Andrew Keen Quotes

He straightened and turned to find Andrew had shifted closer. There was nowhere for Neil to stand except up against Andrew, but somehow Neil didn't mind. They'd been apart for seven weeks but Neil keenly remembered why he'd stayed. He remembered this unyielding, unquestioning weight that could hold him and all of his problems up without breaking a sweat. For the first time in months he could finally breathe again. It was such a relief it was frightening; Neil hadn't meant to lean on Andrew so much.

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.

Rather than virtual or second life, social media is actually becoming life itself—the central and increasingly transparent stage of human existence,

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.

...and of course if Andrew Keene had been on the downhill side of the Standpipe, he would have exited the world in no time. But God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned...

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

Rather than the answer, the Internet is actually the central question about our connected twenty-first-century world.

In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.

Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists like Google and Amazon.

Social media has exploded our narcissism. “Facebragging” has become a new slang term for the way that social media has enabled us to shamelessly self-promote, self-congratulate, and generally make public fools of ourselves. As Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, authors of The Narcissism Epidemic, have pointed out, there’s a kind of democratization on the web, where everyone’s opinion has been elevated (or deflated) to a common level. Journalists who fight to present information with clarity and objectivity find themselves contradicted and shouted down by raging bloggers and commenters with no actual knowledge of whatever circumstance they may be reporting. Self-expression on the web has led to a sense of entitlement, a belief that “everybody’s opinion is just as valid as everyone else’s.”2 Andrew Keen refers to the phenomenon as “ignorance meets egoism, meets bad taste, meets mob rule.”3 It’s a world where the way up is to be louder, more flashy, more harsh and outspoken.

He looked down at her and their gazes meshed for long moments. “I was wrong before. You’re definitely the best part.” Faith’s breath stuttered in her lungs. Nobody had ever said anything so damn romantic to her in her life. She’d been told she was gorgeous and beautiful and sexy by men who’d been keen to get her into bed but she’d never been told she was the best part of anybody’s anything.

The keen Saracen blade sliced through the archbishop's shield down to his arm, but Turpin's aim was truer. Corsablis's turbaned head rolled in the dust as the prelate swung his mighty weapon. The Berber's steed raced on, bearing a headless rider who soon toppled from his mount. Turpin, galloping on to where the press was thickest, turned in his saddle and addressed the head where it lay: 'Scoundrel pagan, you've met your end! So be it always with the enemies of Christ!

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.

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.

The goal was ambitious. Public interest was high. Experts were eager to contribute. Money was readily available. Armed with every ingredient for success, Samuel Pierpont Langley set out in the early 1900s to be the first man to pilot an airplane. Highly regarded, he was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution, a mathematics professor who had also worked at Harvard. His friends included some of the most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. Langley was given a $50,000 grant from the War Department to fund his project, a tremendous amount of money for the time. He pulled together the best minds of the day, a veritable dream team of talent and know-how. Langley and his team used the finest materials, and the press followed him everywhere. People all over the country were riveted to the story, waiting to read that he had achieved his goal. With the team he had gathered and ample resources, his success was guaranteed. Or was it? A few hundred miles away, Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history. How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better-funded and better-educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why. 2.

Kotkin’s new feudalism, in which narcissistic aristocrats like Kardashian and Bieber are able to wield massive armies of loyal voyeurs.

At the same time, the Establishment and their media allies were in full cry. Lord McGregor, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, issued a statement condemning the hysteria that the book immediately generated as ‘An odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.’ In fact, this criticism was never made of the book itself; indeed, Lord McGregor has since told me that the issue was the ‘most difficult’ of his tenure. The Archbishop of Canterbury worried publicly about the effects of the publicity on Princes William and Harry; Lord St John of Fewsley condemned the book’s publication, while a pot-pourri of MPs were keen to see me locked away in the Tower; it was, too, a torrid time for Diana’s supporters. As loyalists rallied to the flag, ignoring the message while deriding the messenger, the public gradually began to accept the book’s veracity through statements by Diana’s friends, further confirmed when she visited her old friend Carolyn Bartholomew, who had spoken about the Princess’s bulimia. Unfortunately, that casual call upon an old and trusted friend had bitter consequences for Diana. Senior courtiers, including the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, pointed accusing fingers at Diana when they saw the front-page coverage of the visit. Aggrieved and hurt, the Princess flew by helicopter to Merseyside for a visit to a hospice, her first official engagement since Diana, Her True Story hit the headlines. It proved to be an emotional meeting between Diana and her public for, touched by the show of affection from waiting wellwishers, she burst into tears, overcome by the distressing echoes of her morning meeting with Palace officials, and by the underlying strain of the decision she and Prince Charles had taken. As she later told a friend: ‘An old lady in the crowd stroked my face and that triggered something inside me. I simply couldn’t stop myself crying.’ The public tears did not surprise her close friends, who knew only too well the private anguish of her lonely position, the strain she had borne for 18 months. As one remarked: ‘She is a brilliant actress who has disguised her private sorrow.

