tomorrow, the brookings institution host a discussion regarding the budgeting process. live coverage begins at 9:30 a.m. eastern on c-span 2. >> this week on q&a, our guest is andrew keen, author of "the internet is not the answer." our guest talks about his objections to the overuse of technology in our society. he also talks about the history of silicon valley and the tech world, the use of our personal data by internet sites, and what he thinks regular users of the web should know. >> andrew keen, where did you get this title, "the internet is not the answer."

>> like most of my best ideas, they didn't come from me. the original title, i can't say the original words because i'm sure this is a family show. but the original title was "epic fail." we had a long conversation with my agent. at one point, morgan shouted that the internet is not the answer. so it wasn't my title unfortunately. it's a good title, isn't it? >> i wanted to ask about the whole chapter you talk about failing, failcon. what is that? >> i'm sure you been to silicon valley. it is a place of cults. it's this ideal of failure.

the bigger you are, the more you boast about failure. i attended a conference called failcon. one of the speakers was a young man who boasted he is now the current ceo of uber, the darling of silicon valley, a company worth $40 billion. but he boasted about being sued by record labels for a quarter of a trillion dollars because he had a company called scour which is essentially like napster, and legitimized the stealing of music. so the cult of failure is one of the most irritating aspects of silicon valley. you have tim o'reilly, a well-known publisher. he makes speeches like "how i failed."

but of course the real truth about silicon valley is that they are the winners. the people who don't have jobs, people who are unemployed, who are underemployed, people who cannot get to college, they don't go around saying i am a failure. i think this cult of failure is one of the reasons why silicon valley is so profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. because it is the one sector in the american economy fortunately that is doing well. it is the one sector driving innovation, driving change. so when you have a cult of failure, it isn't great. >> what was your life like in london? >> my life in london was middle-class, jewish, north london for those of your viewers -- i don't know what the equivalent would be in new york. what is sort of a lower or middle-class neighborhood in new york? brooklyn. my family were shopkeepers. my grandfather had come over from poland.

he began in the east end, in the docks, the old docks. he sold fashion fabric which was in those days when most women made their own clothing. so he would wheel his cart from the east end to the west end. eventually, my family did better and they had a store on oxford street, which is a major shopping street. so i was lucky. i had quite a privileged of bringing. >> school, how much? >> enough. i was at school at north london high school and then i went to the university of london and i went to a place called the school of slavonic studies. specialized in balkan history. this was before the collapse of the berlin wall so i was particularly interested in the

history of communism and pre-communism, the history of russia and germany and countries that then existed like czechoslovakia which have now fragmented. after i graduated from the school of slavonic studies in london, i was a british council scholar, which is equivalent to a fulbright scholar in sarajevo in the old yugoslavia. this was both before the civil war and the olympics, 1982 1983. then i came to grad school in berkeley. i came as a political scientist. i had the fairly unique achievement of coming as a scholar and then being thrown out as a troublemaker. so i had my moments of failure too. >>what kind of trouble were you making. i made fun of stodgy epidemics

-- academics, career academics that have nothing to say for themselves. as you can tell from my work, i find hard to be not a little brutal. and i like to tell what i see is the truth. and american academia is so mired in tradition, in bureaucracy, it is so reactionary, whether it's from the left or the right -- you have political correctness. in england, you're trained to think for yourself. when i was a student in england, my teachers expected me to argue with them, to think for myself. so when i came to berkeley, it was a cultural shock when you have these professors who expected you to agree with them, who expected you to toe the line, who expected you to read their boring articles and theories and then spew them back to them. so of course, perhaps rather immaturely, i wasn't willing to do that and they were not very happy so i was thrown out. the pinnacle of my career at berkeley if someone can call it a pinnacle, i had a particularly

stodgy old hungarian professor. one day, he had some visiting students from harvard. he wanted the graduate students to behave themselves. and this was joined the period of ceausescu, an awful dictator in romania. so i gave a rather entertaining presentation comparing him to vlad the impaler. this hungarian professor never spoke to me again. that was my kiss of death. i didn't fit into academia which is ironic because sometimes people think i am a defender of the old elite, tradition. i like to think of myself and more rebellious terms. >> where do you live now? >> santa rosa, california. are you familiar with the movie "shadow of a doubt"?

