Andrew Keen

Andrew speaks English

Services: Brainstorm, Panel, Presentation

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Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen refers to himself as “The AntiChrist of Sillicon Valley”, and is the one courageous individual that criticizes Web 2.0 developments.

Keen is the author of the international hit The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture. Acclaimed by The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani as having been written “with acuity and passion” and by A.N. Wilson in the Daily Mail as “staggering”, The Cult of the Amateur has been published into twelve languages and was short-listed for the 2008 Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

Keens’ critique is that Web 2.0 worships the Creative Amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Keen believes in an educated elite, amateurs can never be on par with real experts and Web 2.0 is a threat to creativity and our culture. In the Weekly Standard, he called Web 2.0 a grand utopian movement, similar to a “communist society” as described by Karl Marx.

With his provocative style, Andrew has appeared on many television and radio shows around the world, such as the Colbert Report, McNeil-Lehrer Newsnight show, The Today Show, Fox News, CNN International, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and BBC Newsnight. Andrew Keen was one of the leading characters in “Wiki’s Waarheid“, the dutch VPRO documentary on Web 2.0 developments by IJsbrand van Veelen.

He writes a syndicated column for the London Independent, as well as for the leading Dutch paper De Volkskrant and the Belgium daily De Standaard. He has written for many other publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Guardian, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Prospect, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly. Additionally he writes about media on his own blog, The Great Seduction.

Earlier, Andrew was a pioneering Silicon Valley entrepreneur, founding Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a well-known first generation Internet music company. He produced the new media show “MB5 2000” and remains active as an advisor and investor in promising start-up companies. Andrew was educated at London University where he got a First Class Degree in Modern History, at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of California at Berkeley.

Keen talks about his critisizm of web 2.0, democratization and intellectual property and he debated with well-known web 2.0 thinkers such as Kevin Kelly and David Weinberger.

His new book, The Internet is not the answer, will be published in January 2015.

Andrew Keen on TEDx:

Andrew Keen on CNN:

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