Keen On

A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, about the death of the American dream which, he argued, can be dated from on 5 June 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And it’s on that infamous date that I begun my conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the rebirth of the American dream. According to the Los Angeles based Taplin, who is now working on a book about an upcoming renaissance of American culture, the vehicle for a revitalized United States will come from a Sixties style explosion of cultural vitality. Bright new music, film and books will create a bright new America, Taplin predicts. I hope he’s right.Jonathan Taplin is a writer, film producer and scholar. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 a

On the week that the price of Bitcoin rose above $100,000 and Trump appointed David Sacks as his “AI and Crypto Czar”, has Silicon Valley finally succeeded in conquering Washington DC? In today’s That Was The Week summary of tech news, Keith Teare and Andrew review what appears to be a tectonic shift in power between Silicon Valley and Washington DC. Are “right-wing” Trump supporters like Sacks, Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen being invited to Washington by the MAGA movement to ransack the Federal bureaucracy? Or is this that grand historical moment when the real powers-that-be emerge from behind the curtain and impose their own digital neo-liberal regime in DC?Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publi

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist Jeff Jarvis, is another leading defender of the internet. In his new book, The Web We Weave, Jarvis explains how we can reclaim the internet from moguls, misanthropes and moral panics. The Web, Jarvis argues, is a mirror of all the best and worst aspects of society. It’s us. So only we can reclaim the internet from the Musks, the bots and the moral hysteria now threatening to destroy it. Jeff Jarvis is the author of six books, including currently "The Web We Weave," "The Gutenberg Parenthesis," and "Magazine." He cohosts the podcasts "This Week in Google" and "AI Inside" and blogs at Buzzmachine. Jarvis is the Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation Emeritus at CUNY's Newmark School of Journalism. In a long career as a journalist, he was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly, president and creative di

Few people deserve their place in the Internet Hall of Fame than Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker. Since co-founding the Mozilla Project in the late Nineties, Baker has been one of the most consistent and articulate champions of an open internet. So looking back over the last quarter century, what does Baker make of the history of online freedom? And is she hopeful that new technologies like AI can regenerate the promise of an open internet?Mitchell Baker co-founded the Mozilla Project to support the open, innovative web and ensure it continues offering opportunities for everyone. As Chairwoman of Mozilla, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers around the world who are building the internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Mitchell is deeply engaged in developing product offerings that promote the mission of empowering individuals. She also guides the overall scope and direction of Mozilla’s mission. Mit

Few people are better at demystifying the byzantine complexities of the American healthcare system than the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Robert Pearl, MD. So what does Pearl make of Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services? Is this a thinly veiled excuse to go to war with the current American healthcare system? Or does RFK Jr really have the acuity to responsibly reform a system in desperate need of reinvention?For 18 years, ROBERT PEARL, MD served as CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (Kaiser Permanente). He is also former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group. In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. He is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on healthcare strategy, technology, and

If Silicon Valley has an official matriarch, it might be the Palo Alto based educator and writer Esther Wojcicki. Popularly known as the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”, Wojcicki is the mother of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki and anthropologist and professor Janet Wojcicki. And, of course, she’s also the mother-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. So how does “Woj”, who, as the founder of the Media Arts program, taught for many years at Palo Alto High School, make sense of the last twenty years in which the zeitgeist has shifted from an evangelical faith in technological progress to a deep suspicion of it. And how does Wojcicki look back at her own family history in this period which has been marked by both astonishingly good fortune and terrible tragedy?Esther Wojcicki is an educator and the author of the 2019 bestseller, "How to Raise Successful People."Wojcicki's daughters are YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki and anthropologist

Steve Blank is one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent hackers. As the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, Blank has changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. And now, as a Stanford professor, he’s focused on hacking contemporary United States diplomacy and warfare. So what does Blank make of Elon Musk’s attempts to make the Federal government more efficient? Will the American future be owned by SpaceX rather than NASA? And what does that tell us about the value of the Federal U.S. bureaucracy in the 21st century?Eight-time entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He’s changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. Recognized as a thought leader on startups and innovation, Steve was named one of the Thinkers50 top management thinkers and recognized by the Harvard

If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff. One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became one of the earliest critics of its increasingly market-driven and monopolistic forces. But now, as the zeitgeist has sharply shifted against the digital revolution, Rushkoff has become cautiously optimistic about the potential of AI to improve the world. As he told me when we talked recently in New York City, AI might be what he called “the first native app for the internet”. I’m not exactly sure what this McLuhanesque message means, but it does suggest that today’s AI media revolution might not be quite as dismal as most of us fear.Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as

As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy show, which will be going into its seventh series next year, Andrew Keen has given much thought to the health of American democracy. In this KEEN ON episode, Jonathan Rauch, the Brookings Institute senior fellow, turns the tables on Andrew and interviews him about the state of American democracy. What is the risk of the incoming Trump administration to the Republic, Jon asks Andrew? Is Trump just one more turbulent chapter in the colorful history of American democracy or does the MAGA movement represent an existential threat to the world’s oldest representative democratic system?Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX T

Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab chairman Bill Gross. Having founded Idealab in 1996, Gross has been a participant in every wave of digital innovation - from Web 1 and 2.0 to Web 3 and today’s AI revolution. He’s also been a frequent speaker at events like DLD, the Munich based annual conference which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in January. And so, having visited Gross at his ultra cool Idealab offices in Pasadena, I asked the serial entrepreneur and investor to reminisce about the last twenty years of tech history. What were his greatest successes and failures? And how fundamentally different is today’s AI boom from the other cycles of innovation that he’s experienced?Bill Gross founded Idealab in March 1996. Bill is a lifelong entrepreneur, starting his first solar business in high school. After graduating from the California Institute of Technology, Bill started GNP Development, Inc., which made a natural language product for Lotus 1-2-3 calle

