Keen On America

Pity the novelist. In a year which brought us the unbelievable non-fiction of a second Trump victory and the establishment of Luigi Mangione as an American folk hero, what can novelists do to stretch our imagination? But according to the LA Times literary critic, Bethanne Patrick , novelists do, indeed, still have something to tell us. And to make her case, she discusses her five favorite works of...

For all the hysteria about misinformation and disinformation, maybe we prefer ignorance. That’s the intriguing thesis of the illustrious Columbia University intellectual historian, Mark Lilla, in his new book, Ignorance is Bliss. It all begins, of course, inside Plato’s cave in his Republic , that metaphorical preface to Western thought where we are subjected to illusionary shadows and delusional...

It’s been coming a while. But now it’s official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, suitably entitled “ I’m With Musk ”, Keith argues that without Musk “I have no idea what a positive narrative about modernization and growth would be.” America, Keith argues, needs “builders” like Musk who will enable “a real conversation about change”. I’m...

On May 24, 2022, a 18 year-old walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and shot to death 19 students and 2 teachers. In Uvalde’s Darkest Hour , the owner of the local Uvalde Leader-News , Craig Garnett tries to make sense of these tragic events. Although making sense might be the wrong words to describe either the book or Garnett himself. While this mass murder occurred more than two y...

While many of us fear a future in which all our online interactions are with algorithms, the young Florida based programming prodigy, Michael Sayman , actually looks forward to this brave new world. In fact, earlier this year he started a controversial social media app called SocialAI which exclusively feature bots responding to its human users. For Sayman, our ubiquitous interaction with smart ma...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the dearth of high quality contemporary music and movies. The music writer, David Rowell , agrees with Taplin, but goes one step further, suggesting that we no longer even like new music. In his new book, The Endless Refrain , Rowell the rise of music streaming and the consolidation of digital platforms has so decimated the musical l...

A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt , author of Ours Was the Shining Future, about the death of the American dream which, he argued, can be dated from on 5 June 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And it’s on that infamous date that I begun my conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the rebirth of the American dream. According to the Los Angeles based Taplin, who is now working o...

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...