How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen – review

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen – review
As the internet giants run amok, a visionary critic calls for governments and citizens to tackle a crisis of historic proportions
By John Naughton
Mar 4 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/04/how-to-fix-future-staying-human-digital-age-andrew-keen-review

Many years ago the cultural critic Neil Postman predicted that the future of humanity lay somewhere in the area between the dystopian nightmares of two English writers – George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear – surveillance and thought-control; Huxley thought that our undoing would be the things that delight us – that our rulers would twig that entertainment is more efficient than coercion as a means of social control.

Then we invented the internet, a technology that – it turned out – gave us both nightmares at once: comprehensive surveillance by states and corporations on the one hand; and, on the other, a strange kind of passive addiction to devices, apps and services which, like the drug soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, possess “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol and none of their defects”.

The great irony, of course, is that not all of this was inevitable. Granted, the technology always had an intrinsic capacity for surveillance because of the way it works. But it also had the great emancipatory, democratising potential celebrated by the legal scholar Yochai Benkler in his landmark 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks. But that potential has, for the most part, not been realised. What has happened instead is that the internet has been captured by a small number of American companies, which are amplifying inequality (creating unimaginable wealth for their owners while employing very few people), polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy. And the same outfits are now racing ahead to enhance the artificial intelligence technology that will entrench their dominance.

Confronted with this challenge, our societies seem like rabbits caught in the headlights of a truck. True, our legislators are belatedly waking up to the scale of the problem, but at the moment their responses seem either banal (see Theresa May’s bleating about social media) or self-defeating (Germany’s outsourcing of decisionsabout what should be published, or censored, to Facebook and Twitter). The intellectual bankruptcy of these reactions suggests that our leaders have not yet understood the scale of the revolution under way, which is also why they have no idea what to do about it – and why so much commentary about our digital future has a dystopian air.

Into this maelstrom steps Andrew Keen, a tech commentator who never drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid. In three earlier books – The Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo and The Internet Is Not the Answer – he provided an ongoing, scathing critique of tech evangelism. His scepticism now looks prescient: he understood the significance of what was happening earlier than most.

With his new book, Keen switches from sarcasm to a kind of pragmatic optimism. Our digital future can be shaped in more humane directions, he argues. But for that to happen we need to be realistic about the scale of the challenge, to learn from history and accept that there are no magic bullets or technological fixes. Like Churchill, he offers mostly blood, sweat and tears; but at least he has a programme of what needs to be done.

A key plank in this platform is that the dominant digital technologies of the future must not be proprietary, but open. And there must be real competition in digital markets. This means that governments have to update antitrust laws for a digital age in which winner-takes-all outcomes are routine, and enforce them rigorously. Monopolistic abuses should be prosecuted and punished. Mergers and acquisitions that were once waved through (Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, for example, or Facebook’s of WhatsApp) should be scrutinised sceptically. Competition lawyers should be crawling all over the hidden, high-speed ad-trading markets operated by Google and Facebook. And so on.

Second, we need to protect the public sphere on which all democracies depend. Facebook and Twitter – and, in some areas, Google – should be treated and regulated like the media companies they have become. The era when we were suspicious of Rupert Murdoch but indulgent towards Mark Zuckerberg is over. Tech companies should be held responsible for the harms they do.

[snip]