The Cult of the Amateur | Andrew Keen | Talks at Google

Welcome Andrew Keen to Google today to speak as part of the Authors at Google series. He'll be speaking about his new book, which just came out today, titled the Cult of the how the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values. Amidst the near unanimous excitement surrounding Web 2.0, Andrew is one of the sharpest critics of the movement that I've encountered, sparking debate about how we can and should be using the technology we create. He was the founder of AudioCafe.com in 1997 and currently blogs@thegreatseduction.com and hosts the podcast After TV. He has taught at Northeastern Tufts and the University of Massachusetts. And sure to create controversy, he's here today to speak to us. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Keen to Google. Am I mic'd up or do I use your mic? Okay, can you all hear me? Thank you very much for such a generous, kind welcome. I don't think I deserve it, given this book, but I'll do my best to regain your trust and affection. Quick correction on the original the subtitle of the book, we simplified it so that everyone can get it, even bloggers. Now the subtitle is. It's still called the Cult of the Amateur. It's how today's Internet is killing our culture and in England, the book comes out today as well. It says how today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy. So there's all sorts of killing and assaulting going on here and that's what I've come here to talk to you about. I'm not going to read too much out of the book. I know that Google has a very generous program, so you guys will get the book. So I'm not really selling you anything except my ideas. Do you all have books? No. No. Well, then you have to buy it. So I have to convince you it's worth reading. I better change my. Better change my speech. Okay, well, Ricky said he didn't think it would be good to read too much out. I'll read a couple of pages. I'll talk about the general premise of the book. I want to talk a little bit about Google because I'm particularly interested in it. And given I'm here in the belly of the beast, so to speak, it'd be interesting to get your input about whether I'm really crazy or just a little bit crazy in terms of what I'm saying and my concerns about Google. I assume you all here are you all work for Google, right? No. One here works for Yahoo or anyone else. Okay, so this is a. This book is a subversion of the subversion. Some of you may have read some of the criticism on the Internet. It's a serious book, but it's also a book written slightly tongue in cheek. It's not a book that takes itself perhaps quite as seriously as some of my critics suggest, just as perhaps I don't take myself quite as seriously as some people think. But at the same time, there's some serious ideas behind the book. It's an unabashed polemic, which means it's biased unashamedly. So this is not a fair book, and I'm fairly describing. I'm proud of the fact it's not fair. It's designed to open a certain kind of conversation about Web 2.0 and democratized media and the digital revolution. A conversation which has been taking place off campus outside Silicon Valley, in pockets popping up from here and there, but not really a conversation that I think has taken place within Silicon Valley. It's not a conversation that we all collectively, as people responsible for the development of the digital revolution, are really confronting and thinking through. So let me just tell you a couple of my basic premises. Originally the subtitle had democratization in it. Actually originally the title of the book, before it was, before it became known as the Cult of the Amateur. And by the way, I didn't think up the Cult of the Amateur, so there's some intellectual theft going on there. This was a term that was originally thought up by Nicholas Carr, another of the handful of critics of Web 2.0, and I, so to speak, borrowed it from him and he graciously allowed me to take the term. Originally this book was called the Great Seduction. And I indeed do blog at a URL called the Great Seduction. The premise of the book, then as now, in very simple terms, is that the so called democratization of the Internet is a great seduction. It's promising, like any kind of seduction, something which it's not able to deliver. A democratized media, as I'm sure you all know, promises citizens an ideal platform to articulate their ideas, to report the news, to dig for truth. The democratization of media, which I think is articulated by all sorts of thinkers from Chris Anderson and Larry Lessig to Don Tapscott to David Weinberger. There's a whole group of very intelligent and articulate spokespeople, idealistic spokesman spokespeople for Web 2.0, but they're basically all saying the same thing, that the new digital economy will free us from old structures. The new digital economy will undermine historic injustices, those injustices of society, political and economic, and in particular the injustice of mainstream big media. I'm not sure whether you guys think of yourself as big or small media. It certainly seemed to me big, although your new big media as opposed to old big media. But the premise of the Web 2.0 democratizes the idealists like Anderson and Lessig out there is that the old structures of power are inefficient. They don't report news or culture not only with any great efficiency or, or accuracy, but also the best stuff isn't bubbling up. So mainstream media is biased. It's run by often irresponsible, sometimes corrupt corporations, executives. The news is biased. It's inane. My book suggests otherwise. My book suggests that the new new media, democratized media, the media of web 2.0, is structurally is profoundly flawed on lots of different levels. The book is also implicitly and sometimes explicitly a defense of mainstream media. In my view, mainstream media has become this very convenient punch bag for what I call libertarians on the left and libertarians on the right, people who have no respect for any kinds of authority. I admit that I'm somewhat of a nostalgist for mainstream media. I do idealize it. I was just on before I was here. I just was on CBS's Morning Show. And I have to admit that I had second thoughts about my argument while I was watching