it is the ultimate film about the innocence of small-town life in america. i was a big fan of hitchcock. i like the idea of living in innocent america which is of course not as innocent as it appears. >> going to run a clip from your ted x speech. before we do this, you gave this speech in 2012. what is ted x and where was it? >> it is the franchise of ted. there are a couple of main ted events which are very exclusive events for the technology elite who like to think they are improving the world and in order to improve the world, they need to spend $7,000 to socialize with each other for a weekend.

but anyone can now buy into the ted brand and you can put on a ted x event. some are better than others. but they are a lot less exclusive or elitist than the main ted. >> this is brussels. >> i have done them in brussels, i've done then in budapest, and in holland. they are a lot of fun. have you been to them? >> no, i have watched them online. do they pay you to do this? >> they pay expenses. but you get to meet interesting people. the one in brussels, i spoke just before steve wozniak, the cofounder of apple. and he was very funny afterwards. he said my speech made him cry. >> we have more than one clip. let's watch this and then i will ask you more about it.

[video clip] >> we are data or we are emerging as data. that is what steve wozniak for better or worse put into motion. and as we look at each other in the future, in the latter part of the 21st century, we won't see question marks, we will see data. we will see information. and one company in silicon valley, google, they are even designing glasses which when you put on you won't see these physical question marks, you will see data. bang bang. that's the murder. >> that was the theme of the show, "bang bang," so i couldn't resist using that. >> what do you do in a speech like this and who is the audience?

>> the audience at that particular event, which i think is the largest ted x in the world, about 3000 people in the audience and the tickets are relatively affordable. so the audience would be made up of technologists, journalists, students. it's a good audience. i did another one in budapest. you are trying to engage and entertain. everyone at ted x gets, i think,16 minutes to speak. >> is it scripted? >> not at all. >> so when we watch you, it's off the top of your head. >> it's off the top of my head. the ted x people like to get people to prepare and they like practice. but i never do. i never show up to the practice. i think speeches when they are canned are worthless. i think they have to be spontaneous. i can only be motivated when i am in front of people.

my books are always late. my articles are always late. i like this kind of experience because i can't put it off. i can only take something seriously if i have 3000 people because that forces you not to screw up. it is an invigorating experience. for me, the live experience is excellent. i've been able to prosper in this economy because of that. as a pure writer, i think i would be struggling a lot more. whilst i don't necessarily celebrate that because i know many very fine writers and very fine thinkers struggle in front of a live audience, the real opportunity now the digital age ironically is the physical experience. what the digital has done is commodified the copy, made it worthless. you don't pay for anything online.

what that has done ironically enough is made the physical experience far more worth it. that is why ted is so valuable. it is what people go to events. it makes people want to meet people more. which means that we are not going to disappear into the digital ethos and there will always be the physical experience. but to do well in this world particularly as an entertainer or a thinker or as a writer, you have to be able to perform. you have to be able to entertain. >> in your talk, set it up if you don't mind, the whole use of the "vertigo" clip. did you use this for a long time? >> for me, i have always had an obsession with hitchcock's "vertigo." i think it is his major achievement. i have always been a huge cinema

person. it's one of those films that attracts obsessives like me. every time you see it, you feel another skin. for me, it was an opportunity to write about silicon valley because i always thought of technology as the great seduction, the thing you fall in love with. and you think you fall in love with one thing and you fall in love with something quite different. i'm sure most of your viewers are familiar with the movie. but it's a film about a man who falls in love with a blonde who turns out to be a brunette. he falls in love with what he thinks is a blonde, beautiful san francisco heiress and turns

out to be a brunette from kansas who works as a shopgirl. >> well let's watch it and then you can -- it starts with "vertigo." [video clip] >> look at him. he is already in love with her and he has not even met her. he is watching. zizek, the great slovenian philosopher calls this the parallax view. that doorway. here she comes. kim novak, a beautiful blonde american heiress from san francisco who drives a green jaguar around town. what does this have to do with information and data? the truth of the movie is that the blonde isn't it really a blonde. she is in fact a brunette shopgirl from kansas.

