Andrew Keen's Prodigious Emissions of Smug

Via Jason Rosenhouse, I've recently been made aware of the existence of someone who is quite possibly the most shameless narcissist this side of Bill O'Rielly. His name is Andrew Keen, and he has woven an entire book from his messiah-grade superiority complex, where he slams hoi polloi for having the temerity to take part in the formation of cultural trends and political narrative. The most recent example of his complete inability to not be a blubbering douche bag is his appearance on the Colbert Report, where he displayed all the logic and intellectual acumen of a petulant five year-old. During the interview, Keen was such an unabashed cry-baby bitch that he induced one of those rare instances where Colbert was floored to point of briefly coming out of character. Keen's self-obsessed snobbery reached it's peak when he quite literally proclaimed to Colbert, “I know more about the Internet than you do!” Wow, that's some argumentative skill right there, shithead! Hopefully you can use your vast knowledge of the Internet to locate someone who knows a surgical technique for removing whatever thorny branch is crammed up your ass.

Wow, and to think he doesn't even realize what an pompous asshole he comes off as. However, his book has apparently overlooked one of the great benefits of the internet: it provides and extensive database where people can look up someone's history. The most ironic thing about Keen is that, while being a flagrant elitist and a snob, he himself failed to become one of the very “elites” he's gone to bat for. Keen was the founder and CEO of AudioCafe, a startup from the halcyon days of the dot com bubble. Unfortunately, like most useless startups from the era, it folded within a matter of years and left it's shareholders broke. What we have here is a failed entrepreneur who had long ago faded into irrelevancy with the rise of Web 2.0. So what does he do? He does what whiny, petulant bitches like himself always do: blame someone else. According to Keen, the “cult of the amateur” is ruining our culture. Or perhaps its just ruining him. Keen is apparently of the opinion that his failure in life is principally attributable to the fact that Web 2.0 has enabled too many of the damn rubes to produce content that competes with his “professional product”. Art and political narrative should be the exclusive pedigree of establishment gate-keepers, and the masses should sit like good little children and be fed from their spoon only.

But that's only his obvious motivation, the editorial phenotype is the typical intellectual property boosting and the condemnation of free software and free culture as “communism”. Just look at quotes from this editorial in The Weekly Standard from about a year and a half ago:

But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have — if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock — a moral obligation to question the development of technology.

......

Traditional “elitist” media is being destroyed by digital technologies. Newspapers are in freefall. Network television, the modern equivalent of the dinosaur, is being shaken by TiVo’s overnight annihilation of the 30-second commercial. The iPod is undermining the multibillion dollar music industry. Meanwhile, digital piracy, enabled by Silicon Valley hardware and justified by Silicon Valley intellectual property communists such as Larry Lessig, is draining revenue from established artists, movie studios, newspapers, record labels, and song writers.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century.

In other words, the crap we've all heard before about how piracy is “destroying” established industries, except with the added twist that its also “destroying” culture. Nevermind, however, that the legacy media has been proceeding just fine in destroying culture itself in producing an endless stream of crap. Uninspired sitcoms, prefabricated music, the destruction of successful movie and video game franchises with excessive production of sequels and a thousand other forms of market saturation have all done more to ruin our culture than anyone just pounding away at a keyboard ever could. To compare the sewage-products of modern day Viacom and Disney to Van Gogh and Hitchcock is a far more vulgar affront to taste than I've ever seen on a blog or a YouTube video. And, of course, let us not forget to mention that art and culture got along just fine for millennia into centuries before there was ever a notion of “intellectual property”. Our modern ideas of “copyright” were only established in the 17th. Century with the advent of the printing press. That means that almost all of the venerated works in the Western canon, from Homer's Epics to DaVinci and Michaelangelo, were created without the aid of Keen's pet legal contrivances.

Of course, if there is one thing Keen should be given credit for, its his honesty. His opinion on this matter is quite obviously shared by the rest of the big media establishment, they just prefer obscuritanism and concern-trolling to the undisguised self-aggrandizement and aristocracy mongering that Keen has become known for. Yet the fact that Keen has been getting a copious amount of attention from the legacy media betrays a mutually beneficial relationship: they get a figure to perform the role of their public-cheerleader, he gets a somewhat convincing illusion of relevance.

[Editors Note: I know I'm supposed to be on hiatus, and I really still am. But right now I'm in the eye of the storm and have an opportunity to get a few posts out. Its not going to last, though, and the next week and the following weekend are going to be a bitch. But I figure I might as well enjoy myself while I can.]