Keen On America

In the wake of Biden’s pathetically dismal performance last week, it’s worth remembering that some progressive thinkers have been warning for months about this catastrophe. Back in May, the New York Times ran an op-ed by UC Berkeley political science professor M. Steven Fish entitled “Trump Knows Dominance Wins, Someone Tell Democrats”. Even though The Times functions as the Pravda of the Democratic Party, obviously nobody did tell the Dems, which explains why the dominantly dishonest Trump trounced the submissively honest Biden last week and pretty much guaranteed a second Trump term. Meanwhile, the prolific Steve Fish has a new book out, Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge. Let’s hope the apparatchiks in the Democratic party reads this essential warning and recognize that unless they purge old man Biden, all will be lost in November. One caveat on this conversation: I interviewed Steve in his UC Berkeley office earlier in June, so there’s no mention of the debate last week. But we will work on getting Fish back on the show to discuss the latest debacle and what we can do about it.M. Steven Fish is a comparative political scientist who specializes in democracy and authoritarianism, religion and politics, and constitutional systems and national legislatures. His most recent book is Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge (2024). Previously he published Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (2011), which was selected for Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles, 2012: Top 25 Books. He is also author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (2005), which was the recipient of the Best Book Award of 2006, presented by the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association, and Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (1995). He is coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey (2009) and Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (2001). Fish writes and comments extensively on international affairs and the rising challenges to democracy in the United States and around the world. He appears on BBC, CNN, and other major networks, and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The American Interest, The Daily Beast, Slate, and Foreign Policy. He has served as an expert consultant to U.S. federal agencies and international organizations such as the European Commission for Democracy through Law.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

Does Silicon Valley have an AI bubble problem? That Was the Week’s Keith Teare, usually the most bullish of tech bulls, acknowledges that Silicon Valley has an overvaluation issue with AI startups. But I wonder if the problem with AI goes deeper than the frothiness of its startup valuations. What, if anything, is AI search good for? asks a Vox piece that Keith links to this week. That could be rephrased. What, if anything, is AI good for? might be a better question amidst the ridiculous valuations and childish promises of Silicon Valley’s AI priesthood. And the current answer, I suspect, is: not very much. 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

Imagine accosting a stranger in a grocery store because you mistook him to be your husband? That was the fate of the Washington Post science reporter, Sadie Dingfelder, who suffers from the bizarre condition of faceblindness. She explores this condition in DO I KNOW YOU?, her own journey into the strange science of sight, memory, and imagination. Dingfelder’s embrace of her own neurodiversity is both intriguing and delightful. This is a strongly recommended interview, one of my favorite of the summer so far. Sadie Dingfelder is a science journalist who is currently obsessed with hidden neurodiversity and science-based answers to the question: If you were beamed into the mind of another person or animal, what would that be like? Her debut book, “Do I Know you? A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory and Imagination,” comes out in June. She spent six years as a reporter for the Washington Post Express, where she focused on high-impact public service journalism, such as this review of every single bathroom on the National Mall. From 2016 to 2019, she also penned a biweekly column, "The Staycationer," detailing her DC adventures, which included a walk-on part in the Washington Ballet’s Nutcracker, auditioning to be a “Nationals Racing President,” and playing one of the Smithsonian’s priceless Stradivarius violins. She contributed feature stories to other sections of the paper, including the tale of a crane who fell in love with her zookeeper. As a freelance writer, Dingfelder’s work has appeared in National Geographic, Washingtonian magazine, Connecticut Magazine and the Washington City Paper. Prior to working at the Post, Dingfelder spent almost a decade as the senior science writer for the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology magazine, covering new findings in neuroscience, cognitive science, and ethology.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

If you liked Davy Chou’s excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul, then Tracy O’Neill’s new memoir, Woman of Interest, might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee’s return to South Korea in search of their mysterious birth mother. Chou’s movie features a heartbreakingly lost Ji-Min Park wandering through life in the West and finally stumbling emptily onto the foggy truth of her Korean origins. O’Neill’s non-fictional quest for her mother, in contrast, contains more agency and her quest eventually resulted in what her publisher describes as “the priceless power of self-knowledge.” There’s is an awkwardness to my conversation with O’Neill which actually makes her appear more like the lost heroine in Return To Seoul than she might like to acknowledge. Or maybe, as some think, I’m just an aggressively insensitive interviewer. Tracy O’Neill is the author of the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was named a Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writers Fellow. O’Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University.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 New York City based writer John Ganz appeared on episode 2099 talking about how American cracked up in the Nineties with the rise of neo-Nazis like David Duke. When it comes to national crack-ups, however, nothing much competes with Nazi Germany in the Thirties - and Ganz, as a grandson of German Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently travelled to Cologne to search for his family’s bookstore. This trip, which Ganz describes in a Harper’s piece, The Dead Admonish, is anything but cathartic. In contrast with other descendants of Jews returning to Germany like the British journalist John Kampfner, Ganz finds little reassuring about contemporary Germany. Strangely, the trip seems to have ignited a sense of Jewishness in the defiantly secular Ganz. The dead do, indeed, admonish. John Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Michael Lipkin assisted with translating source material.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

