Andrew Keen is a British-American 🏷️#author, broadcaster, and internet 🏷️#entrepreneur, best known as one of the earliest and most persistent critics of Web 2.0's utopian promises. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur argued that handing everyone a platform without a business model would drown out experts, starve creators, and replace a culture of listening with a culture of speaking. He hosts the interview show Keen On, where he cross-examines writers, technologists, and policymakers on politics, economics, and the future.
Keen founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a first-generation internet music company — a formative experience he credits, alongside the Web 2.0 boom of 2005–2006, with turning him against 📝Silicon Valley's "glib optimism" that entrepreneurs could become immensely rich while everyone won. His critique has always targeted business models and platform economics rather than technology itself: a "platform-dominated culture where all the money goes to the platform owners" and none to the creators. He has written four books extending the argument, including The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) and How to Fix the Future (2018), and appeared alongside 📝Judy Estrin on "📝Don't Be Evil," the first episode of 📝Everything They Know.
Andrew entered the library through his Don't Be Evil interview on my friend 📝Ari Andersen's podcast — the self-described kid announcing the emperor was naked, sixteen years before everyone agreed.