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

Wed Apr 25 10:18:02 EDT 2007

This is part of a bigger question, as Adorno suggests.

Where does good taste reside and how does a particular taste become
prevalent?

Fashion might be an interesting example here. To quite an extent it is true
that high fashion taste is set by an elite - mainly the fashion houses of
Paris, Milan, London, NYC and Tokyo. However, they take their ideas from all
over the place. It is accepted as standard practice in the fashion industry,
as well as other design professions, to regard other people's creative work
as fair game. Having taught (many years ago) on a reputable UK fashion
program I was surprised (at the time) to see lecturers setting students
projects where they were told to take the work of an artist (any artist they
like, or perhaps a specific artist, or a style) and to use it as the basis
for designing a collection.

Coming out of a contemporary arts background I was amazed at this. One would
never suggest this to a fine art student as a means to initiate work, as the
value of novelty and self expression are the touchstones of both fine art
practice and pedagogy. The initiative has to come from the artist (or at
least that is the premise).

The point of this story is to suggest that taste can have murky orgins.
Those so called "trend setters" or "opinion formers" get their trends and
opinions from somewhere...

Taking the example of fashion a little further, whilst it is the case that
high fashion is primarily determined by a few fashion houses it is also the
case that street fashion is quite different. Having lived in London for some
decades I have observed how trends emerge and are picked up. Sometimes they
come out of the media (via pop groups, TV, etc) but more often than not they
start with small groups of individuals somewhere just trying something out,
for the heck of it, finding it cool as a means of badging themselves, and
then others joining in.

This would suggest that Adorno didn't quite get it. He may have been right
speaking of Germany in the 1930's but the London of the late 20th Century,
and many other such places, would seem to suggest a different model of how
taste is created and picked up.

In this respect there is nothing new in the digitopian calls for a
democratic web. Street culture already is like this. Of course you could say
that such culture is tasteless...and you could very well be right.

However, it is a matter of taste.

Regards

Simon

On 25/4/07 07:17, "Gere, Charlie" <c.gere at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

> I have no doubt there will be all sorts of fuss and noise about this, but I
> think it sounds spot on and about time we had some proper trenchant critique
> of some of absolute nonsense talked about Web 2:0, especially if it involves
> Adorno. I will definitely be buying the book. Well done Andrew!
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net on behalf of Trebor Scholz
> Sent: Wed 4/25/2007 12:05 PM
> To: IDC list
> Subject: [iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Andrew Keen)
>  
> 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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Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
AIM: simonbiggsuk

Research Professor in Art, Edinburgh College of Art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
http://www.eca.ac.uk/