the show because it really was dreadful. So, you know, I definitely think that one of the best and most obvious criticisms of my position is mainstream media is not just Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. I may be simplistic, but I think I understand that. But at the same time, I think it's also important to note that mainstream media has produced the New York Times, has produced Bob Dylan, has produced U2. So let me get onto the basic arguments. Does anyone have any questions about anything I said? I figure since I'm in the land of democratized media, I should be democratic today. Does anyone have any questions before I move on? Or we can just leave the questions till later. Okay, so here's the basic argument in very simple terms of the book. Democratized media, ideally in the web 2.0 world. And I think this is as true for Google as anything else, does away with the intermediaries. It, so to speak, disintermediates. It makes traditional media more efficient and supposedly, ideally, this is what the people say. It ideally makes traditional media more efficient and more truthful. The premise of the Web 2.0 revolution, articulated by everybody from Jimmy Wales to The guys at YouTube who I engaged with at the D conference last week, to your people at Google, to the MySpace people, is suddenly everyone acquires the printing press, everyone becomes Johannes Gutenberg, everyone is able to publish themselves. You don't have to have programming skills to become a blogger. You don't have to have specially trained cinematic skills to become a videographer and put your stuff on YouTube. You don't need to have gone to recording school to be able to work the simple software programs to record your music and distribute it on the Internet. So the web 2.0 world suggests that it makes it very simple both for creative people and writers and journalists to create and distribute and therefore also market and sell their product. It does away with the middleman. And in the language of Web 2.0, and indeed Web 1.0, the middleman is always bad. The middleman is corrupt. The middleman is inefficient. The middleman is the music executive. Supposedly, idealistically, at least, or perhaps the opposite of idealistically, is the music executive rolling in and out of their limousine in Los Angeles, eating expensive sushi lunches while the poor exploited musician is starving and getting 1% of the music label's profits. My argument is twofold. Firstly, I don't think that's true. I don't really get into that in the book. I really don't formally defend mainstream media. That's perhaps the subject of another book. But in terms of web 2.0, I don't believe that that Rosie scenario is either realistic or in some senses, even attractive. So what I've written with the cult of the amateur is the reverse of the long tail. The book is even designed to look like the backside, to excuse the vulgarity of the long tail. So what do I say? I say, firstly, that this is not a viable economy for artists. Generally, one can always find artists who are making money on the Internet. But the basic argument I make is that we need middlemen. We need the experts. Whether those experts are in marketing or in creativity, or whether they're in figuring out talent and polishing it and figuring out how to distribute it. These are the core players in any media system. Web 1.0 pre 10.3.0, however many OS you want to go up to. And that if we do away with that ecosystem, if we do away with those intermediaries, then we're essentially undermining media as well. We're undermining talent because talent is scarce. Whether one likes it or not. And the core value of the ecosystem in traditional media is finding and distributing that talent. And that ecosystem is not an algorithm. I'm sorry to tell you that, because you here are all employed one way or the other by an algorithm. But that ecosystem is human. The only really valuable way of discovering and polishing up and distributing and selling talent is human talent. The other thing I point out in the book, I think, which is well worth noting and perhaps discussing, is that the flattening of culture, the idealized Web 2.0 system, where the intermediaries go away, has profoundly unfortunate and often dangerous consequences. I don't believe that these consequences are in any way intended. And indeed there's no one in control of Web 2.0, just as Web 2.0 itself is a term which Tim O'Reilly thought up doesn't have any scientific truth. All it was was a way of historically packaging the next stage in the Internet revolution after the Nasdaq crash of 2000. Having said that, though this flattened media is much more vulnerable to corruption than historic media. It lends itself to charlatans, it lends itself to corporate interests, it lends itself to liars, it lends itself to those anonymous bloggers and other anonymous interests, but behind much of the most distressing and often vulgar content on the Internet. So one of the arguments, I think it's one of the key arguments I make in my book is this is not a trustworthy media. If indeed the concept of trust, which many people believe is the core value in our digital world, then a media without gatekeepers is, is by definition untrustworthy. And whether or not one accepts one kind of critique of mainstream media or not, I think it's extremely difficult to argue that all the gatekeepers historically have been biased, have been pursuing corporate or class or gender or national or religious interest. So I'm really here to defend or the book itself is, is a defense of a media with formal, official, transparent gatekeepers. Web 2.0, in my view, doesn't work. It's too easy to game. It's too easy to play around with if you can fix the algorithm. I'm sure some of you here are responsible for making sure that the Google algorithm is not gamed. It remains, so to speak, honest. But there are many other algorithms out there, from Digg to Reddit to all the other supposedly wisdom of the crowd sites that I believe are too easy to fix. I don't talk about the Italian sociologist Pareto in the book, but Pareto talks about an 8020 rule and I think I'm a follower of Pareto in the sense that all systems tend to be dominated by 20% of the people who shape 80% of the content. I think that is as much