THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER

A Silicon Valley veteran and journalist sounds the alarm on the pernicious effects of the Internet.

Everything you love about the Internet—the connection, the convenience, the way it puts the world of information, goods and services at your fingertips—has its dark, Orwellian side, argues Keen (Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, 2012, etc.). Yes, the Internet changed the corporate playing field, and some have played by the new rules far better than others, but the book sometimes makes it seem that such success is itself a crime: “As in the medieval world, Google, Apple, and Facebook have detached themselves from the physical reality of the increasingly impoverished communities around them.” Keen rightly warns about loss of privacy (often willingly if unwittingly surrendered), about fortunes made through consumers working for free (with every Facebook post or Google search), about a future, if not the present, in which every connection is monitored and exploited. But his laments about the crash of Kodak and the demise of so many record stores suggest that he might as well be pining for the steam locomotive and quill pen. While he admits that much of the cultural change has been driven by consumers, leading to winner-take-all fortunes for whoever satisfies the customer best, those consumers simply don’t see the big picture: “Internet evangelists, especially libertarian entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, see everything in terms of satisfying the customer. And while Amazon does indeed satisfy most of us as consumers, it is having a far less satisfactory outcome for citizens.” For all of his doomsday prophecy, Keen’s solutions seem scaled down and conventional: recommendations for “technology Sabbaths or joining the ‘slow Web’ movement” and to “use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.”

Though the book serves as a corrective to cybertech utopianism, even the author admits, “I certainly couldn’t have written this book without the miracles of email and the Web.”