YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Keen

lines on the record: 138
first: 2018-01-22
most recent: 2018-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Guys, you have to see. You taught me not to be too kind to you. Positive might be a slight exaggeration. But certainly I'm less miserable than I used to be.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If Bruce was around now, he probably none of us would have heard of him if he was still in his bedroom in New Jersey. He wouldn't have made it in the music industry. You need... Talent, you need ANR people. The same guy who discovered Bruce also discovered Dylan.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's so human, because it's so honest, and because, and maybe this comes back to our conversation, you understand how much intense personal emotional investment is required to develop talent. Clearly, the guy's a genius, but he had to spend 15 years in his bedroom practicing the guitar to actually realize that genius. And coming back to the music industry”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think Bruce Bringstein's autobiography read by himself on Audible is fantastic, especially since I'm going to see him on the 20th of April.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's no argument. As perhaps it should have, it shouldn't have stayed the same way. It's like saying we should still have horses, you know, cars had an impact. And now whatever is going to replace cars. Like the other day I was at something and they were talking about self-driving cars and things like that. I said, it's not a matter of if it's when it happens. So what are we going to do about it? And who's responsible for it? All right. We're here talking to Andrew Keane, who's a very sharp chronicler of ideas around the impact of the internet and where it should be. He's written a number of books about a variety of things, but his next book seems rather hopeful because most of your books were not hopeful. It's called How to Fix the Future. It's certainly broken right now, or it feels broken. And we're going to talk about these reasonable solutions to problems caused by the digital revolution when we get back.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's only the music industry. I've always, in all my books, I've written Especially because I had a music startup in the mid 90s. So I drank the Kool-Aid as much as everyone else. And certainly the impact on the music industry is self evident. It's unarguable the impact. I mean, the global revenue of recorded music dropped 50%, I think, between Napster in 1999 and about 2050. There's no argument with it.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just changed the business plan in a way that was very fast and very problematic. And I didn't look, I don't think there was anything to stop it because this is the way people want to consume media. But it was the thing that caused the change to happen.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they think of themselves that way. It was interesting because when President Obama was leaving, he gave a speech that didn't get as noticed as much, but I certainly did, where he talked about this idea that tech people have this idea that tech solves all problems and maybe government isn't a problem to solve by tech and that there's certain problems that don't have tech solutions, including, and we'll talk about this, the impact on jobs. The new inventions coming are quite impactful on jobs in a way that a squirrel video it wasn't. They certainly decimated music. Entertainment journalism. Now we're going for the big jobs driving accountants, lawyers, and things like that. We'll talk about more about your book later.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but you know, they hung the moon. I don't know if you know that. I mean, it was really interesting. It's an experience, an American expression. What does it mean? They hung the moon. They did everything. The moon, they did it. They're responsible for all beauty.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. So this idea that, well, we've discovered it, so it must be true. We must embrace it. I think we need to be a little careful. And also, and I know we're going to talk about my book, but I really think the most important thing, the way for Silicon Valley to genuinely grow up is to be more historical. Understand we've been through this before. We've been through it with the Industrial Revolution and other historical periods. This is not happening for the first time in human history.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Culturally problematic thing about Silicon Valley is this general amnesia, this idea that, well, if we've thought of it, no one's thought of it before. So, you sometimes see that in the work of people like Tristan Harris, who have suddenly discovered that tech is addictive. Well, there are lots of people who knew that before. All you need to do is read Nick Carr.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Digital utopianism and dystopianism. And I think we also need to be careful, particularly in Silicon Valley, which has no memory. I think the most”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their Twitter, I think the danger, there are two dangers. Firstly, we can flip this thing on its head. And suddenly from being our Savior, technology becomes the problem. And neither of those things are true. We've got to walk the fine line between”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. I think that you're seeing a lot of resurgence of like Tristan Harris and Tech Addiction. You're seeing the Russia stuff, today there's a terrorism, like did Facebook cause terrorism, it seems like, you know, Twitter.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it doesn't necessarily cross over into their personal lives. So, for example, they're quite careful about how much access their kids have to personal technology. So they do get it as long as Getting it doesn't involve undermining their professional lives and their wealth”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they just willfully believe it's for the. They all do. It's a really, I've not heard, except for Elon Musk, who has his own issues too with his stuff too, like his cars and everything else. I think they tend towards... Naivete bordering on willful naivete.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or they're waking up morally. Morally. I do. I think some of them are quite troubled. I think others are like, this is a real challenge to our business model. I think, you know, I'd like to see Mark say Mark Zuckerberg, who's probably the center of this in a more, I think it never occurred to him the damage parts of what he was doing. It was only, you know what I mean? And I don't think it's not someone who cares for money that much. Or he's not. Cheryl got it.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Against the backdrop of when you do talk to the leaders of these companies, they're unusually naive about maybe they're willfully naive. Maybe they know just what they're doing and they're the most of them, they do have a vision of like, we did a last couple of two years ago, we were talking about AI and literally every single leader of every company, except for Elon Musk. Interesting left was like Benny Off. Was AI is great? Is a happy shiny future? They tend to go that way. They tend to, they've stuck to this script of this is all for the good, you know, the best of all worlds and the best of all, whatever, the best of all things in the best of all possible worlds. And so I think this year is sort of a real slap to the side of their heads. It's like, wait a minute, you have impact on jobs. Do you have impact on our society? You have impact on all finally.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in love with technology as anyone else, it's just that I think I've been a little bit more critical in understanding the social and economic and political consequences of the revolution.