true for web 2.0 as it's true for traditional media. Only the new elite are anonymous, the new elite are the kids, the 20 somethings who are shaping so called wisdom of the crowd sites like Reddit and Digg. I'm also curious, and perhaps we can get into this later, as to whether or not you think Google is honest and how many people are really out there fixing it and shaping it. Let me also talk about the real consequences of the Web 2.0 economy. I see it in particular in some respects at Google, but particularly on YouTube. Is there anyone here formerly from YouTube? The problem with Web 2.0 media, the problem, the problem with this flattened world is there's increasingly a flattening of the traditional separation between content and advertising. Now I don't need to tell you guys that in the sense that obviously Google is itself quite controversial in terms of the way its page separates paid content and free content, although I think you do at least attempt to separate the two. But when you do away with formal gatekeepers, when you give the content away for free, somebody of course has to pay the bills. Someone has to figure out a way to pay their mortgage and pay their staff. The problem with Web 2.0 media is it's increasingly becoming one long commercial break. I see that in particular on YouTube. Last week, as I suggested, I was at the D conference, Eric Schmidt was there, and also Chen and Hurley of YouTube. And I asked them publicly, I said, aren't you troubled by the fact that there is increasingly, it's increasingly hard, and I talk about this in the book as well, it's increasingly hard to distinguish between paid content and genuine content. And their response, and I consider this a very troubling response, is it doesn't matter, we don't care. Because all we want is for the users of YouTube to have fun. And if they're enjoying the advertising or the supposed advertising content as much as they're enjoying the free or the supposed independent content, then we're not too bothered. The problem in my view with something like YouTube, which seems to me to be really the most kind of concrete premonition of this next generation media flattened media world dominated by user generated content, lacking any kind of intermediaries, simply technology and users inputting their content into it, is that the whole thing becomes one long advertisement. The only way to create good content for it is by being able to pay camera people, being able to produce good quality content. Therefore, most of the most successful content on Google, sorry, on YouTube, is itself sponsored. And often that sponsorship, particularly by corporations or political interest groups or by other perhaps more insidious organizations isn't obvious. So I'm concerned with the degree of media illiteracy that this Web 2.0 revolution is provoking. I'm concerned that the kids now coming online are not able to distinguish between advertising and content. I'm concerned that increasingly all they're doing is watching one long commercial break. Isn't this true of any. Isn't this true of any advertising sponsored thing such as television? I don't think so. I think that television, the break between advertising and content is very clear historically. I mean, you have today. Well, but I think you have in the uk. You mean in America. It's in what way. The programs are sponsored, There's a lot more advertorial type stuff going on and there are many more commercial breaks. Again, yeah, I mean, as I said, I'm certainly not here to defend some of the more sort of vulgar, if you like, forms of mainstream media. Daytime television, I certainly wouldn't defend, and I'm not in support of that, but I think what YouTube then and sites like it represent is the next step in that muddling up of content and advertising. The fact that television does it is certainly no defense. And certainly the idealists of the Web 2.0 movement are people who believe that this new media is more transparent, is more responsible, and is more truthful than television. I certainly wouldn't argue that television is a potential particularly truthful medium. And I think generally it's been a deep disappointment. What's interesting about the television revolution is at its birth in the mid-1950s, there were also idealists who believed that it was going to change everything and improve everything. And of course by the 60s and 70s it was clear that it wasn't. I'm concerned that the same thing will happen with this levelized, democratized media. But I wouldn't agree with you completely. I think it would be hard to argue that the profound muddling up of content and advertising takes place on television to the same extent as it does on a site like YouTube. So I mean, obviously not a teenager anymore, but the, the teenagers I know now today are the least credulous people I've ever met in my entire life. They're some of the most cynical people I've ever encountered. And I'm wondering if you have any Kind of hard numbers to suggest the idea that they can't make these distinctions. I think that's an interesting point. Most of my evidence is anecdotal. Where do you get that evidence that they're the most cynical people? You know, I'm curious, I mean, do you have children? Well, I mean, I have underage relatives, a very large number of them. I keep in contact with people that are still in college and the friends that they've made. These people by and large are incredible cynical, incredibly cynical, and assume that any media that they consume in any format is already compromised and weighted against other media that they encounter. I know very few of them that take anything at face value, even stuff that we would consider to be authoritative. They start looking for the bias in long standing publications. So I'm wondering why the assumption, since it's so obvious that there's this pollution of intent and provenance, why the assumption is that children growing up in this environment aren't aware of it? I don't. I mean, I think we're exchanging anecdotes here really, or anecdotal visions of the world. I certainly, I mean, I have children and they're not yet teenagers and I spend a lot of time with children. They don't seem to me to be particularly cynical. If anything, I think they believe the media. That's the