Andrew Keen on why “the Internet is ideology”

Wow, Dueling Jimbos …

Jon

Jon, it sounds like you're not keen on Keen. Could you elaborate in just a few sentences for me (and us)? I generally like what Keen has to say... but, admittedly, I'm easily entranced by anyone who points out the follies of Jimmy Wales.

P.S. After "Great, thank you," guess what the first word out of Jimbo's mouth was?

Look, you and I both know what it's really like in the trenches. Those Model 2001 Hot Air Buffoons — Keen, Manjoo, Wales, I haven't read Sifry — they're so udderly detached from the war on the ground that it's just plain comical watching them belly-bump and chest-thump each other around in Laputa-Stratos City. What real difference does it make which side of the fantasy volleyball net any of them are on?

Jon

Well, important questions do not get answered.

Is Jimbo as brave with mortae as he is with the desysop command?



Has somebody stolen ArbComm's brain to run a city somewhere, leaving us with a shambling remote-controlled hulk? I mean, you could probably make it do all kinds of brainless things in the meantime, but is that really the point? Perhaps that is the point.



And finally and most importantly, when is Droxine's clothing going to finally just fall off, as expected? I may have been toking xenite, but I think there must be some illegal use of antigravity there which has nothing to do with levitating cities.

I read in one of those "behind the scenes" Star Trek books that the actress who played Droxine was actually flat-chested, as the costumers couldn't get that get-up to actually work on a full-chested bust. So, you're looking at what are probably grapefruit-sized balls of polyurethane foam.

Nowadays, they just put the synthetic stuffing under the skin.

This photo of Diana Ewing (the actress who played Droxine) confirms that.

The thing that kills me in the 4-man video debate is that as they're talking about how facts and truth are conveyed on the Internet, the moderator keeps calling Jimbo "the Founder" of Wikipedia, and that's what pops up under his name in the graphic under his yapping mouth. You'd think that someone who has learned the truth about this big, fat lie would have pointed that out. Thus I wonder if any one of those 5 men (other than Jimbo) knows it's a lie?

That's precisely the sight-gag I remember as Spock says his line about "finest example of sustained anti-gravity levitation" while Kirk, just spying her entrance, nods affirmatively.

Now, back to the βøøβøθøn already in e-gress.

Jon

Micah Sifry says (around 42:30):



Then the moderator interrupts:



Then we hear Sifry talk about how some African-American bloggers had to be anonymous at first, because they were unsure if they might get death threats, etc., etc.

Sounds like Sifry is using a couple of data points to make a wide generalization. In my observations, I think the trend is that more and more writers (especially commenters on blogs and news stories, as well as Yahoo! Answers participants and their ilk) hide behind anonymity so that they may more freely make outrageous statements without accountability.

I wonder if some academic "study" could prove or disprove Sifry's hypothesis.

I posted some thoughts on what Keen is saying here in Jon's thread on Democracy and Inquiry which has less Star Trek stuff.

CRAZY GUY ALERT: at 65:53.

And at the 86:00 mark, a questioner from the audience (who strikes me as a Wikipedia admin archetype) gets completely obliterated by Andrew Keen, who notes of him, "you seem very pleased with yourself" and "it's a stupid question". Keen was vicious there.

Keen:

After all these years, Keen still hasn't cottoned on to the fact that anything that Jimbo or the Frei Kultur Kinder say in public about "direct democracy", or any sort of democracy, on Wikimedia sites is just so much eyewash. As we here know all too well, such a thing has never been permitted, and as a matter of policy will never be. This is little different from the bullshit that Jimbo spouted off to the US Senate about how "The First Amendment plays an important role in this project (Wikipedia)", when in fact the very notion is expressly disavowed on Wikipedia itself.

Exactamundo!

Keen is still wrestling with Jimbo's rhetoric, which even the most clueless among us knows by now is an empty shell — just the latest snakeskin he casts off to elude the easily divertable critic.

Jon

Yeah, but that "stuffing" has to have about the specific gravity of water, so it STILL wouldn't work for that.

William Ware Theiss always tried to design stuff that would get past the gov censors, while still looking like it was almost about to fail catastrophically for engineering reasons (kind of like the US space shuttle), but I suppose even he wasn't magic.

Farhad Manjoo is an idiot, and he's devious. Don't ever let him interview you. He's the one who declared in 2002, when Google-Watch.org started, that I must be a nut case because I don't like Google. His Salon piece set the "Daniel Brandt the nut case who doesn't like Google" meme in concrete for years to come.

I mention it here (scroll down a bit). There's a photo of Jimbo across from the photo of Manjoo. That's because they're more alike than different. SlimVirgin cited Manjoo and the Beasley site when she started that stub on me in September 2005. There were no rules on Wikipedia, SlimVirgin had her own agenda, and Jimbo backed her up. I will never forgive Beasley, I will never forgive Manjoo, I will never forgive SlimVirgin, and I will never forgive Jimbo.

On the Internet, if you are the first one to be right about something (like I was right about Google in 2002), that's the same as being wrong.

And people wonder why I don't talk to cyberspace journalists these days unless they already have a good track record with me...

If this has already been discussed somewhere on the site, I apologize for the redundancy. At any rate, the video of the debate is available here. Keen gets in some relatively sharp jabs.

We don't like redundancy.

Now, is there any chance that one of the mods will roll up the "Swiss prize" threads about Jimbo's recent windfall?

Done.

Thanks for the handy link, Gomi.

To me, the Classic Jimbo Moment comes at around the 45:00 mark. He neatly demonstrates his narcissism, evasiveness, Randroidism, and intellectual dishonesty all in one neat little paragraph-sized statement. To put this in context, he's asked if the internet needs some sort of authority or "governance structure" to deal with situations like the recent dust-up over Jimbo's (temporary, as it happens) deletion of several unused pornographic images on Commons.

In particular, note the non-statement, "because that's the way we do our work." In other words, he isn't going to tell us the actual reason why Wikipedia does everything "in the open" (which ultimately is because constantly-changing pages get better Google rankings, and has very little to do with anyone there actually believing that "transparency" is a good thing). He is, quite literally, saying because that's just how it is in "explaining" what may be the single most problematic aspect of the entire Wikipedia phenomenon.

Moreover, he has no idea whatsoever what goes on "at the Encyclopaedia Britannica." In fact, most editorial meetings at the EB are likely to be vastly more "civil" and rational than even an uncontroversial Wikipedia talk page - Jimbo is simply spewing self-serving strawman nonsense here. The EB would hire rational and "neutral" writers to begin with, not cobble together a group of potentially-biased (not to mention anonymous) people, and then just hope they can call the result a "consensus." Another strawman is the bit about "repealing the First Amendment," as if anyone is actually suggesting anything even remotely like that.

Perhaps most importantly, the fact that "it's messy" actually does indicate that the government should "step in and do it," or more accurately, that governance structures should be imposed from the public sphere, if only by pressure of legislation that assigns liability to Wikipedia (and similar sites) to the same degree as traditional publishers. These sites obviously aren't going to create those structures themselves, internally, and in the meantime a large number of people in education, publishing, and a variety of other fields are being negatively impacted by a website hosted by a tax-advantaged US-based organization that cares very little for social responsibility or anything else, all while calling itself a "charity."

Then there's the BIG LIE about all the work being out in the open, transparent, uncensored.

Funny how no one seems to notice the BIG PILE OF WALE CRAP in the living room any more.

Jon

And among the senior contestants, nothing of importance is ever transacted "in the open." The ArbCom, ANI, RFCs, etc. are a Potemkin Village.

Honestly, is there a link to the consolidated Swiss prize topic?

Here. For goodness sake, Greg, has your mouse finger stopped working? Two clicks away, literally, from here ("The Wikipedia Review", then "Wikipedia In the Media" where it is (currently) the top topic). Anyway, have fun.

That depends on whether you're looking at it from an inside or outside perspective, though. Note that he said "we do all our work in the open." All the scheming, plotting, pretext-manufacturing, glad-handing, future-monetization planning, sweetheart-contract-creating, and so on is of course done in secret, but for Jimbo & Co., that's not work, that's entertainment.

Don't we normally put things about Jimbo in The Jimbo Phenomenon, and don't we normally put news worth discussing in News Worth Discussing?

I didn't think to look in "Wikipedia In the Media".

I'm sorry I frustrated you.

For ease of reference …

“Debate : The Internet and Democracy”, Miller Center of Public Affairs, 18 May 2010.

• Video (89:18)
• PDF Transcript