all women from kansas i think work in stores and they are brunette. and he is about to be set up sucked into this vortex of heartbreak and murder. and that is what we are here to talk about today because just as jimmy stewart got sold the false blonde, we are being sold something as well, which is a scam, something that undermines us as a species. >> what is the scam? >> the scam is the ideal of being able to self publish online. the scam is facebook, instagram. the scam is twitter. i'm is easy to seduce as anyone. i'm on some of these things too, i'm not claiming not to be. the scam is the idea that these platforms give us the opportunity to realize ourselves, to tell the world what we think and what we see,

to distribute our photography, our music, and our text, allows us to become online bloggers and videographers. but the scam is that we are being used. mike morris, the brilliant venture capitalist who invested in google and yahoo! and many of the other big hits, describes this as the data factory economy. in the industrial age, people want to work in factories. they were paid for their labor. they worked 9-to-5 and they went home and did what they wanted with that money. today, we are all working these factories, like google, like facebook, twitter. but we are unpaid labor. we are working 24 hours a day. we are not rewarded. we are not even acknowledged that we are creating the value for them. worse than that, we are the ones who are being packaged up as the product. what these companies are doing

is learning more and more about us from our behavior, from what we publish, from our photographs, from our ideas, from what we buy, from what we say, from what we don't say. they are learning about us, they are creating this bentham-like panopticon, and then they are transforming us. they are repackaging us as the product. so we are the ones being sold. not only are we working for free but then we are being sold. so it's the ultimate scam. it is a perfect hitchcock movie. >>who was bentham and what is a panopticon? jeremy bentham was as early 19th-century utilitarian philosopher. he invented this idea of the panopticon, a prison that had a tower that could see everything. he believed the idea could be used in schools and hospitals. bentham believed that this would create discipline in the new industrial society.

the french historian michel foucault has written extensively about it. bentham inspired john stuart mill to react against bentham. i love bentham, the idea bentham, both his corpse and his ideas play a central idea in the idea of a digital vertigo. >> i want to show you a list of the top 10 people in the united states in terms of twitter followers, tell us what this means to you when you see it. we will look at the first five. you've got katy perry who has

the most followers at 63 million. justin bieber up there at 59 million. barack obama at number 3, 52 million. taylor swift at 50 million. youtube, i don't think youtube is a person, but they have 48 million followers. at the bottom, lady gaga at 43 rihanna at 39, and ellen degeneres at 37. what does that say to you? >> what it says is that the internet has created a world not of cultural democracy. it is not what thomas friedman calls a flat world. it is actually rocky and hilly and as mountainous as the old world. it has created this infrastructure for a winner take all culture, a winner take all economic system in which a tiny group of superstar entertainers

are controlling our attention. that is a very brilliant business writer at harvard called anita elberse. she has written an important book called "blockbusters." she says we were promised that the internet would democratize would sweep away the old elites. actually, we've got more of the same. it's even worse now. what we have is a system where a tiny group of people control our attention. and if that isn't that enough, the other thing that is an even worse consequences that this economy is hollowing out the middle. the old entertainment economy -- it wasn't ideal, i'm not defending the studios and production companies -- but what it did at least guarantee was the infrastructure, the

