The author aims most of his ire at that axis of internet evil, Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace, but does take time to target the internet’s other influences as well. He freely criticizes that, “…sites like Craigslist that offer free classifieds, undermining paid ad placements” (8), as if the E section of the newspaper has some sort of divine ownership of print advertisement. The crux of Keen’s argument lies in the idea that there are experts in each field, whether it be politics, art, literature or the critique of these or any similar areas, such as music. Furthermore, the commutative, collective opinions of genres are faulty and lead us into the temptation of narcissism, not to the truth. For the purposes of this assignment (and this website), however, let’s focus on what Keen has to say about music, a topic that he devotes two of the book’s eight chapters to in sections affectionately titled “The Day the Music Died [sides A and B].”

Intermittently spattered throughout the book, there are hints that this internet free-for-all is hindering actual artistic creativity, “The new Internet is about self-made music, not Bob Dylan or the Brandenburg Concertos” (14). This, at first, seems like a viable argument, most of the no-talent hacks filling the series of tubes are far removed from the greatest music has to offer. Reasonable, of course, until one wonders what exactly he means by “self-made.” Is he suggesting that Dylan is some corporately-created musical product? That N*SYNC is the zenith of musicianship? Come to think of it, aren’t most of history’s greater artists “self-made”? Never furthering on these points, he later adds that, “Finding and nurturing talent in a sea of amateurs may be the real challenge in today’s Web 2.0 world” (30). This is factually correct, but Keen is stressing the wrong result. Ask most purveyors of online music criticism and they will tell you that this “finding and nurturing” is one of the better aspects of the current movement. This is not the last time that the author implies the conceptual existence of this fictional artist, the one operating exclusively by “…the sweat of their creative brow and the disciplined use of their talent…”, the one that is only trying to make the best art possible and because of people like Brianna LaHara is now poor, starving and on the verge of quitting for a much less rewarding cubicle job. (Go here for one reason as to where all the money once spent on CDs has gone.)

Keen argues that we should defer to “expert” opinions, a term he seems to define as individuals educated and/or trained specifically within a certain field. While this assertion seems logical at its onset, it is at best elitist and at worst propagandist. Education and training do not an expert make. If they did, we’d have a lot more experts! I’ll admit name-dropping the hilarious A. O. Scott helps his cause; trumpeting Rolling Stone (particularly anything from 1977-present) does not.

The idea that we should follow expert opinions is less a pitch for further education than it is a complaint about amateurism and, in the author’s opinion, sloth. Recycling the same argument used against, at different times, marijuana and masturbation, Keen argues that too much role-playing game, er, playing, will cause people “…[to cease] to be productive members of society” (162).

While this error is theoretical, assertions such as, “Web 2.0 economy is not creating jobs to replace those it destroys” (130), is flat-out wrong. I’ll submit that the current technological shift costs jobs, and not just white-collar or no-collar ones, either – the lower middle class working the phones and docks of shipping companies stand to lose from this move to internet commerce. Artists, executives, shipping companies, and stores all lose work and money to downloading. However, new industries are propping up in their places. Before the last part of the twentieth century there was never a need for internet security companies and parental control software. These things need to be created and consistently improved. What more, computers do break down – perhaps a future industry lies in technological repair services.

Keen goes so far as to liken the now-unemployed Tower Records employee to the main characters of the Nick Hornsby novel (also a film and, appropriately, a musical) High Fidelity. He remembers the Tower people as friendly, cutting-edge trend setters, “cultural tastemaker[s]”; I remember them as disinterested and uneducated. This analogy is funny not just because it involves a pre- Shallow Hal Jack Black, but because the employees of Championship Vinyl on more than one occasion make points to shit on mall-located record stores such as, I don’t know, Tower Records!

The author then attempts to tie the death of megastore Tower to the death of independent record labels. If Keen is to be believed, without enterprises like his beloved Tower, labels that brought little known classical, jazz, opera and world music to the rest of the world would go belly-up. Oddly, he includes hip-hop on this list, as if some enormous, faceless company was the sole provider of underground rap music. Isn’t the opposite actually true?

But who is the real culprit of Tower’s demise? YOU and YOUR crazy downloading, of course! “As a specialty retailer, [Tower] hadn’t been able to compete against digital piracy or the low prices of Internet retailers like Amazon and iTunes” (100). Bemoaning the loss of Tower in favor of cheaper, more convenient alternatives is George Amberson-esque. For that matter, Target stores, and their $10 for new CDs, is probably just as much to blame for Tower’s fall than any online service, legal or not.

This leads to my most/least favorite argument against file sharing, the notion that illegally downloading music is akin to stealing foodstuffs from a restaurant. Is illegally downloading music stealing? Yes, and anyone that says otherwise is ignoring fact. (Although I acknowledge that there are an infinite number of gradients contained within that claim.) However, stealing the new Andre 3000 song is not the same thing as taking some kernels from the man selling elote; the former is easily duplicated, while the latter is a one-use-only product.

Devin the Dude - "What a Job"

Perhaps Keen is auditioning for a job at FOX News, because he reduces himself to playing the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” card in defense of his claims: “…by depriving artists and writers of the royalties due them, they aren’t just hurting those from whom they steal – in the end, they are hurting us all” (145). As is usually the case with these sorts of baited statements, how exactly they are “hurting us all” is never clearly defined.

The fear mongering doesn’t stop there, as Keen somehow blames Web 2.0 for individual companies like Google and Yahoo! selling and giving away individuals’ search history, citing specifically the case of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for releasing information deemed undesirable by his nation’s government. While the intellectual result of this trick is minor, the rhetorical damage is irreversible: Keen is claiming that your MySpace page is responsible for this man’s unjust imprisonment.

In spite of its elitism, fear mongering and straight-up wrongness, Cult isn’t a terrible book. Unfortunately, one must drudge through almost two-hundred pages of Keen’s tired complaining before the author offers some viable solutions. His favorites include Citizendium, Politico and eMusic (an assertion this website will not disagree with). He even answers one of his own hypothetical questions, suggesting that the music industry would benefit from reducing the prices of CDs in order to compete with the contrastive cost of downloading.

In that spirit, this review is frontloaded with set up before getting to the substance. Keen provides insight into his thesis pretty early on in stating that, “What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment” (16). Had he substituted, “this book” at the beginning of that statement, he’d have done my job for me.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. Doubleday. New York, NY: 2007. [buy]

*Pay no attention to Keen’s history as a failed web entrepreneur. Audiocafe.com’s (lack of) success has absolutely no bearing on the author’s current perspective.