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

[tobias c. van Veen]

> like Karl Marx, he [Andrew Keen]
> offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details.

Actually, Marx was very good with the details, and more or less ran into
problems with general theories that attempted to articulate future
consequences (materialist dialects). For example, the theory that profits
fall over time in Capital Volume 3 appears to be more or less a localized
law under certain conditions than a general law of capital. In such
instances Marx contradicts his most abstract law -- which is to say, as he
recognised in the analogy of economics to biology, and not physics, his most
concrete -- which argues that economic laws themselves change over time.

As for Keen,  I like the idea of a critique of Web 2.0, and unlike others
here, I find Adorno quite insightful -- or perhaps a certain Adorno, the
Adorno of _Minima Moralia_, _Negative Dialects_, and with Horkheimer,
_Dialects of Enlightenment_, but not the Adorno of the culture industries or
his work, say, critiquing "hot jazz." People seem to forget that Adorno
lived through tough times, tougher than we have it, certainly. His critique
is born of the sharpest of those dark, if not darkest, moments.

As for Keen, the Manifesto contradicts itself on several points. I am not
sure why -- as it seems half tongue-in-cheek? -- and I am not sure it is
worth the expenditure to consider its inconsistencies here. Needless to say
I found Keen's supposed Adorno to be something of a caricature, the Adorno
that I don't think Adorno particularly liked either, the Adorno that
critiqued mass taste but -- and this is what Keen is sorely missing -- also
critiqued all taste. This is the methodology of the negative dialectic:
neither one nor the other, so as to keep in reserve, to save, to preserve,
if you will, the ideal of a future to-come, utopia. Keen, on the other hand,
reads Adorno as a Platonist, but here Plato too appears only in caricature.
But caricatures are often the bread and butter of manifestos, which can be
delightfully subversive -- or dreadfully predictable. I am afraid Keen's
tends towards the latter.

-- tV


tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
McGill Communication & Philosophy