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And whilst I think the internet ultimately, or at least digital technology will have to be that operating system, my argument in 2015 when that book came out was it wasn't ready. And so I used examples like Uber and Airbnb and the rest of the sort of the P2P economy suggesting that it actually was compounding inequality. I developed my ideas about surveillance capitalism and the internet's not the answer was one of, I think, the first full-bown critiques of the kind of society that the digital revolution was producing. And I concluded that for the most part it wasn't something that we really wanted. So we had to reform it. None of my books, I need to remind you listeners, none of my books, I hope at least, are Luddite. They're not against technology. Although it's always easy to pigeonhole someone like myself as being anti-technology. But I'm a”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not letting us go. We make everything. But they're not letting you go. Where would be the world without charity? So Yeah, so the internet's not the answer. So you said, what's the question? So the question is, what should the operating system be for our digital 21st century?”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dystopian distillation of social media, if we would have imagined the worst case scenario or perhaps at least in American terms, the worst case political scenario in 2012, it would have been Trump. I mean, my book slightly dystopian, but even in 2012, if someone had said, where are you going to get Donald Trump coming to power riding on the wave of social media and talking about himself all the time and making stuff up? I thought you're absolutely out of your mind. And of course it's ham.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of individualistic narcissistic elements in our culture. You've seen it today politically manifested most clearly, I think, in Trump. Right, absolutely. Who is the kind of...”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's largely around social media. Actually, the book was called Digital Vertigo because it was sort of, it was a rather ambitious remix of Hitchcock's vertigo, which I'm sure most of your listeners know the narrative of that book, a movie of a... An innocent man, or perhaps not so innocent man who fell in love with this blonde who turned out not to be a blonde. And my point in digital verte girls, we've fallen in love with this idea of social media, but it's not really social. It's actually antisocial. It only compounds the narcissism and the... The so self centered nature of not so much digital media or technology but our contemporary culture. And rather than I've got nothing against the social who think social is apple pie, social is good. But the problem is the social media was antisocial or is antisocial and compounds all the”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about that because I think again, right now, sort of this has been a really lost year for social media, like that it's suddenly tech has suddenly become evil in a way that people hadn't thought of it that way. And it's largely around social media.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you were Well, I've done a lot of different things, like you, I sort of step in and out of media, a little bit of business, business development, consulting. My second book was called Digital Vertigo, which was a kind of critique of social media. It probably should have been called Cult of the Social. It was a critique of the cult of social media, which came out in 2012. And then my last point.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what was forgotten more than anything else was business models. Everyone would assume, as you know this better than I do, that in Silicon Valley, as long as you have eyeballs, the business model will work itself out. What people... Weren't willing to acknowledge was that implicit in the idea of democratized media was surveillance capitalism. Because if you give all this stuff away for free and everyone's spending their time blogging and tweeting and posting on Facebook, ultimately you get business models where these big companies are watching us and selling our data.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I think it left out people or human beings. I'll never forget Barry Diller when we talked about this. This was way back when, and he goes, I asked him about citizen journalism and he said, citizen journalism, how would you like citizen surgery? And it was really, I was like, exactly.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secondly, when you do away with curation, you also undermine truth, and of course, you know, ten, more than ten years after Cult of the Amateur, many, many people have come up to me and said, well, when that book came out, I thought you were an elitist and I thought you didn't know what you're talking about. But actually, over the last 10 years, I think you've been proved to be more correct than incorrect. Now, the book was purposely provocative and perhaps took a slightly extreme view, but it certainly had an important impact and I think it was a A valuable correction to the kind of the utopianism of the time, which believed that you could have this purely democratic media, no gatekeepers and everything would work perfectly.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think it was very genuine. I think people like O'Reilly meant it. I think they were genuine in their... Wish that media would be democratized, but my critique was that firstly curators have value.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because at the time, everyone, it's so interesting when you sort of fast forward today where everyone's gone crazy essentially. But you were talking about the idea, you want to get to the ethos behind the people who made the internet, which was everybody should have a say, everybody has equal footing, everyone has equal expertise, perhaps. There was an idea, there was a very strong ethos to give that concept of that.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and who now is a friend of mine, even though we haven't always been friends. But anyway, I went to food camp. In the early days of Web 2.0, and it occurred to me that the dream of Web 2.0 of this kind of disintermediated media, of this media that could work because it would be democratized and we'd get rid of gatekeepers like you, it wasn't such a great idea. So in 2007, I wrote a book called Cult of the Amateur, which was a critique of the sort of democratized nature of digital media. It was very controversial.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raised lots of money, got into the internet, had a lot of interesting, exciting experiences, and then did some other business development stuff after the crash, so lived through the booty, yeah, the boom and the crash. And then I was in an event in the, probably in around 2003, no, probably about 2004, I was at Foo Camp, which I'm sure you know. Tim O'Reilly?”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it didn't, May. It was a lot of fun. It was the most exciting. We're on Spear Street and all happened around here. We had an office on Mission Street.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we knew one another then. And it was one of those Me Too music startups that raised lots of money and then failed because it didn't really have a coherent business idea. It didn't matter.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, where I came from is I was an internet entrepreneur in the mid-90s. I had a startup, you might remember it, called Audio Cafe.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. I'm thrilled to talk to you because you're always such a good critic. You're such an intelligent critic about the internet, not just yammering on about its evils, but really trying to think hard about what it does. So let's talk a little bit about your background and your first book and your first thoughts. Let's give people an idea of where you came from to get to this position.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, in the red chair is Andrew Keane, who I've known a long, long, long time, Andrew, who's super old. He's a writer, entrepreneur, and also a frequent critic of the internet. In 2015, he wrote a book called The Internet Is Not the Answer. I want to know what the question is, but his new book is called How to Fix the Future. It's all about finding reasonable solutions to the problems caused by the digital revolution, of which there are many and of which we have just covered in a show we're doing for MBC also is the responsibility of tech. So there's lots to talk about, Andrew. Welcome to Recode Decode.”
2018-01-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Keen, author, 'How to Fix the Future' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT