The Cult of the Amateur

How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

By: Andrew Keen

Narrated by: Andrew Keen

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns, our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies, are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry.

Worse, Keen claims, our "cut-and-paste" online culture, in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated, threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite - Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself - he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

©2007 Andrew Keen (P)2007 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically-educated technoscold, and thank goodness. The world needs an intellectual Goliath to slay Web 2.0's army of Davids." (The Weekly Standard)
"Mr. Keen...writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred." (The New York Times)

hard to swallow

Very abrasive and insulting, yet thought provoking.

Great Book

Well read by the author. Very informative.
Highly recommended. A must read for those who put a lot of faith in web 2.0.

6 hours and 22 minutes of ranting

I forced myself to listen through the 6 hours and 22 minutes of ranting about how how much better things were before, and how we as a society are dependent on big corporations to select what kind of media we want to consume. I do agree that we still need media outlets that offers a broad view of current issues, both domestic and international, but I don't agree that the world will end just because the old media outlets are inable to adapt to the new economy.

A painful voyage from a single perspective

I struggled through "The Cult of the Amateur" for a variety of different reasons, but what sticks with me most vividly is the overwhelming feeling that the author had an alternate agenda - as if at some point I would become a part of a sophisticated infomercial for some far away product. Fortunately, that was not the case, but the struggle to get through it was no less painful.

At the end of the whole thing I found myself wondering what the point was - knowing because it had been pounded into me throughout the story - and not believing that there's anything wrong with the "amateur" challenging the common professional or even the "expert" that might know what he's read or learned in years of experience. I believe, as most Internet people probably do, that sometimes the expert doesn't know what's best and the "amateur" will come up with the next best thing and/or the right idea. The author's hypothesis was quite a bit different, suggesting that the amateur is taking over and that the power is nearly destroying what we know as expert opinion and knowledge. Quite different from how I and most of my peers view things.

Hope that helps for those of you considering this book - perhaps enough to save your credits and wait for it to hit the sale rack.

Too negative

This author is too personal and too emotional on the new technology and their impacts on our life. The booming of Internet changing many things. Not all of them are perfect due to the freedom provided by Internet. Many so called amateurs finally get chance to have their voices heard, and have their knowledge and experience shared. The author has negative view to all of them, and online wiki is singled out to be criticized. Certainly, the benefit of having those amateurs on the Internet benefit all of us. Otherwise we cannot explain why stock price of google price keeping raising

Whiny with few solutions

Saw this book in a store and from the dust cover, thought it sounded like a good read (or listen since Audible had it). My enthusiasm for this book quickly waned. The author's arguments are weak and for the first 9 chapters he offers almost no solutions. Many of the problems he mention existed before Web 2.0, they just have been intensified or focused in recent years, but according to the author these problems are because of Web 2.0.

The author is also the narrator and part way through the book I found him very pompous. Thinking I might be thinking this because of his British accent, I went online and read book reviews that accused him of the same thing.

Because I had such high hopes for this book, I continued listening to the complaining and hoped the author was just setting me up for some awesome finish.

I am somewhat happy that in the last chapter the author does offer some solutions and success stories. Unfortunately they are way too late and he does not talk as passionately about them as the problems.

If you are looking for a book to argues why Web 2.0 is bad, then this book is for you.

If you want a realistic or objective book on the problems of Web 2.0, look elsewhere.

basic sensational scare tactics

This book had a few interesting points such as how the record industry has been hurt by the internet, but the rest of the book was just a collection of the latest headlines over the past few years; the dangers of pedophiles on the internet, the scourge of internet gambling,the potential lack of privacy and ID theft, etc. the biggest joke of the book though was how the author kept talking about how the internet was ruining the American way of life, but the author was from England and had married an American woman and moved to the US, he had no claim of America or the American dream. I would would not recommend this book, to ones ided and negative.

good but not amazing

a good exploration of the thesis, but came off speculative instead of evidence based. often felt like a personal soapbox -- an enjoyable one -- than a detailed explof th he topic.

An additional comment

i do concur with the other reviews, but i felt like commenting on the narration:
keen tries to dramatize every single sentence. as i was listening to chapter one, i was thinking: "hmmmm, by the tone of his voice, and the amount of melodrama, we're reaching the climax of the book already."
Then i realized having a "climax" in a non-fiction book is unusual, and i also realized that every sentence thereafter was similarly narrated.

Mostly one-sided, sometimes prophetic

The book presents numerous good arguments worthy of thought and action, but also numerous poor arguments -- in much larger quantity. Keen is hell-bent on depicting the Web 2.0's relationship to traditional culture creation as a zero-sum game, not allowing any recognition to how they can also complement each other. What's worse, though, is that the author utterly fails to consider how the early flaws in collaborative online endevours, crowdsourcing platforms and the many ways to express oneself and practice one's passions -- and vices -- online can be both tweaked and revolutionized to work much better in all respects. These fatalistic positions make the book obnoxious to listen to, which is a shame. Had Keen taken a more productive stance and a more nuanced view on internet trends, his in many respects prophetic words could have received a larger audience and helped us prepare better for example for the all-out assault of fake news we see today.

It should be noted that much of the book is about problems of the internet (and humanity) at large, not about Web 2.0 in particular. Several chapters concern topics such as online gambling, porn addiction, identity theft, screen addiction, omnipresent commercialization of personal data, and data breaches, rather than platforms for crowdsourcing or for online-to-offline business, as the book's title suggests.