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Keen On

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Dec 2, 2024 • 47min

Episode 2261: Douglas Rushkoff on why AI is the first native app for the internet

Douglas Rushkoff, a prominent media theorist and author, dives deep into the intersection of technology and society. He discusses the evolution of the internet from a decentralized utopia to a corporate-controlled landscape. Rushkoff highlights the role of AI as the internet’s first native application and its potential to address global issues. He reflects on the impact of movements like Occupy and critiques the failures of neoliberalism, advocating for a proactive approach to harnessing technology for human enhancement.
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Dec 1, 2024 • 59min

Episode 2260: Andrew Keen evaluates the health of American democracy

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 the Republic, Jon asks Andrew? Is Trump just one more turbulent chapter in the colorful history of American democracy or does the MAGA movement represent an existential threat to the world’s oldest representative democratic system?Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institute and the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer of The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His many Brookings publications include the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth”, as well as the 2015 ebook “Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy.” Other books include “The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50” (2018) and “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America” (2004). He has also authored research on political parties, marijuana legalization, LGBT rights and religious liberty, and more. Although much of his writing has been on public policy, he has also written on topics as widely varied as adultery, agriculture, economics, gay marriage, height discrimination, biological rhythms, number inflation, and animal rights. His multiple-award-winning column, “Social Studies,” appeared from 1998 to 2010 in National Journal. Among the many other publications for which he has written are The New Republic, The Economist, Reason, Harper’s, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Public Interest, The Advocate, The Daily, and others. In his 1994 book “Demosclerosis”—revised and republished in 2000 as “Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working”—he argues that America’s government is becoming gradually less flexible and effective with time, and suggests ways to treat the malady. His 1993 book “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought” (the University of Chicago Press) defends free speech and robust criticism, even when it is racist or sexist and even when it hurts. In 1992 his book “The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan” questioned the then-conventional wisdom that Japan was fundamentally different from the West. Rauch was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and graduated in 1982 from Yale University. In addition to the National Magazine Award, his honors include the 2010 National Headliner Award, one of the industry’s most venerable prizes. In 1996 he was awarded the Premio Napoli alla Stampa Estera for his coverage, in The Economist, of the European Parliament. In 2011 he won the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association prize for excellence in opinion writing. His articles appear in The Best Magazine Writing 2005 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and 2007. He has appeared as a guest on many television and radio programs.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 30, 2024 • 51min

Episode 2259: Idealab founder Bill Gross on what's he's learned over the last 20 years

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 January. And so, having visited Gross at his ultra cool Idealab offices in Pasadena, I asked the serial entrepreneur and investor to reminisce about the last twenty years of tech history. What were his greatest successes and failures? And how fundamentally different is today’s AI boom from the other cycles of innovation that he’s experienced?Bill Gross founded Idealab in March 1996. Bill is a lifelong entrepreneur, starting his first solar business in high school. After graduating from the California Institute of Technology, Bill started GNP Development, Inc., which made a natural language product for Lotus 1-2-3 called HAL. In 1985, Lotus Development Corporation acquired GNP. In 1991, Bill started Knowledge Adventure, an educational software publisher that was eventually sold to Havas/Vivendi. Bill serves on the boards of directors of numerous companies and is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Caltech and the Art Center College of Design. Bill received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 29, 2024 • 39min

Episode 2258: Why the Democrats need to radically reimagine 21st century American government as a service or a platform

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 as something that delivers high quality services for 21st century American society. It’s what Keith coins as “government-as-service” and Tim O’Reilly calls government as a platform. Such a forward thinking conception of government, Keith and Andrew agree, is essential if the Democrats are to successfully counter the destructive Republican DOGE plan with something more constructive of their own. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 28, 2024 • 57min

Episode 2257: Kishore Mahbubani offers an undiplomatic introduction to our Asian Century