ecosystem of a middle-class economy. gatekeepers of editors, people who would film shows like this of journalists, people who had regular middle-class incomes. what the internet has done is swept away that old class. none of these people have any role in the digital economy and it has enabled a superstar class of rihanna and lady gaga with 10 to 50 million followers and destroyed the old middle class and we all lose. this is a lose-lose rather than the silicon valley notion of win-win. >> as you saw on the list, barack obama is third. i want to show you a clip -- he did a seven-minute video sometime back, the day before he went to iowa to make a speech about the internet and he did it in the oval office. i don't know if you have seen

this. this president is using this kind of media all the time. [video clip] >> one of the things that i am going to make an early announcement about this week is the issue of getting faster broadband. i want to take a look at something i've got on my ipad. this is internet download speed by city. i can zoom up if you want so you can see the names. so you have seoul, south korea hong kong, tokyo, paris. these cities all have really fast access to the internet because they have made the investments in broadband. here is what is interesting. right next to it, you have cedar falls, iowa. cedar falls isn't a really big place. but the reason they can compete with these other world cities is because citizens got together and made the investments to

bring competition in and make sure that internet speeds were just as fast there as anywhere else. >> what is your reaction? >> broadband is a very complex issue. it's not an area that i'm an expert in. i'm more of an analyst of the broader internet economy. i would say there is an exaggerated sense of the poor quality of american broadband. having said that, i do like the korean model. i myself have no problems with public investment in broadband in the same way as i tell the story in "the internet is not the answer." the internet came down as a top-down government project. i am not an opponent of public

investment in things like broadband. >> i wanted to ask you also the political question about this, the president using this device the day before a speech. i think he is the first president to ever done this. i also found online there is a whole list of people at the white house, like corey shulman, the director of online engagement for the office of digital strategy, makes $73,000 a year. ashleigh axios, her title is creative director for the office of digital strategy. jesse lee, director of progressive media and online response. >> what's the difference between progressive media and other media? >> i don't know but it says he makes $95,000 a year to and then we have another, adam garber, a $72,000 a year guy. and he doesn't have -- he is video director for the office of

digital strategy. >> he probably did the video. >> there's more. lindsay holtz is the director of will digital content for the office of digital strategy. finally, nathaniel lubin is acting director for the office of digital strategy and he is an $80,000 a year man. i wanted your comment on the idea that all of these kind of folks work at the white house. what is the impact on our country? >> i can't comment on those guys. but it seems to me to be a troubling intimacy between the obama administration and certain internet companies beginning with g. for example, the new cto, megan smith, used to be the vp in charge of business development at this company beginning with g. i'm sure you can think of it. if not, you can look it up online. >> i can google it? >> you may be able to google it.

that kind of intimacy i find very troubling. >> why? >> because google has an agenda. it is one of the two or three most powerful companies in the world. google has an agenda. it has an agenda on network neutrality. they are the owner of youtube. it is not surprising they are hostile to the idea of paying extra because youtube is one of the biggest users of broadband on the web. i am a fan of obama. i am not a u.s. citizen so i don't vote but if i did vote, i would have voted for obama. but i am troubled by the way in which obama and this company beginning with g and a certain other companies are a little too intimate.

after the last election when obama made the announcement to will obama made the announcement to that he was going to pursue this network neutrality legislation, he has played into this oversimplified notion that there are these companies out there trying to destroy the internet. it is a children's story. and him it is being orchestrated by large companies like perhaps youtube or netflix who have an agenda. the real issue of network neutrality is that it is a fight between large companies about whether or not perhaps you should pay a toll on the internet. it doesn't pertain to small people. it doesn't pertain to ordinary internet users. a it isn't going to slow down the network. it is an example of a way in which the internet gets used gets exploited by certain marketing departments and spin doctors to exploit people to get involved in issues.

it is so complicated that you can ask five people in washington what net neutrality is and you get five different answers. the most complicated question of the 19th century was the eastern question, the question of what happens to the ottoman empire after it breaks up. i think it was either gladstone or disraeli that said there are only three people in the world who understand the eastern question. the first is mad, the second is dead, and the third is my wife or something like that. it is a similar thing with network neutrality. it is bad enough with the eastern question which was used by various governments and led

to the catastrophe of the first world war. it is an incredibly complicated issue that is being used by different groups to pursue their own agendas. >> someone you talk about in this book is tim berners-lee. we found this from a ted speech. i would like to ask you how he fits into your story. >> people started to put together a magna carta, a bill of rights for the web. how about we do that? the right to communicate with whom i want. what would be on your list? let's crowdsource that. this year. let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary to put together a magna carta for the web. do me a favor. fight for it for me.

