The Internet Is Not the Answer Read online

  The

  Internet

  Is Not the

  Answer

  Also by Andrew Keen

  The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture

  Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

  The

  Internet

  Is Not the

  Answer

  Andrew Keen

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Keen

  Jacket design by Christopher Moisan

  Author photograph by Michael Amsler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2313-8

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9231-8

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  In Memory of V Falber & Sons

  CONTENTS

  Preface: The Question

  Introduction: The Building Is the Message

  1 The Network

  2 The Money

  3 The Broken Center

  4 The Personal Revolution

  5 The Catastrophe of Abundance

  6 The One Percent Economy

  7 Crystal Man

  8 Epic Fail

  Conclusion: The Answer

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Preface

  THE QUESTION

  The Internet, we’ve been promised by its many evangelists, is the answer. It democratizes the good and disrupts the bad, they say, thereby creating a more open and egalitarian world. The more people who join the Internet, or so these evangelists, including Silicon Valley billionaires, social media marketers, and network idealists, tell us, the more value it brings to both society and its users. They thus present the Internet as a magically virtuous circle, an infinitely positive loop, an economic and cultural win-win for its billions of users.

  But today, as the Internet expands to connect almost everyone and everything on the planet, it’s becoming self-evident that this is a false promise. The evangelists are presenting us with what in Silicon Valley is called a “reality distortion field”—a vision that is anything but truthful. Instead of a win-win, the Internet is, in fact, more akin to a negative feedback loop in which we network users are its victims rather than beneficiaries. Rather than the answer, the Internet is actually the central question about our connected twenty-first-century world.

  The more we use the contemporary digital network, the less economic value it is bringing to us. Rather than promoting economic fairness, it is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich and poor and the hollowing out of the middle class. Rather than making us wealthier, the distributed capitalism of the new networked economy is making most of us poorer. Rather than generating more jobs, this digital disruption is a principal cause of our structural unemployment crisis. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists like Google and Amazon.

  Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency and openness, the Internet is creating a panopticon of information-gathering and surveillance services in which we, the users of big data networks like Facebook, have been packaged as their all-too-transparent product. Rather than creating more democracy, it is empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it has unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network. Rather than fostering a renaissance, it has created a selfie-centered culture of voyeurism and narcissism. Rather than establishing more diversity, it is massively enriching a tiny group of young white men in black limousines. Rather than making us happy, it’s compounding our rage.

  No, the Internet is not the answer. Not yet, anyway. This book, which synthesizes the research of many experts and builds upon the material from my two previous books about the Internet,1 explains why.

  The

  Internet

  Is Not the

  Answer

  Introduction

  THE BUILDING IS

  THE MESSAGE

  The writing is on the San Francisco wall. The words WE SHAPE OUR BUILDINGS; THEREAFTER THEY SHAPE US have been engraved onto a black slab of marble beside the front door of a social club called the Battery in downtown San Francisco. These words read like an epigram to the club. They are a reminder, perhaps even a warning to visitors that they will be shaped by the memorable building that they are about to enter.

  Lauded by the San Francisco Chronicle as the city’s “newest and biggest social experiment,”1 the Battery certainly is an ambitious project. Formerly the site of an industrial manufacturer of marble-cutting tools called the Musto Steam Marble Mill, the building has been reinvented by its new owners, two successful Internet entrepreneurs named Michael and Xochi Birch. Having sold the popular social media network Bebo to AOL for $850 million in 2008, the Birches acquired the Musto building on Battery Street for $13.5 million a year later and invested “tens of millions of dollars”2 to transform it into a social club. Their goal is to create a people’s club—a twenty-first-century House of Commons that, they promise, “eschews status,”3 allowing its members to wear jeans and hoodies and discouraging membership from stuffy old elites who “wear a business suit to work.”4 It’s an inclusive social experiment that the Birches, borrowing from Silicon Valley’s lexicon of disruption, call an “unclub”—an open and egalitarian place that supposedly breaks all the traditional rules and treats everyone the same, irrespective of their social status or wealth.

  “We are fans of the village pub where everyone knows everyone,” bubbled Michael Birch. His friends liken his irrepressible optimism to that of Walt Disney or Willy Wonka. “A private club can be the city’s replacement for the village pub, where you do, over time, get to know everyone and have a sense of emotional belonging.”5

  The club “offers privacy” but it isn’t about “the haves and the have-nots,” Xochi Birch added, echoing her husband’s egalitarianism. “We want diversity in every sense. I view it as us trying to curate a community.”6

  The Battery is thus imagined by the Birches to be anything but a traditional “gentlemen’s club,” the kind of exclusive establishment to which a twentieth-century aristocrat—a Winston Churchill, for example—might belong. And yet it was Churchill who, to inaugurate the reconstructed British House of Commons after it had been, as he put it, “blown to smithereens” in May 1941 by bombs dropped from German aircraft, originally said in October 1944 that “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” And so the words of the Right Honorable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the son of the Viscount of Ireland and the grandson of the seventh Duke of Marl
borough, had become the epigram for this twenty-first-century San Francisco unclub that claims to eschew status and embrace diversity.

  Had the Birches been more prescient, they would have engraved a different Winston Churchill quote outside their club. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” Churchill’s remix of a Mark Twain witticism,7 perhaps. But that’s the problem. In spite of being toolmakers of our digital future, Michael and Xochi Birch aren’t prescient. And the truth about the Battery—whether or not it has had a chance to get its jeans on—is that the well-meaning but deluded Birches have unintentionally created one of the least diverse and most exclusive places on earth.

  The twentieth-century media guru Marshall McLuhan, who, in contrast with the Birches, was distinguished by his prescience, famously said that the “medium is the message.” But on Battery Street in downtown San Francisco, it’s the building that is the message. Rather than an unclub, the Battery is an untruth. It offers a deeply troubling message about the gaping inequalities and injustices of our new networked society.

  In spite of its relaxed dress code and self-proclaimed commitment to cultural diversity, the Battery is as opulent as the most marble-encrusted homes of San Francisco’s nineteenth-century gilded elite. All that is left of the old Musto building is the immaculately restored exposed brickwork displayed inside the building and the slab of black marble at the club’s entrance. The 58,000-square-foot, five-story club now boasts a 200-person domestic staff, a 23,000-pound floating steel staircase, a glass elevator, an eight-foot-tall crystal chandelier, restaurants serving dishes like wagyu beef with smoked tofu and hon shimeji mushrooms, a state-of-the-art twenty-person Jacuzzi, a secret poker room hidden behind a bookcase, a 3,000-bottle wine cellar boasting a ceiling constructed from old bottles, a menagerie of taxidermied beasts, and a fourteen-room luxury hotel crowned by a glass-pavilioned penthouse suite with panoramic views of San Francisco Bay.

  For the vast majority of San Franciscans who will never have the good fortune of setting foot in the Battery, this social experiment certainly isn’t very social. Instead of a public House of Commons, the Birches are building a privatized House of Lords, a walled pleasure palace for the digital aristocracy, the privileged one percent of our two-tiered networked age. Rather than a village pub, it’s a nonfictional version of the nostalgic British television series Downton Abbey—a place of feudal excess and privilege.

  Had Churchill joined the Birches’ social experiment, he certainly would have found himself among some of the world’s richest and best-connected people. The club opened in October 2013 with an exclusive list of founding members that reads like a who’s who of what Vanity Fair calls the “New Establishment,” including the CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom; former Facebook president Sean Parker; and the serial Internet entrepreneur Trevor Traina, the owner of the most expensive house in San Francisco, a $35 million mansion on “Billionaire’s Row.”8

  It’s all too easy, of course, to ridicule the Birches’ unclub and their failed social experiment in downtown San Francisco. But unfortunately, it isn’t all that funny. “The bigger issue at hand,” as the New Yorker’s Anisse Gross reminds us about the Battery, is that “San Francisco itself is turning into a private, exclusive club”9 for wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Like its secret poker room, the Battery is a private, exclusive club within a private, exclusive club. It encapsulates what the New York Times’ Timothy Egan describes as the “dystopia by the Bay”—a San Francisco that is “a one-dimensional town for the 1 percent” and “an allegory of how the rich have changed America for the worse.”10

  The Birches’ one-dimensional club is a 58,000-square-foot allegory for the increasingly sharp economic inequities in San Francisco. But there’s an even bigger issue at stake here than the invisible wall in San Francisco separating the few “haves” from the many “have-nots,” including the city’s more than five thousand homeless people. The Battery may be San Francisco’s biggest experiment, but there’s a much bolder social and economic experiment going on in the world outside the club’s tinted windows.