problem. And that's the problem with websites like Wikipedia. Everything that they read on the Internet is true. I was just in New York a couple of weeks ago and I had an interesting speech by Thomas Friedman. And he told the story of a woman he met in Pakistan. And she was a religious Muslim woman. And talking to her, and she was telling him that she kind of liked Al Gore but she would never vote for him for president if she had a vote in America. And he said, why? He said, because Al Gore is Jewish. And so Gore, Friedman said to the woman, how'd you know that? Where did you find that? And she said, I read it on the Internet. And of course, for Friedman, who is coming out with another edition of his World is Flat book and indeed has become a lot much more skeptical, actually as skeptical in some respects as I am about this democratized media, that's become the great phrase of our age, I read it on the Internet. So I can't agree with you. I mean, I certainly don't get the sense that the kids now are media literate. I think they're increasingly media illiterate. And that's not a criticism of the kids, that's a criticism of our culture. This web 2.0 media is indeed compounding media illiteracy. And I think it's media illiteracy that I most care about in this book, because I think that's one of the most fundamental problems in America. It's what's got us into this mess in Iraq. It's what corrupts American politics, the idea that people really don't know what's going on. Television doesn't do a good job. I think mainstream newspapers do. I think serious publishing books do. But my sense is that the democratized Internet is increasingly miscellaneous, unreliable, corrupt, and trivial. So your argument is reminding me a lot of some research I did my last year in college, which was a year ago. It sounds a lot like sort of the crisis librarians think that they're in right now and that they're increasingly dealing with a population of students, even at the college level, who are completely information illiterate. So I guess their phrase is information versus media. But just in the last couple of days, I've been helping some friends who are in college with papers and have been surprised at the same sort of sense of. They don't even know how to start using resources or make sense of how you can use the Internet to get get to credible information. But it makes me feel like the problem isn't with the Internet itself, but with the systems we have in place to educate people about how to discern that information. And perhaps we should be focusing on the correct way to do that in our society versus, I guess, looking at the problems in the Internet itself. I think that's a very fair point and I appreciate the fact that your research is, is really strengthening my case. Let me explain that. My book is not a Luddite text. It's not anti technology. I'm as pro technology as anyone. I have my gadgets, I have my computers and my fancy home theater and all the rest of it. I see the Internet as a mirror. When we look at the Internet, we're looking at ourselves. And when we look at web 2.0, obviously some of the things we see are wonderful. We see energy, we see excitement. We see a youthful culture. But when we look at Web 2.0, we're also looking at ourselves. We see an addiction to pornography. We see massive online gambling. We see ubiquitous anonymity, an anonymous culture in which people seem to be perpetually insulting one another. We see the fragmentation of taste, a fragmentation so dramatic in some respects that what we're seeing is 250 million channels. We see increasing a media which is increasingly defined as an echo chamber in which the ideal of the web as a platform for conversation, for the free exchange of information has become a place where we simply go to confirm what we already believe. So for me, the Internet is a mirror. That's what makes it so interesting in some respects. One of the things I used to do before I was an Internet entrepreneur was I was a lecturer on political theory. I think a good place to start this debate is with social contract theory, imagining worlds where there are no laws between. Because that's in some respects what the Internet is like. And my book is a suggestion that in this so called state of nature which in some respects the Internet conforms to, if we're going to civilize it, if we're going to make it a place that we can enjoy going, then there needs to be rules not necessarily established by the state, rules either established internally or externally. Socially. There used to be. I don't think it still exists. When you used to drive over through San Francisco, there used to be a Yahoo ad which said the Internet a nice place to be. Do you remember that one? I don't think the Internet generally is a very nice place to be anymore. We can't blame technology, we can't blame Yahoo. We can't blame Google, we can't blame any single company. Ultimately, I think we have to blame ourselves. We have to take responsibility for this media. The book itself is a polemic for 80% of its time and then it turns into an attempt to come up with solutions, some ways in which we can sort out the problems that this new media is creating. I'm not suggesting that it can't be reformed. I believe that there's much good news on the Internet. There's the English newspaper the Guardian, which has successfully integrated old and new media business models. There's E Music, which I think is an interesting solution to the profound dilemmas of the music business. There are interesting networks of experts now developing. I'm not against the Internet as a self broadcasting, self publication platform, but if we're going to use it like that, we need to have something to say. Otherwise it degenerates into what I describe as a state of digital narcissism where everything simply becomes a reflection of ourselves. We Twitter ourselves to death and we use the Internet to tell the world what we had for breakfast or what we watched on television. And that's not valuable for ourselves and it's not valuable for any kind of collective conversation. Did you ever. I wanted to put something to you that Douglas Adams said in 99 Sorry, who? Douglas Adams. Oh, okay. He said, of course you can't trust what people tell you on the web any more