Keen - How to Fix the Future

Having spent the last decade writing critically about the digital revolution, Ive been called everything from a Luddite and a curmudgeon to the Antichrist of Silicon Valley. At first I was part of a small group of dissenting authors who challenged the conventional wisdom about the internets beneficial impact on society. But over the last few years, as the zeitgeist has zigged from optimism to pessimism about our technological future, more and more pundits have joined our ranks. Now everyone, it seems, is penning polemics against surveillance capitalism, big data monopolists, the ignorance of the online crowd, juvenile Silicon Valley billionaires, fake news, antisocial social networks, mass technological unemployment, digital addiction, and the existential risk of smart algorithms. The world has caught up with my arguments. Nobody calls me the Antichrist anymore.

Timingas I know all too well from my day job as a serial entrepreneur of mostly ill-timed start-upsis everything. Having written three books exposing the dark side of the digital revolution, I think the time is now right for something more positive. So, rather than yet another noxious screed against contemporary technology, this book offers what I hope are constructive answers to the myriad questions on the digital horizon. To borrow a fashionable Silicon Valley word, this represents a pivot in my writing career. What you are about to read is a solutions book. Its obvious that the future needs to be fixed. The question now is how to fix it.

This is also a people book. What Ive tried to write is a human narrative. Its the story of how people all over the worldfrom Estonia and Singapore to India, Western Europe, the United States, and beyondare trying to solve the great challenges of our digital age. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested, no straight thing was ever made. But there is one straight thing about all the people described in this book. Although there might not be any single solution, any magic bullet for creating an ideal network society, what unites all these people is their determinationwhat I call agencyto shape their own fate in the face of technological forces that often seem both uncontrollable and unaccountable.

There is today much hype, some of it justified, about the internet of thingsthe network of smart objects that is the newest new thing in Silicon Valley. Rather than an internet of things, however, this book showcases an internet of people. I show that instead of smart technology, its smart human beings, acting as theyve always done throughout historyas innovators, regulators, educators, consumers, and, above all, as engaged citizenswho are fixing the twenty-first-century future. At a time when our traditional notion of humanity is threatened by artificial intelligence (AI) and other smart technologies, its this humanist veritythe oldest of old thingsthat is the central message of the book.

There is, however, nothing inevitable about a global network of people successfully fixing the future. The issues that confront us are urgent and complex. Time is many things, but it isnt infinite, at least not for us humans. The digital clock, which seems to proceed at a more accelerated pace than its analog forebear, is already ticking furiously. Unless we act now, we increasingly risk becoming powerless appendages to the new products and platforms of Big Tech corporations. This book, then, is also a call to arms in a culture infected by a creeping (and creepy) technological determinism. And its a reminder that our own human agencyour timeless responsibility to shape our own societiesis essential if we are to build a habitable digital future.

In contrast with smart cars, the future will never be able to drive itself. None of us, not even the Antichrist of Silicon Valley, have superhuman powers. But by working together, as weve done throughout history, we can build a better world for our children. This book is dedicated to them. They are why the future matters.

Andrew Keen

Berkeley, California

July 2017