Vancouver International Digital Festival

World Wide Wasteland

Andrew Keen, one of our Creative Exchange conference speakers, recently had an excerpt from his book, The Cult of the Amateur, printed in the National Post. We thought to post it here too. The essay is provocative and the panel Andrew will be joining is sure to be engaging. Post your comments here and get your questions ready for him on Monday, September 24th at the session entitled “The Wisdom of Crowds: Web 2.0 Democracy or Mob Mentality?” Along with Andrew Keen, Michael Tippett, co-founder & CEO of Now Public; Jim Munroe, novelist, and filmmaker; Jennifer Ouano, president of Elastic Entertainment, and Jason Roks, citizen 001 of digitalpeasants.com & founder of misovision.org, will join the panel.

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World Wide Wasteland

If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was 1999 all over again. The boom has returned to Silicon Valley, and the mad utopians are once again running wild. I bumped into one such evangelist at a recent San Francisco mixer. Over glasses of fruity local Chardonnay, we swapped notes about our newest new things. He told me his current gig involved a new software for publishing music, text and video on the Internet.

“It’s MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google,” he said. “On steroids.”

In reply, I explained I was working on a polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy and values.

“It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule,” I said, unable to resist a smile. “On steroids.”

He smiled uneasily in return. “So it’s Huxley meets the digital age,” he said. “You’re rewriting Huxley for the 21st century.” He raised his wine glass in my honour. “To Brave New World 2.0!”

We clinked wine glasses. But I knew we were toasting the wrong Huxley. Rather than Aldous, the inspiration behind this book comes from his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, the 19th century evolutionary biologist and author of the “infinite monkey theorem.” Huxley’s theory says that if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece–a play by Shakespeare, a Platonic dialogue, or an economic treatise by Adam Smith.

In the pre-Internet age, T. H. Huxley’s scenario of infinite monkeys empowered with infinite technology seemed more like a mathematical jest than a dystopian vision. But what had once appeared as a joke now seems to foretell the consequences of a flattening of culture that is blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur. This is no laughing matter.

Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys — many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins — are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity. For today’s amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels.

At the heart of this infinite monkey experiment in self-publishing is the Internet diary, the ubiquitous blog. Blogging has become such a mania that a new blog is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are blogging with monkey-like shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives. At the time of writing, there are 53 million blogs on the Internet, and this number is doubling every six months. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, 10 new blogs were launched.

If we keep up this pace, there will be over 500 million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com. For these Generation Y utopians, every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is just another person’s version of the facts.

Then there is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where anyone with opposable thumbs and a fifth-grade education can publish anything on any topic from AC/DC to Zoroastrianism. Since Wikipedia’s birth, more than 15,000 contributors have created nearly three million entries in over 100 different languages — none of them authoritatively edited or vetted for accuracy. With hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, Wikipedia has become the third most visited site for information and current events; a more trusted source for news than the CNN or BBC Web sites, even though Wikipedia has no reporters, no editorial staff and no experience in news-gathering. It’s the blind leading the blind–infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.

On Wikipedia, everyone with an agenda can rewrite an entry to their liking — and contributors frequently do. Forbes recently reported, for example, a story of anonymous McDonald and Wal-Mart employees furtively using Wikipedia entries as a medium for deceptively spreading corporate propaganda. On the McDonald’s entry, a link to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation conveniently disappeared; on Wal-Mart’s somebody eliminated a line about underpaid employees making less than the competition.

But the Internet’s infinite monkey experiment is not limited to the written word. T. H. Huxley’s 19th century typewriter has evolved into not only the computer, but also the camcorder, turning the Internet into a vast library for user-generated video content. One site, YouTube, is a portal of amateur videos that, at the time of writing, was the world’s fast-est-growing site, attracting 65,000 new videos daily and boasting 60 million clips being watched each day; that adds up to over 25 million new videos per year and some 25 billion hits. In the fall of 2006, this overnight sensation was bought by Google for over US$1.5-billion.

YouTube eclipses even the blogs in the inanity and absurdity of its content. Nothing seems too prosaic or narcissistic for these videographer monkeys. The site is an infinite gallery of amateur movies showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping or just staring into their computers. In August, 2006, one hugely popular video called The Easter Bunny Hates You showed a man in a bunny suit harassing and attacking people on the streets. A few other favourite subjects include a young woman watching another YouTube user who is watching yet another user — a virtual hall of mirrors that eventually leads to a woman making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of the television; a Malaysian dancer grooving to Ricky Martin and Britney Spears; a dog chasing its tail; an Englishwoman instructing her viewers how to eat a chocolate and marmalade cookie; and, in a highly appropriate addition to the YouTube library, a video of dancing stuffed monkeys.

What’s more disturbing than the fact that millions of us willingly tune in to such nonsense each day is that some Web sites are making monkeys out of us without our even knowing it. By entering words into Google’s search engine, we are actually creating something called “collective intelligence,” the sum wisdom of all Google users. The logic of Google’s search engine, what technologists call its algorithm, reflects the “wisdom” of the crowd.
In other words, the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches. The search engine is an aggregation of the 90 million questions we collectively ask Google each day.

In other words, it just tells us what we already know.

- Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Keen. From the book The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, published by Currency/Double-day, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.