Note: this cross-posted item is my contribution to our Banned Books Week recognition. We’ve been pitting books against each other, hoping to illustrate that there are always (at least) two sides to every story. Most of the other books were more social or political, but I liked this pair.

Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams tell stories of how the the internet’s unprecedented collaboration opportunities are changing the rules of economics. IBM, in one example, estimates the value of work done by volunteer software developers on Linux, the open source computer operating system built largely by people working for free, to be about one billion dollars, annually.

But Andrew Keen, in The Cult Of The Amateur : How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, worries that collaborative technologies like Wikipedia and YouTube are unfairly cutting into established economic models and destroying record companies, television networks, and other cultural institutions.

Both books praise technology, but differ on how it should be used and who should control it. Tapscott and Williams say IBM’s decision to embrace Linux and support open source software is saving the company $900 million/annually, while Keen argues that experts should be given more control over what is published online.

Further reading:

• A debate between Andrew Keen and David Weinberger, from WSJ.com.
• Listen online as Andrew Keen, Xeni Jardin, Larry Sanger, and Clay Shirky discuss Cult of the Amateur on KCRW’s To The Point.
• NPR interview with Wikinomics co-author Don Tapscott
• Eric Raymond’s paper, The Cathedral vs The Bazaar, discussing how massive collaboration makes open source possible.

bbw2007, Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams, The Cult Of The Amateur How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, Andrew Keen, technology, internet, web 2.0, debate, banned books week

I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.

Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.

Most interesting was the news that the handweavers largely opposed only the mills that sold their textiles cheaper than the handweavers did. And mills that sold their products at artificially high prices and used the efficiency of the mechanized looms to earn exorbitant profits weren’t opposed by the handweavers.

Hmmm….

Now back to Keen. Keen “doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things.”

But Keen is wrong. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.

The criticism here is that Keen wants technology to be controlled, and the value enjoyed exclusively by the establishment.

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Keen is right in understanding that this massive supply-side shock to freedom will destabilize and in some cases destroy a number of older social institutions. He is wrong in believing that there is some third way — lets deploy the internet, but not use it to increase the freedom of amateurs to do as they like.

(Emphasis added.)

web 2.0, internet, anarchy, control, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, luddite, luddism, disruptive technology

Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur; How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is getting a lot of attention from usually quiet corners of the web, and I’ve had to quell the urge to write a story under the headline “Andrew Keen Tells YouTubers to Eat Spinach.”

Keen’s argument rests on the belief that “culture” is the sole provence of established media, and falls flat as soon as you get past the bombast of the subtitle. Our consumer relationship with culture is a recent development that has done great harm to us. Culture is participatory, messy, and resilient.

And that’s pretty much exactly how it played out on KCRW’s To The Point (listen), which invited Keen along with anti-Wikipedian Larry Sanger to take up the issue with Xeni Jardin and NYU prof Clay Shirky.

Keen is right to doubt Web 2.0 proponents who suggest technology will solve the world’s problems (it never did, it’s unlikely it ever will), but Jardin and Shirky didn’t argue that. The real issue isn’t technology, it’s the growing clash of control vs. anarchy as described in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Anarchist In The Library. Well, that and the fact that the internet is still rather immature, even if it’s regularly used by a majority of Americans.

internet, web 2.0, anarchy, control, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur