"A disgraceful fascist luddite communist control freak monarchist failed dotcom entrepreneur"

A Podcast with Andrew Keen, founder of AfterTV and the author of The Cult of the Amateur.

Andrew Keen

As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, "It's been 10 years since the blog was born. Love them or hate them, they've roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox." In this online savvy edition of Total Picture Radio, from Berkley, California, is the author of a new - and highly controversial book, The Cult of the Amateur - how today's internet is killing our culture -- published by Doubleday/Currency.

The headline quote above is from from a posting on Andrew's blog, titled, "who am I?" His book has launched (without exaggeration), a bloggers firestorm. In the introduction to The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew writes. "In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought sold, packaged and reinvented."

About Andrew Keen, host of AfterTV.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.”

Andrew is indeed the leading contemporary critic of the Internet.

Andrew hasn’t always been a contrarian. In the mid Nineties, he was a member of the pioneering generation of Silicon Valley visionaries who first “got” the Internet. He founded Audiocafe.com in 1995, and, securing significant investment from Intel and SAP, established it as one of the most highly trafficked websites of the late Nineties. As the Chief Executive of Audiocafe.com, Andrew became a Silicon Valley celebrity. He spoke regularly on the digital media circuit and was featured and quoted in many newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Industry Standard, Business Week, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and The London Guardian.

In 2000, Andrew produced “MB5: The Festival for New Media Visionaries,” a futurist show featuring some of Silicon Valley’s leading pundits. Since then, he has held senior management positions at a number of venture capital backed start-ups including Pulse, Santa Cruz Networks and Pure Depth. Andrew is currently the Founder and Chief Executive of afterTV LLC, a firm that helps marketers optimize their brand desirability in the post-TV consumer landscape.

Born and bred in the Golders Green neighborhood of North London, Andrew was educated at London University, where he graduated with a First Class Honors degree in Modern History. He was a British Council Fellow at the University of Sarajevo and a Berkeley-Stanford MacArthur scholar at UC Berkeley. He has taught at a number of universities, including Tufts, UMass, Northeastern and UC Berkeley. His academic interests include contemporary cultural history, political philosophy and media studies.
Andrew’s erudition, his entrepreneurial experience, and his writing and public speaking skills have established his voice today as both the most controversial and incisive in Silicon Valley. He is the host of the popular Internet chat show afterTV and regularly appears on television and radio. His commentaries can be read on ZDNet, Britannica , iHollywoodForum as well as in traditional publications like the Weekly Standard, Fast Company and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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