than you can trust what people tell you on megaphones, postcards, or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of what you can trust and why is quite literally what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason, we turn off this natural skepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or which we can't easily answer back, like newspapers, television, or granite, hence carved in stone. What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the Internet on trust. Of course you can't. It's just people talking. But that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspaper or saw on the tv, a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no them out there. It's just an awful lot of us. So why did you all laugh when you read about the journalists? Do most of you believe that journalists are corrupt or incompetent? Professional journalists, that is. I believe that they are not necessarily any better at distilling the story than other people are. You're saying that there's a lack of media. The counterargument is there are now many more of us being media for each other. We're mediating the web for each other. We can find people we trust to read and follow their arguments. Yeah. And my response to that is that when you look at quality news organs, particularly newspapers, I think they're irreplaceable. They're irreplaceable for two or three reasons. Firstly, they have the resources. When you look at the way, for example, in which the Washington Post recently reported the Walter Mead medical scandal, bloggers are well intentioned. I'm not doubting that they mean well, but they don't have the resources to dig into real news. They don't have the resources to put together teams. They don't have the resources to travel because no one's paying them. As I show in my book, the vast majority of bloggers are earning pennies. Guy Kawasaki, the well known Silicon Valley blogger, He's a top 50 blogger. He earned $3,500 last year. That is not a way to earn one's living. So I'm not contemptuous of amateurs in the sense that I look down on dabblers. I like enthusiasts. I'm an enthusiast myself in many respects. But you can't compare the work of enthusiasts in journalism, in truth seeking to the work of professionals who are trained, who have fact checkers, who have editors, who have resources, who have teams. So it's not a question of some sort of moral comparison of a professional journalist or a well intentioned blogger. It's simply a reflection of the resources they have at their fingertips and the consequences of their work. So without other people, I don't want to make sure everyone are there people at the back who wants to. I didn't mean to take it away, but I gotta be democratic, right? Andy, thanks for coming here. I have a quick question regarding your argument. As far as letting charlatans in, you are talking that your argument basically suggests that having a wide and broader media, there is more of a Joe Schmoz who can sneak in, post the content anonymously and virtually screw up the overall weather of the informational value. But on the other side of the scale you have agency Xinhua in China which probably has the largest media audience in the world, probably about 700 million people or so, and they are full of gatekeepers. But there is hardly anybody who would trust 70% of news that Xinhua produces. I mean, how do you counter Bell in I certainly. I'm not here to defend authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. I'm not in favor of that. I mean I. Well, but you see someone at the front mumbled Rupert Murdoch. There's a huge difference between Rupert Murdoch and the communist thugs who run China. And I think perhaps that in that comparison lies the kernel of my argument. I think there are some people who don't agree. I think there are some people who believe that Rupert Murdoch or people like Rupert Murdoch, the barons, the traditional barons of mainstream media are as corrupt, are as nasty, are as self interested as the people in charge in China. I think the Chinese example is a very interesting one though, because I think it's the other extreme. I certainly wouldn't want to recreate China in America, but I think that the ideal system is somewhere between the sort of the libertarian anarchy of the current Internet for the most part in America and the authoritarianism in China. The one interesting thing I think the Chinese are doing is they're making it illegal to post anonymously. Now I'm not suggesting we make it illegal and I'm not suggesting we put anonymous bloggers or anonymous posters into jail, but I think if there was one thing, one single thing we could do collectively to clean up the Internet to make it a friendlier place to make it richer in terms of the conversation, better in terms of the way we talk to one another. It would be to collectively undermine the idea of anonymity. I suggested this to Hurley and Chan at D. I said, why don't you establish an area on your site where one group of people have to reveal who they actually are, Maintain the anonymity. You can't outlaw anonymity. But I think what you'll find in any media, if people are truthful about themselves, about who they are, what their backgrounds are, what context they're discussing issues, then you'll have a much better media. So again, I'm not suggesting we can learn anything really from China, but. But I am suggesting that that's the other extreme and that the ideal media system is one that somehow lies between the two. And I'm the last person to ever suggest that. I want state control of media and that if you report something that the state finds unpleasant, journalists should be sent to jail. I'm sorry, I'm from China. I totally understand the issues that you're talking about, but there's a long story. I don't want to dig in it. My point is that, don't you think actually Web 2.0 actually create a new culture for all the people that they have to learn how to balance their trust? I mean, how to balance their understanding about information. Before you talk about trust issues, like, we can trust mainstream media. We can trust authorities from Chinese newspaper. But the thing is, right now, it's not only that we need to learn how to trust. We need to learn why we want to trust and why we, you know, like how we can different distinguish information. That's a new culture. I don't. I don't believe that we, you know, you know, like people cannot trust something, is that we killing the culture, but we actually foster new culture that people can do research by themselves. I mean, for Chinese people, we're really happy that we have so many resources right now that we can dig into. Into it to see. Okay, okay, this is from Xinhua News. This is from bloggers. What is my understanding? Right. I think I completely agree with you. And I think that comes back to my concept of media literacy. That's the thing which we need to build now. We have this open system. The challenge in the open system is to be able to read it critically. The challenge is not to believe everything you read on Wikipedia. The challenge is not to think that this sort of idealized media system can deliver us truth. Truth is just as hard to find on this democratized Internet platform. In fact, it's even harder to find because so much of the stuff is posted anonymously or slyly. So the real challenge is not really at the institutional level. The real challenge is at the individual level. The real challenge is to teach young people whether or not they really are cynical. I hope they're not quite as cynical as one of our friends was suggesting here. The real challenge is to educate media literacy. I'm interested to know how you guys at Google are trying to do that. Let me, since I'm at Google, and I can really have an interesting conversation. There is a section in the book that talks about Google and it's ubiquity. It's critical of Google, and it's critical of the way in which Google is acquiring so much information as an advertising company. I don't think anything I say in the book will come as a surprise to you. You probably hear it all the time, particularly from the outside. But I'm very curious from your perspective of you guys are, obviously, it's a phenomenal company. I mean, it's a remarkable experience coming here. You know, seven years ago there was nothing. Now you're a company with a market cap north of $150 billion. You're one of the most important companies, not only in California, but in the world. You literally are reshaping the media world. What you seem to be doing is acquiring more and more information. And your business model seems to me to be one in which the more information you can acquire about individuals legally, of course, I'm not suggesting you do anything illegally, but the more intimate you become with individuals, with your users, the more you know about them, the more value you have to your clients, the more able you are to sell advertising. I heard Eric Schmidt at D. And then a week earlier than that, he gave a very interesting interview to the Financial Times. And someone said to him, eric, in five years time, what would you like your search engine to be able to do? And he said, in five years, I hope we'll be able to tell our users what they want to do tomorrow and what job they want. In other words, what Eric Schmidt seems to be saying, your boss, essentially, is that he wants to know individuals better than they know themselves. Now, Eric is not some altruistic psychoanalysis. He's not trying to understand ourselves so we can get to God or truth or meaning or spirituality. He's doing it, of course, because he wants to benefit the company. Bottom line, he's a corporate CEO. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm curious as to whether or not you guys are concerned with that scenario, because in my book, as some of you may have already read, I describe this as 1984, 2.0, perhaps not very original, but at the same time it scares me. And I have to tell you that this has been. The book only came out today, but a lot of people have already read it. This has become one of the most interesting bits of the book which people are quoting back to me. This is a piece of the book that I think is going to be discussed, particularly outside Silicon Valley, because people are fearful of an organization like Google that is acquiring so much information that will know us all so intimately, will be able to figure out what indeed we want to do tomorrow and what job we want. Any. Any response on that? Am I being completely unfair? Maybe there's some other. I don't know, There are other people. Okay, yeah. Kind of relates to the point we made earlier. We seem to be equating anonymity to untrustworthiness, but there is anonymity to what? Untrustworthiness. That if someone is anonymous, you cannot trust what they are saying about anything. And there is this middle ground here about pseudonymity, where certain people have screen names that have more trust than others. So what do you feel about the idea of the middleman not being a person, but a role that someone gets into? And see, on Slashdot or Groclaw or other places, we have certain individuals who are known by their pseudonyms and who evoke a lot of trust in the rest of the population. Well, I'm troubled by that because you don't know who they are. So, I mean, you can trick people. I think one of the things that. One of the sort of the simple metaphors I use is when we drive along the street, we often stick our fingers up at one another if we drive badly because we don't know the person. But when we look each other in the eye, we generally behaved in a much more civil way. Anonymity by definition, I think, makes us behave worse. I think it would be very hard to argue that that anonymity brings out the best qualities in us. I see what you're trying to say, and I would be curious as to the kind of. I mean, if anyone can solve this problem, it's you guys. You've got, you know, you've aggregated the smartest minds in the world. But I think whilst an algorithm will go some of the way here, there needs to be a human element, because ultimately only human beings can reveal who they really are. And trust comes from humans, not from algorithms. Yeah. Can you hear? Okay, my question is about whether you have thought about some mechanism to create this change. It seems to me that the Internet is sort of self regulating in that all the people decide the direction that they want to take, take themselves. It's not like everybody got on the Internet and people said you have to think this way, you have to behave this way. These are all decisions that evolved as the first people and the first users got onto the Internet. And if you decide to make these decisions, to make these changes in the direction that you would like it to head, I'm wondering who would be making those decisions. I'm thinking if you decide institutions are making it, isn't that sort of destroying the whole core idea of the Internet? And if you let the Internet users make the decision, don't you think that's already been made and has created the Internet as it exists now? Yeah, I mean, of course one of the premises that my book critiques is this idea of the wisdom of the crowd. Because what you're saying is that the self regulating nature of the Internet has essentially corrected it. I don't think that's true. I think that all it does is create chaos, anarchy, informational uncertainty. The problem is that you need, in terms of media and information, you need to have people in charge. You need to have people, for example, determining whether the latest outrage in Iraq is more important than some obscure story that lots of people vote on. Ultimately, we've got to rely on experts, experts on authorities, on trained professionals in media to provide us with information and news. Otherwise the thing becomes chaos. I'm debating David Weinberger, some of you may know him. He's written a book called Everything is Miscellaneous and he embraces this idea, I mean, very fairly. He's a very smart guy. He and I just conducted a debate in the Wall Street Journal. But the real question becomes do we want an information and entertainment world in which everything is indeed miscellaneous, there's nothing inevitable about it, or do we want some order? Do we need to have an element of hierarchy, an element of expertise, if we're to have an information and entertainment sector that is coherent and valuable? Sorry, I wasn't saying that it's self correcting. I was just wondering if you wanted to make these changes, how would you go about it in a way that's neither authoritarian nor lends itself to the sort of mess that's created? Right. That's a fair question. And that's one of the things I deal with. I think we need as, again, I think we need to collectively look inside ourselves. I think we have to understand that the great seduction of the Internet is to become a broadcaster ourselves. The great seduction of the Internet is to use it as a platform to express ourselves. Now, you know I'm not a representative of the Beijing government here. I'm not suggesting that that should be outlawed and that we should all be forced to consume state media. But at the same time, I think we need to remind ourselves that there are many times when we need to learn to be silent, where we need to remain in the audience. The idealists of Web 2.0 believe that this flattening of media represents literally a convergence of author and audience, and that we can be simultaneously author and audience. I think it's our responsibility to remind ourselves that one of the great duties of being a citizen and to create a. A viable, rich civic culture is to know when we can be an author and when we're part of the audience. And I think you need an audience. You need people who are respectful. One of the things that most troubles me about the Web 2.0 Idealists is the way in which they trash mainstream media. The way in which the Judy Miller scandal somehow meant that every journalist on the New York Times was corrupt. The way in which the media's. I think failure to report Iraq means that mainstream media should simply go away. I think we still need to rely on institutions like the New York Times, the Wall Street Post. I think we need to value the music business and Hollywood. They're not ideal, but they're the best we have. And the alternative is actually really troubling because if what is currently happening continues, In 25 or 50 years, we're simply not going to have a professional music business. We won't have physical newspapers. We may not even have professional digital newspapers. And I don't need to tell you this, we may not have a publishing business. Books themselves, physical books may indeed be undermined. So we need to think to ourselves, do we really value these institutions, these products of mainstream media? And if we do, we need to learn when we need to be an audience and when we need to be an author. Sure, use blogs, use the Internet to put some of your videos up, but don't see it as a way of replacing mainstream media. Don't be seduced with the idea that you can be the next Spielberg. Hi, I wanted to get back to your question about Google, and of course I can't speak for Eric Schmidt. Are you a Google person? I'm a Google person, but in no Way know the top level strategy. But from my experience over here, you know, my view, from what I hear is that, you know, Google's point of view is that if we can give our users the information that they're looking for, honestly, as best as as we can try to get them what they're asking for, then profits will take care of themselves. We don't, you know, put the cart before the horse. Before the cart, I should say. We were just trying to, as I understand it, get them the right answers. And you know, of course, understanding your user, just like when two people talk, you know, the more you understand the person you're talking with, the better you can answer their questions. The same thing for Google. So from what I can tell, Google has tried to do that and has proven counter perhaps to popular wisdom that in fact, you know, doing good, trying to understand, you know, help the person, not subverting yourselves with commercials and flashy things that perhaps advertisers would have paid more for. All that has in fact worked and has in fact not only helped the public get better answers, but has led to revenues for Google. But let me rephrase the question. Are any of you concerned that you can know too much about people and it may not be Google? Maybe there's another search engine being developed in some garage somewhere that's more efficient at knowing things about people. The troubling thing about Web 2.0, in this flattened universe, when no one is paying for content anymore, and where content is either given away or stolen, the