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 empire into the world’s wealthiest country. It’s quite a story and Mahbubani tells it in his own bluntly undiplomatic way. Kishore Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). Mr Mahbubani has been privileged to enjoy two distinct careers, in diplomacy (1971 to 2004) and in academia (2004 to 2019). He is a prolific writer who has spoken in many corners of the world. In diplomacy, he was with the Singapore Foreign Service for 33 years (1971 to 2004). He had postings in Cambodia, Malaysia, Washington DC and New York, where he twice was Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN and served as President of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002. He was Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998. As a result of his excellent performance in his diplomatic career, he was conferred the Public Administration Medal (Gold) by the Singapore Government in 1998. Mr Mahbubani joined academia in 2004, when he was appointed the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School), NUS. He was Dean from 2004 to 2017, and a Professor in the Practice of Public Policy from 2006 to 2019. In April 2019, he was elected as an honorary international member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has honoured distinguished thinkers, including several of America’s founding fathers, since 1780. Mr Mahbubani was awarded the President’s Scholarship in 1967. He graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Philosophy from the University of Singapore in 1971. From Dalhousie University, Canada, he received a Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1976 and an honorary doctorate in 1995. He spent a year as a fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1991 to 1992. He has achieved several “firsts” in his two careers. He was the Founding Dean of the LKY School, the founding Director of the Civil Service College, the first Singapore Ambassador to serve on the UN Security Council, the first Singaporean to publish articles in globally renowned journals and newspapers like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times and the Financial Times and co-authored articles with distinguished global thought leaders like Kofi Annan, Klaus Schwab and Larry Summers. Mr Mahbubani has never shied away from taking on new challenges. He is also a prolific author, having published nine books: Can Asians Think?; Beyond the Age of Innocence; The New Asian Hemisphere; The Great Convergence; Can Singapore Survive?; The ASEAN Miracle (co-authored with Jeffery Sng); Has the West Lost It?; Has China Won?; and The Asian 21st Century, an open access book which has received over 3 million downloads. His memoir, Living the Asian Century, will be released in August 2024. Mr Mahbubani has received significant international recognition for his many accomplishments. The Foreign Policy Association Medal was awarded to him in New York in June 2004 with the following opening words in the citation: “A gifted diplomat, a student of history and philosophy, a provocative writer and an intuitive thinker”. He was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in September 2005, and included in the March 2009 Financial Times list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. He was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers in 2010 and 2011. In 2011, he was described as “the muse of the Asian century”. He was selected by Prospect magazine as one of the top 50 world thinkers for 2014.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 27, 2024 • 55min

Episode 2256: David Kirkpatrick on his twenty year odyssey from digital idealist to sceptic

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 has undergone quite a radical shift over the last twenty years. As he acknowledges, he’s been transformed from a Facebook believer into one of its most acute critics. And, in contrast with Levy and Markoff, Kirkpatrick’s intellectual attention has also broadened, shifting from the internet to focusing on technological fixes for global warming.David Kirkpatrick is a longtime technology and business journalist, author and media entrepreneur, known for his work connecting technology developments to societal impact and progress. He is an expert on internet companies and social media, and is now focusing especially on climate tech and the climate economy. He is also known for moderating on-stage conversations with tech leaders. Kirkpatrick's bestselling 2010 book, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, was published in 32 languages, including Catalan and Vietnamese. It was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year as well as the Gerald Loeb Award. In subsequent years, he has written extensively about the growing societal harms caused by Facebook/Meta and social media broadly. His articles include 2018’s Facing Facebook’s Failure for Techonomy, and earlier that same year, The Facebook Defect, in Time Magazine. In December 2023 he published Vinod Khosla Can See the Future: It Just Got Hazy for a Minute in The Information. Kirkpatrick founded and for 12 years led Techonomy Media, which hosted conferences on technology, innovation, business, and their connection to social progress. Techonomy’s mission was to highlight ways technology could improve society and human lives. Among his numerous onstage interviews there were Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, John Chambers, Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker, economist Jeffrey Sachs, Patrick Collison, DARPA Chief Arati Prabhakar, Sen. Cory Booker, Nandan Nilekani, and Sean Parker. He also has served as a moderator at Burda Media’s DLD conference for 19 years, interviewing a wide range of leaders including Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick worked for Time Inc. for 30 years, mostly at Fortune Magazine, where he was for many years senior editor for internet and technology. Many years earlier, while serving as a copy clerk at Life Magazine, he served as unit chairperson of The Newspaper Guild at Time Inc. He founded and hosted Fortune’s Brainstorm conference series beginning in 2001 and for six years wrote its Fast Forward column. At Brainstorm he hosted and interviewed Pres. Bill Clinton, Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres, Senator John McCain, and numerous technology and business CEOs. He was a formal participant and moderator at the World Economic Forum in Davos for 21 years, and for 13 years was a member of the Forum’s International Media Council, consisting of 100 top global media leaders. He also served for many years as a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television. He is a recipient of the 2012 Silicon Valley Visionary Award, awarded alongside Elon Musk, Jim Breyer, and Sal Khan. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 26, 2024 • 43min