  This experiment is the creation of a networked society. “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution,” explains the Cambridge University political scientist David Runciman.11 We are the brink of a foreign land—a data-saturated place that the British writer John Lanchester calls a “new kind of human society.”12 “The single most important trend in the world today is the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level,” adds the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, Friedman says, “the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.”13

  Runciman, Lanchester, and Friedman are all describing the same great economic, cultural, and, above all, intellectual transformation. “The Internet,” Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, notes, “is not a technology; it’s a belief system.”14 Everything and everyone are being connected in a network revolution that is radically disrupting every aspect of today’s world. Education, transportation, health care, finance, retail, and manufacturing are now being reinvented by Internet-based products such as self-driving cars, wearable computing devices, 3-D printers, personal health monitors, massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer-to-peer services like Airbnb and Uber, and currencies like Bitcoin. Revolutionary entrepreneurs like Sean Parker and Kevin Systrom are building this networked society on our behalf. They haven’t asked our permission, of course. But then the idea of consent is foreign, even immoral, to many of these architects of what the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla calls our “libertarian age.”

  “The libertarian dogma of our time,” Lilla says, “is turning our polities, economies and cultures upside down.” 15 Yes. But the real dogma of our libertarian age lies in glamorizing the turning of things upside down, in rejecting the very idea of “permission,” in establishing a cult of disruption. Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, the self-described “front page of the Internet,” which, in 2013, amassed 56 billion page views from the 40 million pages of unedited content created by 3 million users,16 even wrote a manifesto against permission. In Without Their Permission,17 Ohanian boasts that the twenty-first century will be “made,” not “managed” by entrepreneurs like himself who use the disruptive qualities of the Internet for the benefit of the public good. But like so much of Internet’s mob-produced, user-generated content, Reddit’s value to this public good is debatable. The site’s most popular series of posts in 2013, for example, concerned its unauthorized misidentification of the Boston Marathon bomber, a public disservice that the Atlantic termed a “misinformation disaster.”18

  Like Michael and Xochi Birch’s San Francisco unclub, the Internet is presented to us by naïve entrepreneurs as a diverse, transparent, and egalitarian place—a place that eschews tradition and democratizes social and economic opportunity. This view of the Internet encapsulates what Mark Lilla calls the “new kind of hubris” of our libertarian age, with its trinitarian faith in democracy, the free market, and individualism.19

  Such a distorted view of the Internet is common in Silicon Valley, where doing good and becoming rich are seen as indistinguishable and where disruptive companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber are celebrated for their supposedly public-spirited destruction of archaic rules and institutions. Google, for example, still prides itself as being an “uncompany,” a corporation without the traditional structures of power—even though the $400 billion leviathan is, as of June 2014, the world’s second most valuable corporation. It’s active and in some cases brutally powerful in industries as varied as online search, advertising, publishing, artificial intelligence, news, mobile operating systems, wearable computing, Internet browsers, video, and even—with its fledgling self-driving cars—the automobile industry
.

  In the digital world, everyone wants to be an unbusiness. Amazon, the largest online store in the world and a notorious bully of small publishing companies, still thinks of itself as the scrappy “unstore.” Internet companies like the Amazon-owned shoe store Zappos, and Medium, an online magazine founded by billionaire Twitter founder Ev Williams, are run on so-called holacratic principles—a Silicon Valley version of communism where there are no hierarchies, except, of course, when it comes to wages and stock ownership. Then there are the so-called unconferences of Web publishing magnate Tim O’Reilly—exclusive retreats called the Friends of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp—where nobody is formally in charge and the agenda is set by its carefully curated group of wealthy, young, white, and male technologists. But, like the Birches’ club with its 3,000-bottle wine cellar boasting a ceiling constructed from old bottles, massively powerful and wealthy multinationals like Google and Amazon, and exclusively “open” events for the new elite like FOO Camp, aren’t quite as revolutionary as they’d have us believe. The new wine in Silicon Valley may be digital, but—when it comes to power and wealth—we’ve tasted this kind of blatant hypocrisy many times before in history.

  “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” the science fiction writer William Gibson once said. That unevenly distributed future is networked society. In today’s digital experiment, the world is being transformed into a winner-take-all, upstairs-downstairs kind of society. This networked future is characterized by an astonishingly unequal distribution of economic value and power in almost every industry that the Internet is disrupting. According to the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, this inequality is “one of the biggest shifts in power between people and big institutions, perhaps the biggest one yet of the twenty-first century.20 Like the Battery, it is marketed in the Birches’ feel-good language of inclusion, transparency, and openness; but, like the five-storied pleasure palace, this new world is actually exclusive, opaque, and inegalitarian. Rather than a “public service,” Silicon Valley’s architects of the future are building a privatized networked economy, a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except its powerful, wealthy owners. Like the Battery, the Internet, with its empty promise of making the world a fairer place with more opportunity for more people, has had the unintended consequence of actually making the world less equal and reducing rather than increasing employment and general economic well-being.