In this book, Andrew Keen, an expatriate British 'digital media entrepreneur' living in Silicon Valley, goes on the attack against 'web 2.0' and all who sail in her.

Keen's argument is simple: we are embracing the 'noble amateur' at the expense of our experts, who are losing their jobs in independent book and record stores, newspapers, TV and radio broadcasting — and just about everywhere else. Wikipedia runs on amateur volunteers with a very few skeleton staff; Britannica is laying off staff by the hundreds, if not thousands. Plus, we are flagrantly violating copyright more or less wholesale, and we are — oh, yes — hurting children, who are unprotected in the online jungle (although this seems an irrelevant and gratuitous claim in the context of the rest of the book).

In the process, says Keen, we are destroying the culture and legal infrastructure that has brought us the greatest and most democratically spread prosperity in human history, and handing over all the wealth to a tiny group of ultra-rich geeks. Copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig is dismissed as a Communist.

Keen writes as a reformed smoker. In 1997 he started the web 2.0 music site Audiocafe.com. When that failed, he went on to work at other Silicon Valley music-related start-ups. In a September, 2004 epiphany at Tim O'Reilly's FOO camp, he converted: the internet was the incarnation of the proverbial infinite number of monkeys typing randomly. Web 2.0 is the great seduction — the name he uses for his blog.

Where Keen's argument falls short is his insistence on blaming the internet for every destructive trend, even those that predate its mass acceptance. Are local newspapers in trouble because kids search Google news for the latest entertainment gossip, or because three decades of media consolidation mean that those newspapers are filled with wire reports? Keen blames the internet, as if it were bad news, Clear Channel putting 448 of its 1,200 US radio stations up for sale. But Clear Channel is the reason kids don't listen to radio anymore: the company has perfected the cost-cutting technique of putting a single DJ in a tiny studio in Atlanta to serve a dozen stations across the country, all running the same playlist.

Of course experts are a valuable resource. Who wants to be operated on by an amateur brain surgeon? But Keen seems to imagine that only experts have anything of value to contribute (while admitting that he's an amateur book author). In fact, market forces value expertise unevenly, and always have done. Those infinite monkeys include experts whose work was overlooked before. Plus — as is clear to anyone who's ever sampled financial services or IT consultancy — one reason people distrust experts is that they're so much better at stealing from you.

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