Andrew Keen > Quotes

“Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web in order to help him remember his colleagues at CERN. “The Web is more a social creation than a technical one,” he explains.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“Rather than virtual or second life, social media is actually becoming life itself—the central and increasingly transparent stage of human existence,”
― Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

“À medida que a mídia convencional tradicional é substituída por uma imprensa personalizada, a internet torna-se um espelho de nós mesmos. Em vez de usá-la para buscar notícias, informação ou cultura, nós a usamos para SERMOS de fato a notícia, a informação e a cultura.”
― Andrew Keen

“Rather than the answer, the Internet is actually the central question about our connected twenty-first-century world.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists like Google and Amazon.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.79 “So what does it all mean?” Michael Moritz rhetorically asks about a data factory economy that is immensely profitable for a tiny handful of Silicon Valley companies. What does the personal revolution mean for everyone else, to those who aren’t part of what he calls the “extreme minority” inside the Silicon Valley bubble? “It means that life is very tough for almost everyone in America,” the chairman of Sequoia Capital, whom even Tom Perkins couldn’t accuse of being a progressive radical, says. “It means life is very tough if you’re poor. It means life is very tough if you’re middle class. It means you have to have the right education to go and work at Google or Apple.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“Podemos canalizar a revolução da web 2.0 de maneira construtiva, de modo que ela enriqueça ao invés de matar nossa economia, cultura e valores”
― Andrew Keen

“The structure of this economy is the reverse of the technological open architecture created by the Internet’s pioneers. Instead, it’s a top-down system that is concentrating wealth instead of spreading it. Unfortunately, the supposed “new rules” for this new economy aren’t very new. Rather than producing more jobs or prosperity, the Internet is dominated by winner-take-all companies like Amazon and Google that are now monopolizing vast swaths of our information economy.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“The idea that the internet could transform society by making it more open, more innovative, and more democratic.”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“A 2013 Oxford University white paper, for example, forecasts that 47 percent of jobs could be eliminated by smart technology over the next two decades,20 and a 2017 McKinsey & Company report predicts that 49 percent of all the time we spend working could be automated by current technology.21”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“In the future, we may no longer be in charge of our own creation, he suggests. Our technology might be developing a mind of its own, thereby excluding, disempowering, and enslaving us. The existential threat of self-conscious algorithms is very real, he says. They might be our final invention.”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“T. H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist and author of the “infinite monkey theorem.” Huxley’s theory says that if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece—”
― Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“Worse still, today's digital network is commodifying friendships so that it becomes, quite literally, the currency of the new social economy.”
― Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

“What consumers have to understand is that "free" services on the Internet are never really free. As Reputation.com's CEO Michael Fortik told me, the business models of supposedly free social networks like Facebook is the sale of our information to their advertisers. We, the producers of data on the free network, are its product rather than its friend or partner.”
― Andrew Keen, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

“to “redefine the nature of the country” by getting rid of bureaucracy and reinventing government as what he calls “a service.”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“As in Russia, China has a not-so-secret two-million-person army composed mostly of government employees who flood social media with up to five hundred million pro-regime comments a year.17 The Chinese government sometimes even shuts down hostile websites using the “Great Cannon,” a tool specifically designed to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future

“We took 350 billion snaps in 2011 and an astonishing 1.5 trillion in 2013—more than all the photos ever taken before in all of history.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“Kotkin’s new feudalism, in which narcissistic aristocrats like Kardashian and Bieber are able to wield massive armies of loyal voyeurs.”
― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer

“we humans, for the moment at least, are no speedier, no smarter, and, really, no more self-aware than we were back in 1965.”
― Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future