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—

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.

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.

It is difficult to imagine any act more revolutionary than the redistribution of land from the planters to the slaves in the former Confederacy. By the fall of 1865, Andrew Johnson, keenly aware of the fundamental transformation this would cause in the structure of the economy in the South and in the relations between black and white, reversed any plans for land redistribution. Only former slaves who had paid for their land were allowed to remain on it. Rumors of “forty acres and a mule” for all freed slaves proved unfounded. Still, African Americans continued to make land ownership a priority. As the freedman Bayley Wyat (also spelled Wyatt) put it succinctly in his “Freedman’s Speech,” delivered in 1866: “We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.

Although one may instinctively expect the ‘anti-Semitic’ work of poets like Pound and Eliot to deter the attentions of Jewish literary scholars, the reality is quite different. Indeed, in the mirror image of Menand’s claim, it actually appears that it is Jews who have the obsession with Pound. Pound, perhaps more than any other poet, has exerted an attractive influence over a large swathe of Jewish scholars, all of whom have been pulled magnetically towards him by a burning zeal to deconstruct his work, life, and legacy. This juxtaposition of hatred with attraction is subtly expressed in Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, in the course of which Julius writes that Jews reading Eliot’s poetry are both “appalled and impressed.” These academic activists are appalled because they perceive an unjustified critique upon their ethnic group, and they perceive this critique all the more keenly because of their ethnocentrism. They are impressed because they appreciate, and are threatened by, the talent of their target, often despite themselves. The ‘attraction’ arises from the desire to deconstruct and demean that talent, and thus avenge or assuage the critique.

Never before’, he recalled, ‘have I felt so keenly the mortifying business of sitting behind the scenes with a heavy load of responsibility while others were in action with a vastly superior enemy.

With a keen interest in investing from an early age, his career took him to the hub of global investment markets, the City of London. It was here, that a keen interest became the foundation for his success and over the next seven years, working with some of the largest institutions, he built up a broad-based expertise in trading and investing across global markets.

The fact that you know that you don’t know something means that you can fix it. Your greatest strength can come from a keen awareness of your own limitations.

He stopped a few feet from Arland. “You’re not from around here.” “Such keen powers of observation,” Arland said. “Your armor is clean. Pretty. Do you know what we do to pretty boys like you here?” “Is there a script?” Arland asked him. “Do you give the speech to all who enter here, because if so, I suggest we skip the talking.” The vampire roared, baring his fangs. “A challenge.” Arland smiled. “I love challenges.

Because I take extensive social histories and work from a model of health and healing predicated on mind/body interaction, I am keenly aware of correlations between mental/emotional events and healing responses. These correlations are important, because they suggest ways that people can keep their healing systems in good working order and can use their minds to promote healing rather than obstruct it.

Andrew Keene hubiera estado colina abajo, habría abandonado el mundo sin pérdida de tiempo. Pero Dios protege a los borrachos, a los niños pequeños y a los drogados hasta el tuétano. Andrew estaba en un sitio desde

It’s this devotion to, and obsession with, a flattened critical world—one where amateurism and self-promotion take the place of the “elite” critical voices we once relied upon—that leads writers like Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) to baldly state: “Today’s internet is killing our culture.

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.

Worse still, today's digital network is commodifying friendships so that it becomes, quite literally, the currency of the new social economy.

Keen interest from a caring person is important, but their understanding depends on our willingness to disclose information about ourselves. Humans need understanding but we can’t hope to be understood without being prepared to reveal the truth about ourselves. Lack of sharing is the death knell of intimacy.