Toluu : The Great Seduction

The Great Seduction

Andrew Keen on the future of Media, Culture and Technology

Late last month, while I was in England for the Silicon Valley Comes To Oxford event, I had an interesting chat with a tuxedoed Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. Stone (above right -- standing in the Oxford Union library next to Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn), told me that Internet news was about to become real-time. I didn't get it. A few days later, of course, Mumbai happened and the news did indeed go real-time.

For more on the ups and downs of real-time news, read my piece in today's internet evolution. And while you are there, check out internet evolution's richly informative Web Wide World Global Video Series. The show about Ruanda is particularly revealing -- did you know that gorillas invented the Internet?

This One is MineYesterday

The news about the publishing business is grim grim & very grim, but that doesn't mean there aren't great books by brilliant authors still being published. Take, for example, This One Is Mine, the sophistcated new novel by my friend Maria Semple, published today by Little Brown.

I first read This One Is Mine a couple of years ago in draft form. It's a wickedly acidic take on Los Angeles' wealthy media elite. No wonder that Maria, who used to be a Los Angeles based screenwriter for tv shows like Ellen, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development, has recently moved from surreal Southern California to sensible Seattle.

This one is for anyone who enjoys laughing uncontrollably at Los Angeles. Enjoy!

In defense of sleazy lobbyistsDecember 3

I really like what Tina Brown is doing at The Daily Beast. There's no hint of the crowd at the Beast -- it's all Tina's sensibility, her wit and judgment. So I'm thrilled to now be contributing to the new website. My first piece, published today, is a defense of (sleazy) lobbyists -- surely the loneliest and most misunderstood people in America today.

Judging from the comments about In Defense of Sleazy Lobbyists, it seems like not everyone agrees with my defense of K Street. But then, again, most people disagreed with my defense of professional journalists, and it's only now -- as more and more people recognize news is dying -- that my position is becoming more mainstream.

So spare a thought for the lonely lobbyists of K Street. They are the intermediaries par excellence of our representative democracy and thus have become

Pirating the people's gameNovember 30

I first met Justin Kan and his trademark webcam in May 2007 at Los Angeles’ landmark Roosevelt hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. Back then, Justin Kan had his own personal Internet show: an always-on video streaming act, a digital version of Peter Weir’s 1998 movie The Truman Show, which involved Kan attaching a webcam contraption to his head and broadcasting himself, 24-hours a day, on the Internet.

Kan and I were both appearing at the appropriately named Always-On conference, an event put on by Tony Perkins, the founder of Red Herring magazine and a noted Silicon Valley impresario. As we sat in the lobby of the Roosevelt hotel, once the haunt of old media icons like Gable, Lombard and Monroe and now packed with brash new media stars like Kan, the 24 year-old Yale graduate told me that he planned to transform Justin.tv from a site that just broadcasting himself into a Web 2.0 style portal that enabled everyone to stream themselves on the Internet.

A portal, I thought to myself, dismissively -- how quaint, how antiquated, how very 1998.

How wrong I was. Kan’s Justin.tv, financed by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator early stage venture fund, has proved to be one of the most viral h

The brainy brandNovember 22

And so the Obama post-election brand is now becoming clearer. As the impressed David Brooks notes, it's the brainy brand -- the senior Obama administration being made up, for the most part, of Harvard and Yale Law School graduates and Ivy League PhDs:

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

As the author of an outrageously elitist booky-wooky which assaults our democratic cult of mass ignorance, I'm unabashedly thrilled by Obama's respect for the achievement of America's meritocratic intellectual aristocracy. His will be a truly anti-Palinesque presidency and, while it's not entirely clear whether he'll rule from the right or the left, what is clear is that the Harvard Law School graduate will rule from above rather than from below. But this does create a problem. That's because his pre-election brand was as much focused on YOU as on Obama himself. As Oxford University's Paul Temporal