"My real targets are what I would call the libertarians on the right and the left," he says. To Keen, the "democratised" web is actually a form of oligarchy, the product of an unholy alliance between old counterculturalists ("fat guys with beards, basically") and free-market fundamentalists (he offers Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, as an example). The former group, he says, reject "all forms of external authority"; the latter believe "that if you just leave everything alone it will work itself out".

One inviolable tenet of this twin-track libertarian ethos, according to Keen, is a misplaced faith in the integrity of the amateur - the citizen journalist, the self-published author, the mash-up musician - and a generic distrust of expertise"