Keen On America

The conventional way of thinking about digital technology revolutions is akin to thinking about how to build a house. First we build the foundation, then we add the frame and finally the cosmetic furnishing. In tech, this is known as the “stack” - and traditionally, each chapter in the narrative involves different companies and technologies. So in the case of the Internet boom, for example, first there were tech plumbing companies like Cisco, then middleware companies, and finally consumer companies like Amazon that interface with customers. But, as Andrew and Keith Teare discuss in this week That Was the Week tech roundup, in the case of the AI revolution, the entire “stack” might be owned by a single company. So OpenAI or Anthropic threaten to quite literally control the construction of the entire house - from laying the foundations to painting the walls and laying the carpets of tomorrow’s AI world. As Keith and Andrew warn, the implications of this on the future of innovation in the digital economy are immense. In the age of AI, Big Tech threatens to be dramatically more monolith and powerful than ever. Even Keith, the eternal tech optimist, seems a little nervous about such a dramatic concentration of wealth and power. 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

Early today, we posted a conversation with Celeste Marcus, LIBERTIES Quarterly managing editor, about her hard-hitting “Hate Lands” essay in the Fall 2024 issue. In the same issue, there’s an equally hard hitting piece by the Rutgers historian, Katherine C. Epstein. But whereas Marcus goes after Trump and Putin, Epstein’s ire is reserved for her fellow American historians who, she believes, are, literally, “killing history”. And Epstein doesn’t pull her punches in this conversation either. America, she told me, is the “world’s teenager” in terms of (not) making sense of its own historical narrative. Meanwhile, “the donkeys are leading the donkeys” inside American history departments, creating a crisis of this most essential academic craft.Katherine C. Epstein is associate professor of history at Rutgers-Camden.  She is currently working on her second book, which examines government secrecy, defense contracting, intellectual property, and the political economy of power projection.  Her first book, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Harvard University Press, 2014), examined these issues through the lens of torpedo development before World War I.  In 2018-2019, she held an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  Her work has appeared in various academic journals and edited collections, as well as in the Wall Street Journal and American Interest.  She teaches courses in US history, military history, diplomatic history, and historical methods.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

In the Fall 2024 issue of Liberties Quarterly, managing editor Celeste Marcus writes about the great Polish movie director Agnieszka Holland. Marcus argues that the 75 year-old Holland - best known for her 1990 movie Europa Europa - remains as relevant as ever because of her focus on what she calls the “terrifying contingency” of social breakdown. Linking Holland’s latest film, Green Border, a movie about the the plight of east European migrants with Donald Trump’s dehumanization of American migrants, Marcus argues that “no human hates like the human.” And the very worst humans, Marcus reminds us, with a barely concealed reference to Trump and Putin, “do not live under beds or in our imaginations; they sit in paneled offices behind mahogany desks, signing bills into law, raising and razing cities with the same hand.”Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics and the co-host of “The DC Salon” podcast. She is at work on a biography of the artist Chaim Soutine.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

Do we shape the future or does it shape us? That’s the core question in Brian Solis’ new book, Mindshift which provides lessons for corporate executives in transforming leadership and driving innovation. Like so many other futurists, Solis’ work focuses on how we can become irreplaceable in the age of AI. Agency still lies with us, he acknowledges. But unless we use that agency to shape the future, Solis warns, then that future will eventually make all of us eminently replaceable. Brian Solis is Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow. In his role, Brian sets the strategic direction and programming for ServiceNow’s Innovation and Executive Briefing Centers in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, and Singapore. Additionally, Brian designs and delivers strategic engagements with important customers to advise on digital and business innovation strategies. Brian Solis has been called “one of the greatest digital analysts of our time.” Brian is also a world renowned keynote speaker and an award-winning author of eight best-selling books including, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, What’s the Future of Business and The End of Business as Usual.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

