=================================================================
Descriptions du produit
Revue de presse
Pacey and chilling... A powerful, frightening read --Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
Andrew Keen's pleasingly incisive study argues that, far from being a democratising force in society, the internet has only amplified global inequities. --John Naughton, Observer
Keen has a sharp eye when it comes to skewering the pretensions and self-delusions of the new digital establishment --Financial Times
A punchy manifesto about the future and integrity of the internet age... This book is a must-read for for anyone remotely concerned about their lives on the net. --Independent
Extremely well-researched and well-written --William Hartston, Daily Express
A packed compendium of all the ways digital life casts aside basic human virtues in favor of a rapacious, winner-takes-all economy. Out of Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos came the myths that information "wants to be free" and that the Internet is fueling a cooperative new utopianism. Keen is excellent at exposing the hypocrisy of that mythology. --Michael Harris, Washington Post
Andrew Keen has written a very powerful and daring manifesto questioning whether the Internet lives up to its own espoused values. He is not an opponent of Internet culture, he is its conscience, and must be heard. --Po Bronson
Andrew Keen has again shown himself one of the sharpest critics of Silicon Valley hype, greed, egotism, and inequity. His tales are revealing, his analyses biting. --Mark Bauerlain, author of The Dumbest Generation
Keen provokes us in every sense of the word-at times maddening, more often thought-provoking, he lets just enough out of the Silicon Valley hot air balloon to start a real conversation about the full impact of digital technology. --Larry Downes, co-author of Unleashing the Killer App
A provocative title and an even more provocative book. Andrew Keen rightly challenges us to think about how the internet will shape society. I remain more optimistic, but hope I'm right to be so. --Mark Read, CEO, WPP Digital
If you've ever wondered why the New Economy looks suspiciously like the Old Economy - only with even more for the winners and less for everyone else - put down your shiny new phablet and read this book. --Robert Levine, author of Free Ride
Andrew Keen is the Christopher Hitchens of the Internet. Neglect this book with peril. In an industry and world full of prosaic pabulum about the supposedly digitally divine, Keen's work is an important and sharp razor. --Michael Fertik, CEO, Reputation.com --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Présentation de l'éditeur
In this sharp and witty book, long-time Silicon Valley observer and author Andrew Keen argues that, on balance, the Internet has had a disastrous impact on all our lives.
By tracing the history of the Internet, from its founding in the 1960s to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989, through the waves of start-ups and the rise of the big data companies to the increasing attempts to monetize almost every human activity, Keen shows how the Web has had a deeply negative effect on our culture, economy and society.
Informed by Keen's own research and interviews, as well as the work of other writers, reporters and academics, The Internet is Not the Answer is an urgent investigation into the tech world - from the threat to privacy posed by social media and online surveillance by government agencies, to the impact of the Internet on unemployment and economic inequality.
Keen concludes by outlining the changes that he believes must be made, before it's too late. If we do nothing, he warns, this new technology and the companies that control it will continue to impoverish us all. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Voir l'ensemble des Descriptions du produit
==============================================================
The Guardian : Computing and the net The Observer John Naughton
Sunday 1 February 2015 07.00 GMT
A view across Silicon Valley, California: has the effect of the internet merely been to concentrate more wealth in the hands of a few companies and individuals? Photograph: Alamy
The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983, and for its first 10 years was almost exclusively the preserve of academic researchers, which meant that cyberspace evolved as a parallel, utopian universe in which the norms of “meatspace” (John Perry Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) did not apply. In fact, for most of the first two decades, the real world remained blissfully unaware of the existence of the virtual one.
And then Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, and in 1993 Marc Andreessen released Mosaic, the first graphical browser, and suddenly the real world realised what the internet was and, more importantly, what it could do. What happened next was, with hindsight, predictable, though relatively few people spotted it at the time. It was later summed up by John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as “the greatest legal accumulation of wealth in history”. More succinctly you could say that what happened was that Wall Street moved west.
Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist. In the 1990s he founded a startup in the Bay Area and drank the Kool-Aid that fuelled the first internet bubble. But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0, and whenever conference organisers wanted to ensure a bloody good row, Andrew Keen was the man they invited to give the keynote address.
If his new book is anything to go by, Keen has lost none of his edge, but he’s expanded the scope and depth of his critique. He wants to persuade us to transcend our childlike fascination with the baubles of cyberspace so that we can take a long hard look at the weird, dysfunctional, inegalitarian, comprehensively surveilled world that we have been building with digital tools. In that sense, The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking.
Like these other critics, Keen challenges the dominant narrative about the internet – that it’s a technology that liberates, informs and empowers people. The problem with this narrative, he points out, is not that it’s wrong – the network does indeed have the potential to do all of these marvellous things, and much more besides. The problem is that it’s not the whole story, and perhaps it will turn out to be the least important part of it.
The more important truth about the internet, Keen thinks, is that it has evolved into a global machine for creating a world characterised by vast and growing inequality. “The error that evangelists make,” he writes, “is to assume that the internet’s open, decentralised technology naturally translates into a less hierarchical or unequal society. But rather than more openness and the destruction of hierarchies, an unregulated network society is breaking the old centre, compounding economic and cultural inequality, and creating a digital generation of masters of the universe. This new power may be rooted in a borderless network, but it still translates into massive wealth and power for a tiny handful of companies and individuals.”
Advertisement
Another chorus of the dominant narrative is the unavoidability of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”, which is another word for the collateral damage inflicted by Silicon Valley’s most revered process: disruption. Many critics just burble on about this, but Keen had the inspired idea of going to see what technology-wrought destruction is really like, up close. He goes to Rochester, New York, the city that was once the company town of Eastman Kodak, the analogue giant that was destroyed by digital technology. Kodak once employed 145,000 people worldwide. What Keen finds in Rochester is not only a Detroit-style ghost town, but also 55,000 former employees whose pensions have vanished in a puff of bankruptcy.
In the decades to come, we can expect many more Rochesters. In the pre-digital age, industrial development produced disruption, but also jobs. In contrast, the new giants of the digital revolution are a neoliberal’s wet dream, producing fabulous wealth for the owners of capital while employing very few ordinary mortals – except perhaps for those working in the concierge economy as serfs catering to the whims of elites that are cash-rich but time-poor.
Far from being the “answer” to society’s problems, Keen argues, the internet is at the root of many of them. As a result, it poses an existential question for democracies everywhere: can elected governments control the waves of creative destruction now sweeping through our societies as the digital revolution gathers momentum? Mr Keen doesn’t have an answer to this question. But then – as an inspection of our current election campaign confirms – neither do we.
The Internet Is Not the Answer is published by Atlantic (£16.99). Click here to order it for £13.59
|