[iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Andrew Keen)

[David Berry]

Whilst the Web 2.0 phenomena has been useful for showing us that the  
Californian Ideology has life in it yet, I am not sure that binary  
oppositions between high/low culture are that useful for an analysis  
of the ideology of the information society (unless discourses of high/ 
low are used to show us something interesting about these debates in  
themselves). Also, I am sure I am not the only one to tire of hearing  
the old chestnut of 'today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media',  
we only need to have a cursory look at history to see that  
pornography did not 'reveal' clay writing, stone carving, vellum  
script or a host of other mediums. Rather, the ubiquity of  
pornography on the web reveals something about the continual  
expansion of capitalism into our social and personal lives, and that  
the gratification of desire structured through new technology creates  
new markets for individuals disciplined through a 'control  
society' (Deleuze).

In any case I am not sure that *avoiding* 'digital utopianism' is  
something we should be aiming for.  Instead I would argue that it is  
precisely the political imaginary manifested through new technologies  
that offers the possibility of political praxis for radical politics.  
So I would happily call for more 'spinning and whirling and ...  
continual flux' and less Platonic authoritarianism.

Best

David






On 25 Apr 2007, at 12:05, Trebor Scholz wrote:

> Welcome to Andrew Keen. His "deliciously subversive new book," "The  
> Cult of the Amateur" "exposes the grave consequences of today’s new  
> participatory Web 2.0 and reveals
> how it threatens our values..." There is a parallel to Jaron  
> Lanier's "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online  
> Collectivism." (Thanks to Bernardo Parrella for the link.)
>
> THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen
>
> 1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive  
> delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology -- in  
> the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts --  will
> enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie  
> directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone  
> has something interesting to say.
>
> 2. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media  
> will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon  
> criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired
> of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite  
> (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able  
> to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a
> work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an  
> ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be  
> tasteless.
>
> 3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as  
> well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to  
> that triangular space between Frankfurt,
> Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to  
> undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a  
> 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library
> of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of  
> fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it  
> shouldn’t be fiction.
>
> 4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad  
> media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major  
> record labels and publishing houses has
> discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such  
> as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo” three). It  
> is most unlikely that citizen media will
> have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of  
> equivalent prodigy.
>
> 5. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984  
> Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen  
> Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth”
> about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big  
> Brother and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the  
> dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the
> dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will  
> think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George  
> Orwell).
>
> 6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a  
> theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long  
> Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small
> media producers industriously trading with one another. But  
> Anderson’s “Long Tail” is really a long tale. The real economic  
> future is something akin to Google -- a vertiginous
> media world in which content and advertising become so  
> indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to  
> that Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).
>
> 7. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The  
> future of general media content, the place culture is going, is  
> Voyeurweb.com: the convergence of
> self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity -- a self- 
> argument in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us, we  
> have a responsibility to protect people from
> their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst  
> instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more  
> disciplined than themselves.
>
> 8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early  
> Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in  
> its holy trinity of online community,
> individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership.  
> Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute  
> faith in the virtue of human nature that lends
> the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual  
> Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.
>
> 9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is  
> the most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be  
> fought word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase,
> delusion-by-delusion.  As an opening gambit, let’s focus on the  
> meaning of four key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) author  
> b) audience c) community d) elitism.
>
> 10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development  
> will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and  
> in continual flux. Everything will be in motion;
> everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous  
> opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he was of the opinion  
> that opinionated artists should be banned from his
> Republic.
>
>
>
>
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