only way to create valuable content is through advertising. So the whole economy becomes advertising driven, which means that Google has become the dominant media company, in fact, whether one likes it or not, and that as advertising, the value of advertising becomes more and more focused on personalizing those ads. Are you concerned that in this new media, with this remarkable technology that allows such intimate personalization, are you worried that we can, whether it's Google or someone else, know too much? I think the key problem is not the availability of a technology, but it's a matter of choice. So if I choose to give up a bit of privacy in expression exchange for convenience or versus, I have no choice and I'll always have to give up the privacy. I think that's an important issue here. So if Google or the fact that Eric Schmidt mentioned it rather than doing it behind everyone's spec means that chances are we'll get to choose to use that feature or can turn it off if we don't like it, and then if we have full information on how the System works and then I can turn it off if I don't want. Then what is the main problem there? Yeah, I mean that's Again, you're assuming that everyone is as knowledgeable as you guys. I mean Google is. Google has aggregated the smartest minds in the world. But the problem with the Internet is most people aren't as smart as you guys. Most people don't look at the fine print. Most people, for example, don't understand that when they enter something into the search engine box, whether it's Yahoo or Google or Ask, they're telling somebody else about themselves. And often what they're telling them is about their most intimate selves, their spiritual aspirations, their sexual identities or lack of identities, their wishes, their dreams. I have a whole section in the book in which I describe a couple of the users. The AOL Ex Data Valdez disaster last year, in which all this search engine information spilt into the public. The problem is that whether we like it or not, people aren't as smart or as relevant or indeed as media literate as we'd like them to be. They're too trusting. And of course the world trusts Google. Everyone asks me this book's getting a lot of attention around the world. Everybody asks me about Google. In fact, Mercury News woman called me yesterday saying what do you think of Google? Are these guys really bad? Should we be scared of them? In my view, not that I know any more than anybody else, certainly not as much as you guys. I mean, I don't think anyone here is bad. I think everyone here wants to improve the world. I believe the ideal of don't doing evil. But the problem is that when you aggregate so much intimate information about the world's population, that itself is a seduction for people with evil intent. Google is really revolutionizing the whole history of knowledge. Never before in the history of the human race has anyone a government, a state, a Russian secret police, the East German state Stasi. Never before has anyone acquired such intimate information about everyone. And the really scary thing is what happens if this falls into the wrong hands? Then what? Then what becomes of us? Then what becomes of our freedom? So that's one of the issues that really interests me in the book. And I think it's certainly an issue that will become more and more salient as Google, for better or worse, becomes a more efficient company at aggregating that intimate information. One more question, you mentioned that one of the problems with free content is that it then becomes dependent on advertising to support itself. And my question to you is then how is that any different from your newspaper or television, which also is dependent on advertising to support itself? I'm not against the. And I think that's a good question. I'm not against the advertising model as I suggested. And in fact, Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, has come out with a really provocative idea. His next book, which I think is going to be called Free. Free, I think you were at the BEA conference. He says that he's going to be two versions of the book. One that comes with advertising, which he will give out free, and one that won't. I don't have a problem with, as I suggested, with formal advertising, although I would prefer my books come just as text and you pay me for my book. I would rather not have advertising because I think that compromises it. I've been very critical of Google and Yahoo and most other Internet companies in here. If I had to sell advertising, I certainly couldn't come to them. And it would probably be full of, you know, adverts from Rupert Murdoch, which then people would say, well, you would say that because Murdoch advertised in your book. So I think that advertising by definition compromises content. That's why movies and books historically don't come with advertising. I accept the fact about newspapers, but I think newspapers have, generally, the great newspapers have done a good job job separating the content from advertising. My problem with advertising is not that model. My problem is when it's unclear whether the content is independent or advertorial. And I think, as I suggested with a website like YouTube, where there's no clear division, it seems as if it's a sort of. It's the wet dream to be vulgar of. Of all PR and advertising execs. It gives them the perfect platform to distribute their message. And nobody, not Chen or Hurley or you or I or the millions of people who go onto YouTube, nobody really knows who's producing that content. So that's the problem with a flattened media. Everything becomes advertising. I'm all in favor of advertising if there's a clear, unambiguous separation between the content and the advertising. And that means that I'm also critical of mainstream media when it muddles the two up. I'm not supporting the television model either. I want to see a clear separation because that generates media literacy. We know when information is paid for and we know when it's provided objectively for our benefit so that we become more knowledgeable and wiser. That was it. Thank you. It was very, very interesting. I mean, I can hang around afterwards if anyone has any questions, but I really appreciate it. Very good questions. Thank. You.