram Is the Fastest-Growing Social Site Globally, Mobile Devices Rule Over PCs for Access,” TechCrunch, January 21, 2014, techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/instagram-is-the-fastest-growing-social-site-globally-mobile-devices-rule-over-pcs-for-social-access.

  11 See, for example, Ellis Hamburger, “Instagram Announces Instagram Direct for Private Photo, Video and Text Messaging,” Verge, December 12, 2013.

  12 Alex Williams, “The Agony of Instagram,” New York Times, December 13, 2013.

  13 Sarah Nicole Prickett, “Where the Grass Looks Greener,” New York Times, November 17, 2013.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Williams, “The Agony of Instagram.”

  16 Tim Wu, “Sign of the Times: The Intimacy of Anonymity,” New York Times, June 3, 2014.

  17 Teddy Wayne, “Of Myself I Sing,” New York Times, August 24, 2014.

  18 Time, December 25, 2006.

  19 Packer, “Celebrating Inequality.”

  20 See, for example, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Free Press, 2009), and Elias Aboujaoude, Virtually You (New York: Norton, 2011).

  21 David Brooks, “High-Five Nation,” New York Times, September 15, 2009.