Art's + Labs advisor Andrew Keen participated in a debate at the National Press Club on the discuss the topic "Is democracy threatened by the unchecked nature of information on the Internet?"
Here are some of the highlights:
On the notion that the web can harm democracy:
It depends, of course, what you mean by democracy. Jimmy [Wales]'s definition of democracy was an anti-federalist position, a sort of an idealized, direct-democracy rhetoric which suggests (and I'm quoting him now) that "It's all about the people deciding." But of course at the foundation this country is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, in which the federalists won over the anti-federalists.
The premise of democracy is not about the people deciding; it's about finding educated, high-quality political figures who will make wise decisions about the community. So I think Jimmy is falling into the old trap of appropriating democracy for his own ends.
On the notion that the Internet is, fundamentally, technology:
One of the mistakes we make about the Internet is that it's technology. It isn't; it's ideology. The Internet was built by people who questioned authority. The Internet is bound up in a fundamental assault on the notion of expertise, on what Jimmy calls 'the mainstream media,' which includes shows like this, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And the idea that representative democracy, experts -- whether in media, in politics, in the arts, in legal affairs, in intellectual affairs -- are unreliable and need to be replaced by what Jimmy calls 'the people' is deeply dangerous.Read more here.
What I most fear about the Internet -- which...we all use; I'm as addicted as everybody else -- is the way we take this technology, which has no center, is flattened, has done away with authority and expertise -- we take this technology to prove the ideological, idealized theories of Jimmy Wales. The truth is, we need expertise, we need authority, we need to remind ourselves of the foundations of representative democracy."
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