Episode 2255: Frank Vogl on whether Donald Trump 2.0 will be a semi-legal repeat of the Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX debacle

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 real motivator, what exactly should we expect of a reborn Donald Trump? Might the Trump 2.0 regime, for example, be a semi-legal version of Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX and will we remember this new administration as the Bitcoin Presidency?Frank Vogl is the co-founder of two leading international non-governmental organizations fighting corruption -- Transparency International and the Partnership for Transparency Fund (Frank is the Chair of the PTF Board).  He teaches at Georgetown University, writes regular "blog" articles on corruption for theGlobalist.com and lectures extensively.  Frank is also a specialist in international economics and finance with more than 50 years of experience in these fields - first as an international journalist, then as the Director of Information & Public Affairs at the World Bank official and, from 1990 to 2017, as the president and CEO of a consulting firm, Vogl Communications Inc.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 25, 2024 • 50min

Episode 2254: Steven Levy on what has and hasn't surprised him about the last twenty years of tech history

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 offices, we talked about what has and hasn’t surprised him about the last twenty years of tech history and why he may be the last journalist with the good fortune of being paid to write long articles about Microsoft.Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.”For almost four decades Levy has chronicled the digital revolution, its impact on humanity, and the people behind it. He has written the foundational work on computer culture (Hackers, 1984) and with Crypto (2001) the indispensable book on story behind that groundbreaking technology—years before people began gushing about Bitcoin and the blockchain. He has written the definitive books on Facebook, Google, the Macintosh, and the iPod. World-class engineers tell him that they pursued AI after reading his 1992 book Artificial Life. And he currently covers the breadth of tech stories—the good and the disturbing—for WIRED, where he has been a contributor since its inception. Levy’s previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Among his honors: PC Magazine named Hackers the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. Crypto won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair. In the Plex was Amazon’s best business book of 2011. In 2008 he was inducted as a SVForum Visionary, alongside Reed Hastings and Diane Greene. (Previous winners include Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Vin Cerf.) He has won several Computer Press Association Awards, been finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Loeb Award, winner of a Clarion Award and many others.  His 1988 book, The Unicorn’s Secret, was the source material for a two-night NBC miniseries, “The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer.” Levy hails from Philadelphia, where he began his career writing for weekly papers and writing stories for Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. He wrote extensively on rock music and sports. In 1982, he published a Rolling Stone story on computer hackers that drew him into the world of technology.  He lives in New York City with his wife, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Teresa Carpenter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 24, 2024 • 50min

Episode 2253: Andrew Keen revisits Cult of the Amateur

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 that the supposedly “democratizing” Web 2.0 revolution did to both our culture and politics is still of massive significance. Perhaps it might be time for a 20th anniversary rewrite, a Cult of the Amateur 2.0 for our brave new AI world. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. His next book, Exurbia Now: Notes from the Battleground of American Democracy, is scheduled for publication from Melville House Books in 2024. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review. Masciotra has a Master’s Degree in English Studies and Communication from Valparaiso University. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from the University of St. Francis. He is public lecturer, speaking on a wide variety of topics, from the history of protest music in the United States to the importance of bars in American culture. David Masciotra has spoken at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Lewis University, Indiana University, the Chicago Public Library, the Lambeth Library (UK), and an additional range of colleges, libraries, arts centers, and bookstores. As a journalist, he has conducted interviews with political leaders, musicians, authors, and cultural figures, including Jesse Jackson, John Mellencamp, Noam Chomsky, all members of Metallica, David Mamet, James Lee Burke, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Joan Osborne, Martín Espada, Steve Earle, and Rita Dove. Masciotra lives in Indiana, and teaches literature and political science courses at the University of St. Francis and Indiana University Northwest. Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
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Nov 23, 2024 • 37min

Episode 2252: Can the AI revolution decentralize our politics, culture and economy?

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 danger of the AI revolution. Both are skeptical about radical decentralization, but both recognize that there’s nothing inevitable about history repeating itself again. As Keith notes, it’s up to us. Human agency will define the success or failure of the AI revolution. We all know the world we want. Now we just need to create it.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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