Whatever one thinks of the creative potential of AI, it’s definitely been great for metaphor makers. Yesterday, we had Shannon Vallor explaining why AI is a mirror of our social and political values. Today, Madhumita Murgia, the Financial Times’ Artificial Intelligence editor and author of CODE DEPENDENT, suggests that we are all living in the shadow of the economic perils and inequities AI. The metaphors of shadows and mirrors return us, of course, to Plato’s cave and Socrates’ invention of metaphor to define justice. Rather than rely on dusty old metaphors, perhaps AI offers an opportunity to get out of our (metaphorical) cave and stare directly into the sun. That said, CODE DEPENDENT, already short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, is a valuable addition to the deluge of new books about AI. Madhumita Murgia is the first Artificial Intelligence Editor of the Financial Times and has been writing about AI, for Wired and the FT, for over a decade. Born and raised in India, she studied biology and immunology at Oxford University. She lives in London.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

According to Shannon Vallor, a self-styled AI “ethicist”, artificial intelligence is a mirror. When we interact with the latest algorithms from OpenAI or Anthropic, she says, we are actually observing our social and political values, prejudices and ideals. This all-too-human quality of AI makes it less of an existential threat to humanity and more of a reflection both of society’s flaws and a promise of its self-improvement. AI, like our own reflection in the mirror, is both everything and nothing. No wonder we need “ethicists” like Vallor to remind us of our flawed appearance. Shannon Vallor is a philosopher of AI and a writer of books about how new technologies reshape human character. Vallor grew up fascinated by the promise of computing, robotics, and space travel to allow us to shape a more humane future. Today that dream is drifting further away, as we lock ourselves into ever more unsustainable social and environmental patterns. Despite being marketed as the keys to our future, the AI technologies that dominate the headlines today only tend to amplify and reinforce those patterns. Can AI help us unweave them instead? Can we use it to strengthen the virtues of human wisdom, care, and creativity, rather than to devalue and replace them? Vallor’s work seeks to reclaim technology's roots as a moral practice: finding new and better techniques for the care and service of life with others, and the humane engineering of futures worth wanting.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

We are focusing on the impact of AI this week with interviews featuring Shannon Vallor, Matt Beane and Madhumita Murgia. First up Beane, who teaches Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and has a new book out about how to save human ability in an age of intelligent machines. The book is called The Skill Code, but as Matt Beane explains, it’s really about a human code that will allow us to maintain our value in an age of intelligent machines. Matt has also been kind enough to provide KEEN ON subscribers with a link to chapter 1 of the book: keenon.theskillcodebook.comMatt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we use across the broader world of work. He has published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and spoken on the Ted stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup. Beane is an Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Digital Fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy. He received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management.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

Little has changed in America more dramatically over the last half century than the retail fashion industry. There was a time, Julie Satow tells us the mid 20th century, when the high fashion department stores on New York City’s Fifth Avenue were not only glamorous, but were actually run by women. This is the story of her new book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, a wistful, yet sociologically penetrating view of of the golden age of American department stores. What does the death of the high-end fashion department store tell us about the America of the 2020’s, I asked the New York City based Satow. And should we be nostalgic for department stores which excluded African-Americans and which seem to have compounded the economic and class divisions of American women?Julie Satow is the author of “The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel” and the forthcoming “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion,” to be published in June 2024 by Doubleday.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

There are those who believe that fighting for democracy is more important than defending the rather nebulous concept of “liberalism”. And then there are those, like the political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, who, in their eponymous new book, see liberalism as a way of life which makes us both better and happier people. For Lefebvre, liberalism is the ideology of our times, as ubiquitous as religion once was. Rather than apologizing for the L word, Lefebvre argues, we should celebrate the way in which it saturates every area of public and private life, shapes our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and underpins our moral and aesthetic values.Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He teaches and researchs in political theory, the history of political thought, modern and contemporary French philosophy, and human rights. He grew up in Vancouver, Canada, studied in the United States (PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Humanities Center 2007), and now calls Sydney home. For the past decade, his work has focused on one big idea: “political” ideas and institutions can and do inspire rich and rewarding ways of life. His latest book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton 2024), is about how so many of us are liberals all the way down and draw our values (and our sense of what’s good, right, normal, outrageous, wrong, funny, worthwhile, and much more) from liberalism.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