In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.

From the Hardcover edition.

“Shrewdly argued...[Keen] writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Thoroughly engaging, brightly written pages.” —The Chicago Tribune

“A staggering new book.” —A.N. Wilson, The Daily Mail

“Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically-educated technoscold—and thank goodness.” —Jonathan Last, online editor, The Weekly Standard

—Christopher M. Schroeder, CEO, HealthCentral Network (healthcentral.com), and former CEO and publisher, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

“Page after page of really interesting insight and research. I look forward to the much-needed debate about the problems that Keen articulates—which can’t be lightly dismissed.”

—Larry Sanger, cofounder, Wikipedia and founder, Citizendium

“Thoroughly engaging, brightly written pages”

—Chicago Tribune

“Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically educated technoscold—and thank goodness. The world needs an intellectual Goliath to slay Web 2.0’s army of Davids.”

—Jonathan Last, online editor, Weekly Standard