Keen On America

On the week that the price of Bitcoin rose above $100,000 and Trump appointed David Sacks as his “AI and Crypto Czar”, has Silicon Valley finally succeeded in conquering Washington DC? In today’s That Was The Week summary of tech news, Keith Teare and Andrew review what appears to be a tectonic shift in power between Silicon Valley and Washington DC. Are “right-wing” Trump supporters like Sacks, E...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist Jeff Jarvis , is another leading defender of the internet. In his new book, The Web We Weave , Jarvis explains how we can reclaim the internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panics. The Web, Jarvi...

Few people deserve their place in the Internet Hall of Fame than Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker . Since co-founding the Mozilla Project in the late Nineties, Baker has been one of the most consistent and articulate champions of an open internet. So looking back over the last quarter century, what does Baker make of the history of online freedom? And is she hopeful that new technologies like AI...

Few people are better at demystifying the byzantine complexities of the American healthcare system than the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Robert Pearl , MD. So what does Pearl make of Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services? Is this a thinly veiled excuse to go to war with the current American healthcare system? Or does RFK Jr really have the acuity to responsibl...

If Silicon Valley has an official matriarch, it might be the Palo Alto based educator and writer Esther Wojcicki. Popularly known as the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”, Wojcicki is the mother of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki and anthropologist and professor Janet Wojcicki. And, of course, she’s also the mother-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. So ho...

Steve Blank is one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent hackers. As the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, Blank has changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. And now, as a Stanford professor, he’s focused on hacking contemporary United States diplomacy and warfare. So what does Blank make of Elon...

If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff . One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became one of the earliest critics of its increasingly market-driven and monopolistic forces. But now, as the zeitgeist has sharply shifted against the digital revolution, Rushkoff has become cautiously opti...

As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy 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 , the Brookings Institute senior fellow, turns the tables on Andrew and interviews him about the state of American democracy. What is the risk of the incoming Trump administration to...

Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab chairman Bill Gross . 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. He’s also been a frequent speaker at events like DLD , the Munich based annual conference which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in J...

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 publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this week, the problem with this DOGE plan is that it appears much more interested in blowing up government than in rebuilding it. What’s needed, Keith and Andrew argue, is to radically rethink government...

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, Mahbubani - Singapore’s longtime permanent representative at the United Nations - offers what he calls an “undiplomatic memoir” of Singapore’s rise from an impoverished outlay of the British...

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference , today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick , author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy Media . In contrast with Steven Levy and John Markoff , whose attitude toward Silicon Valley doesn’t seem have dramatically changed, Kirkpatrick’s thinking h...

As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International , myboldb friend Frank Vogl 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 about how money didn’t buy the election for Trump. But given that the art of the (digital) deal is Trump’s only rea...

Last week, we featured an interview with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy , the former Newsweek technology correspondent and author of best-selling books about hacking, crypto, Google and Facebook. Levy is now Wired’ s editor-at-large and when I visited Levy at New York City’s glittering Conde Nast of...

In this KEEN ON Andrew Keen special, guest host David Masciotra interviews Andrew about his controversial book 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 YouTube. Duh. What both David and Andrew agree on, however, is that the book’sn focus on the damage...

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 Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss both the promise and...

How to beat Trump? In his new book, 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 overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, Turf War ex...

Former New York Times reporter 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 Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Va...

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner . How to prevent the worst happening , Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened, how exactly is Wehner - who worked in several Republican administrations - feeling about the future of the Amer...

It’s hard to know if 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 in the Wall Street Journal that Trump “can’t win another presidential election”. What Buckley was explicitly calling for was Trumpism without Trump. So what, exactly, is “Tr...

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra , Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both of...

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the...

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal government. So how seriously might we take Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Should...

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel , who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he...

The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past , the sociologist Frank Furedi believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and undermine all our hard won intellectual freedoms. It’s the convention conservative argument, of course, but what’s interesting about Furedi is that he used to be a revolution...