As a longtime Harvard Business School professor and the former chief marketing officer at Aetna, David C. Edelman is all too familiar with both the dangers and opportunities of personalized technology. In Personalization, his new book, co-authored with Boston Consulting Group managing director Mark Abraham, Edelman focuses on customer strategy in our age of AI. While Edelman acknowledges that there have been dangers with Web 2.0 style products that enables personalization, he is nonetheless cautiously optimist that AI will enable companies to provide hyper-personalized services and products that will ultimately benefit consumers. Rather than the age of surveillance capitalism, then, Edelman believes that AI represents the age of the empowered and happy consumer. Fighting talk from one of the world’s leading marketing mavens.David C. Edelman has a long history of Personalization work stretching back more than three decades. In 1989, he wrote the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) classic article, “Segment-of-One Marketing,” in which he predicted the possibilities of Personalization. Since then, he has chronicled the evolution of the field, offering the visionary ideas he’s developed as a practitioner and a consultant. David has worked with dozens of companies on Personalization, AI, and Agile marketing at BCG and Digitas before transforming Aetna’s approach to customer experience while serving as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. His six articles in the Harvard Business Review cover the evolving Customer Decision Journey, the Future of Customer Experience, and the Implications of AI for Management Leaders and Boards. Today, he is an executive advisor and board member to brands and technology providers, is an advisor to BCG, and teaches at Harvard Business School. Forbes has repeatedly named him one of the Top 20 Most Influential Voices in Marketing, and Ad Age has named him a Top 20 Chief Marketing and Technology Officer. A music fanatic and avid tenor sax player, David lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Miriam and their two labradoodles, where they periodically host their three grown children.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

Last week, we featured an interview with the leftist American theologian, Jim Wallis, who warned about the false white gospel of contemporary Christian nationalism. And we return to the existential dangers of American religion today with Talia Lavin whose new book, Wild Faith, warns that the Christian right is actually taking over America. In contrast with Wallis, however, Lavin doesn’t offer a more loving version of American christianity as an theological alternative to the evangelical right. For radically secular Lavin, the challenge is to get any kind of fundamentalist religion out of politics. That’s the way to fix democracy. That’s how to save America.Talia Lavin is the author of the critically acclaimed book Culture Warlords. She is a journalist who has had bylines in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, and more. She writes a newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, which is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. 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

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson, who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress, appeared on KEEN ON just over a year ago to talk about technology & prosperity. Given that the prize was given to Johnson (and Acemoglu) for their work on explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations, we thought it worthwhile to rerun the interview from last year. Particularly since, if anything, the relationship between new technologies like AI and economic inequality is even more pertinent in 2024 than it was last year. SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae. Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence. His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support.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

Earlier this week, the prominent African-American broadcaster and writer, Tavis Smiley, came on the show to voice his support for Reparations to correct the past racial injustices in American history. The Kentucky based historian, Joel Edward Goza, author of Rebirth of a Nation, agrees with Smiley, arguing that Reparations is, in fact, the central civil rights issue of our age. The struggle for Reparations in California, he argues, has turned the state into the Alabama or Mississippi of the 2020s. Perhaps. Although I’m not sure everyone, either in and out of California, will agree with Goza’s analysis of Ronald Reagan’s central role in 21st century America’s racial injustice. Or his suggestion that California should pay reparations to the rest of America for Reagan’s sins. Joel Edward Goza is a writer, speaker, and community advocate. He is professor of ethics at the HBCU Simmons College and teaches in Kentucky prisons. Before focusing on writing and teaching, Joel worked in urban redevelopment and community activism for over a decade in Houston’s Fifth Ward. He is also the author of America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics, and contributes to The Hill, Salon, and Religion News Service. 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

In her quest for the White House, it seems as if Kamala Harris is doing everything in her power to disassociate herself with liberal ideas. So what, exactly, has happened to liberal politics in the United States today? That’s exactly the question which the excellent young George Washington historian, Timothy Shenk, asks in his new book, Left Adrift. And in tracing the fate of liberal politics in America today, Shenk goes back to the Democratic party’s two most influential political strategists of the Clinton era: Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. The story of these two Zeligs of the center-left, Shenk explains, helps us understand not only Kamala Harris’ innate conservatism, but also the challenges (and perhaps opportunities) for American liberalism to reinvent itself in today’s age of illiberal populism. Timothy Shenk is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. A senior editor at Dissent magazine, he has written for the New York Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and Jacobin, among other publications. He received his bachelor’s degree and PhD in history from Columbia University, has been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New America Foundation.  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

It’s been a strange week in tech. The Nobel prizes in both Chemistry and Physics went to prominent former or current Googlers, and yet the tech news cycle has been dominated by the U.S. government’s intent to break up a seemingly prostrate Google. Keith Teare and Andrew, in their regular That Was The Week summary of tech news, discuss Google’s failure to present itself in the United States as the motor of American economic innovation. OpenAI has stolen that mantle, Keith suggests, which may be why the editorial in his newsletter this week is about OpenAI’s trillion dollar opportunity. Google’s messaging is off, Keith suggests, which is why they might consider hiring Chris Lehane, the subject of an intriguing New Yorker piece on Silicon Valley’s new master of the political message. The only problem is that Lehane is Sam Altman’s new messaging man at OpenAI. Perhaps Altman should use ChatGPT to create a Lehane bot, which they could then sell, for billions of dollars, to Big Tech rivals like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. 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