As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy (https://www.howtofixdemocracy.org/) show, which will be going into its seventh series next year, Andrew Keen has given much thought to the health of American democracy. In this KEEN ON episode, Jonathan Rauch (https://www.brookings.edu/people/jonathan-rauch/) , the Brookings Institute senior fellow, turns the tables…
Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab (https://www.idealab.com/) chairman Bill Gross (https://www.idealab.com/bio/management/bill_gross.php) . Having founded Idealab in 1996, Gross has been a participant in every wave of digital innovation - from Web 1 and 2.0 to Web 3 and today’s AI revolution.…
This week’s tech news is all about Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy’s DOGE ambitions to supposedly reinvent the Federal government. But as That Was The Week (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this week, the problem with this DOGE plan is that it appears much more interested in blowing…
If the 20th century was the American Century then, for Kishore Mahbubani, the controversial Singaporean writer and diplomat, the 21st century is the Asian Century. In his new memoir, Living the Asian Century, (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Asian-Century-Undiplomatic-Memoir/dp/1541703049) Mahbubani - Singapore’s longtime permanent representative at the United Nations - offers what he calls an…
To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference (https://www.dld-conference.com/) , today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kirkpatrick_(author)) , author of The Facebook Effect (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Facebook-Effect/David-Kirkpatrick/9781439102121) and founder of Techonomy Media (https://worth.com/techonomy/) . In contrast with Steven Levy (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2254-steven-levy-on-what) and…
As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International (https://www.transparency.org/en) , myboldb friend Frank Vogl (https://www.frankvogl.com/about) has always the nose for a good story. So it was particularly interesting to get Frank’s take on the incoming Trump administration, especially since he just wrote an interesting piece (https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-harris-and-musk-how-money-did-and-didnt-affect-the-election) about how…
Last week, we featured an interview (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2250-john-markoff-compares) with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy) , the former Newsweek technology correspondent and author of best-selling books about hacking, crypto, Google and Facebook. Levy is now Wired’s…
In this KEEN ON Andrew Keen special, guest host David Masciotra (https://davidmasciotra.com/) interviews Andrew about his controversial book Cult of the Amateur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cult_of_the_Amateur) . While David generously describes it as prescient, Andrew focuses more on what the 2007 book got blatantly wrong - like dismissing Google’s $1.5 billion acquisition of…
Every digital tech revolution over the last forty years has promised decentralization but each one only seems to have recentralized power. So will the AI revolution be different? Can AI be the tipping point for fundamentally decentralizing the architecture of our 21st century politics, culture and business? That Was The…
How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War (https://www.archwaypublishing.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/847566-turf-war) , the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his self-styled “masterpiece,” a half-mile of gargantuan buildings…
Former New York Times reporter John Markoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Markoff) has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the…
Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wehner) . How to prevent the worst happening (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/conservative-argument-against-trump/680438/) , Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened,…
It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.H._Buckley) is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguing (https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-trump-embrace-trumpism-american-dream-public-corruption-swamp-nationalism-safety-net-patriotism-11668428085) in the Wall Street Journal…
So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra (https://davidmasciotra.com/) , Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/11/11/how-francis-fukuyama-and-the-big-lebowski-explain-trumps-victory/) and Springsteen (https://unherd.com/2024/10/bruce-springsteen-is-the-last-american-liberal/) as twin paragons of American liberalism…