This week’s tech news is all about Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy’s DOGE ambitions to supposedly reinvent the Federal government. But as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this week, the problem with this DOGE plan is that it appears much more interested in blowing up government than in rebuilding it. What’s needed, Keith and Andrew argue, is to radically rethink government as something that delivers high quality services for 21st century American society. It’s what Keith coins as “government-as-service” and Tim O’Reilly calls government as a platform. Such a forward thinking conception of government, Keith and Andrew agree, is essential if the Democrats are to successfully counter the destructive Republican DOGE plan with something more constructive of their own. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied

If the 20th century was the American Century then, for Kishore Mahbubani, the controversial Singaporean writer and diplomat, the 21st century is the Asian Century. In his new memoir, Living the Asian Century, Mahbubani - Singapore’s longtime permanent representative at the United Nations - offers what he calls an “undiplomatic memoir” of Singapore’s rise from an impoverished outlay of the British empire into the world’s wealthiest country. It’s quite a story and Mahbubani tells it in his own bluntly undiplomatic way. Kishore Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). Mr Mahbubani has been privileged to enjoy two distinct careers, in diplomacy (1971 to 2004) and in academia (2004 to 2019). He is a prolific writer who has spoken in many corners of the world. In diplomacy, he was with the Singapore Foreign Service for 33 years (1971 to 2004). He had postings in Cambodia, Malaysia, Washington DC and New York, where he twice was Singapore’s Am

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference, today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy Media. In contrast with Steven Levy and John Markoff, whose attitude toward Silicon Valley doesn’t seem have dramatically changed, Kirkpatrick’s thinking has undergone quite a radical shift over the last twenty years. As he acknowledges, he’s been transformed from a Facebook believer into one of its most acute critics. And, in contrast with Levy and Markoff, Kirkpatrick’s intellectual attention has also broadened, shifting from the internet to focusing on technological fixes for global warming.David Kirkpatrick is a longtime technology and business journalist, author and media entrepreneur, known for his work connecting technology developments to societal impact and progress. He is an expert on internet companies and social media, and is now focusing especially on climate

As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International, myboldb friend Frank Vogl has always the nose for a good story. So it was particularly interesting to get Frank’s take on the incoming Trump administration, especially since he just wrote an interesting piece about how money didn’t buy the election for Trump. But given that the art of the (digital) deal is Trump’s only real motivator, what exactly should we expect of a reborn Donald Trump? Might the Trump 2.0 regime, for example, be a semi-legal version of Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX and will we remember this new administration as the Bitcoin Presidency?Frank Vogl is the co-founder of two leading international non-governmental organizations fighting corruption -- Transparency International and the Partnership for Transparency Fund (Frank is the Chair of the PTF Board).  He teaches at Georgetown University, writes regular "blog" articles on corruption for theGlobalist.com and lectures extensively.  Frank is also a specialist in international

Last week, we featured an interview with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy, the former Newsweek technology correspondent and author of best-selling books about hacking, crypto, Google and Facebook. Levy is now Wired’s editor-at-large and when I visited Levy at New York City’s glittering Conde Nast offices, we talked about what has and hasn’t surprised him about the last twenty years of tech history and why he may be the last journalist with the good fortune of being paid to write long articles about Microsoft.Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.”For almost four decades Levy has chronicled the digital revolution, its impact on humanity, and the people behind it. He has written the foundational work on computer culture (Hackers, 1984) and with Crypto (2001) the indispensable book on story behind that groundbreaking technology—years befor

In this KEEN ON Andrew Keen special, guest host David Masciotra interviews Andrew about his controversial book Cult of the Amateur. While David generously describes it as prescient, Andrew focuses more on what the 2007 book got blatantly wrong - like dismissing Google’s $1.5 billion acquisition of YouTube. Duh. What both David and Andrew agree on, however, is that the book’sn focus on the damage that the supposedly “democratizing” Web 2.0 revolution did to both our culture and politics is still of massive significance. Perhaps it might be time for a 20th anniversary rewrite, a Cult of the Amateur 2.0 for our brave new AI world. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO

Every digital tech revolution over the last forty years has promised decentralization but each one only seems to have recentralized power. So will the AI revolution be different? Can AI be the tipping point for fundamentally decentralizing the architecture of our 21st century politics, culture and business? That Was The Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss both the promise and danger of the AI revolution. Both are skeptical about radical decentralization, but both recognize that there’s nothing inevitable about history repeating itself again. As Keith notes, it’s up to us. Human agency will define the success or failure of the AI revolution. We all know the world we want. Now we just need to create it.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book”

How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War, the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his self-styled “masterpiece,” a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, Turf War explains, they defeated his proposal. So fast forward forty years. What, I asked Robinson, are the lessons of Turf War for the mid 2020’s? How can activists successfully resist Trump’s latest assault on the environment and on the civil rights of women and migrants?Steven Robinson has been an award-winning architect, a land-use planner, community activist, and writer in New York and New Mexico since 1985. His buildings and public space designs in urban and rural landscapes have served private clients, academic institutions, and native communities. He was a founder of Westpride, the grassroots nonprofit that initiated the

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times’ science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper’s star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how tec

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. How to prevent the worst happening, Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened, how exactly is Wehner - who worked in several Republican administrations - feeling about the future of the American Republic? More optimist than one might. American self-renewal is a wonder of the world, Wehner explained to me, which is why, he believes, we should still be remain cheerful about American democracy.Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. His books include The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, which he co-wrote with Michael J. Gerson, and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics an