The PdF 2007 Conference hosted a spirited panel examining Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur, featuring Keen, Clay Shirky, Craig Newmark, and Robert Scoble, and hosted by PdF's Josh Levy. Larry Lessig has a response to Cult, and it's fair to say that he's not impressed. Keen's book is subtitled "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture," so it's probably not surprising that Lessig – a champion of the participatory Web – wouldn't embrace a book that sees the Internet and its political/cultural/social empowerment as a largely bad thing. I haven't read Keen's book yet (but we of the Internet do not let that stop us!). But from what I've read elsewhere, he's unsettled by a techno-determinist mindset that has been criticized since time immemorial, or at least since the days of the early Web:

What I am doing is exposing Web 2.0's ideological clothing (as opposed to its nakedness) -- its radical assault on mainstream media, its inherently relativistic aesthetic code, and the deeply destructive cultural consequences of its utopian faith in information technology.

Keen decides to frame those concerns in a particularly provocative way; here's Keen on the idea that the Internet's amateur hour is manifesting itself as an assault on democracy:

The YouTubification of politics is a threat to civic culture. It infantilizes the political process, silencing public discourse and leaving the future of government up to thirty-second video clips shot by camcorder-wielding amateurs with political agendas.

Lessig goes after Keen for not differentiating between what amateur "monkeys" (Keen's word choice) on the Web can create with what they do create in 2007, a few years into the Internet revolution. And it seems like, not having read the book, there are strong and useful critiques and warnings that Keen could articulated about the downsides of digital democracy. But what particularly ticks Lessig off is that he judges Keen to be guilty of the very things he pins as faults on amateurs: "sloppiness, error, and ignorance." And this from Doubleday, an esteemed establishment press.

(Want more Keen goodness? Keen and Wired's Kevin Kelly debate "Can We Save the Internet?" Short Kelly: "You can call them amateurs, but I call them a miracle.")

amateur | Andrew Keen | Larry Lessig | participatory culture
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