>>what is crowd source? >> crowd source is getting many thousands of people online to contribute to the creation of something. so wikipedia is a crowd sourced encyclopedia. >> what role did this man play? >> that man is incredibly important. in 1989, when all of our eyes were on the collapse of the berlin wall, when we were told that the 20th century was finished and we could all agree about everything, that guy who was younger then, a recent graduate of oxford, queens college. the same as jeremy bentham 200

years earlier, sometimes history works in funny ways. that man was at the cern research center in geneva. he was a young physicist. he invented the world wide web. he did not invent the internet. he invented the world wide web that sat on top of the internet and made the internet accessible for everyone. the achievement of the world wide web was that it took the internet and made it popular. the reason i bring up 1989 is because we all thought that history came to an end, but actually it represents the real beginning of the 21st century. i think in 100 years, when we look back -- sure the war was interesting.

but you have this symbolic handing over of history from the issue of the cold war to the issue of the digital revolution. today, 1989 seems to be the year that marked the difference between the industrial 20th century and the digital 21st century. in my view, he is a hero. he was a publicly spirited scientist, who did this out of love. no one was paying him. he essentially gave it away. he could have owned the world wide web. he could have put all sorts of ip around it. but he didn't. the problem with tim berners-lee, as the internet shifted from publicly spirited guys to incredibly aggressive entrepreneurs, is he has become kind of irrelevant. he is a symbol of the old world.

i am a great fan of his and a great admirer, but i would say that his romantic vision of the internet as a place that would bring everything together has not been realized. it is the reverse. when he talks about a bill of rights, i would stand there and say sure that is nice, but we have enough bills of rights. if we are going to make the internet a habitable place, we need to make it a successful place. if it will really be the answer to our challenges, we need a bill of responsibilities. that is what is missing from the internet at the moment, a sense of responsibility. it has become the receptacle for our culture of entitlement. everyone thinks it was delivered in the middle of the night. that is why this network neutrality thing is annoying. they think it was delivered as a

gift to people as a reflection of their own virtues. if we will make it a good place, a reflection of our best qualities, we need more responsibilities and less rights. >> i want to bring up the ted thing again-- >> are you trying to audition? >> would ted even exist without the internet? isn't it part of creating a community? >> ted used to be a thing that was run by a guy in southern california. ironically enough, a guy called chris anderson, who had run a big publishing company futurepublishing, which went bust after the first internet boom, he was one of the examples of internet cowboys who tried to make money. one of his investments was in

ted. when futurepublishing went bust and he lost his job, he bought ted, and built it into a successful franchise. i think ted would still exist. it is essentially a salon. it was great for enlightenment. people wanted intelligent conversation. one of the reasons ted does so well is because general media is so bad, not just the internet but television, there is such an absence of serious thought. people want that kind of thing. in the 21st century, the other thing ted offers is networking. i am ambivalent about networking. i don't like the networking world we are falling into. but the challenge in this postindustrial world is to build our own personal brand. we will not work for ford or kodak the rest of our lives. we are all going to be continually inventing and reinventing ourselves.

networking is at the center, the more people you know the wealthier you will be. reid hoffman, the founder of linkedin is a very brilliant man, undergraduate at stanford and philosopher at oxford. i think he was a fulbright or rhodes scholar. he has understood this better than anyone. he essentially invented social media. >> here you are back at that ted him him him-- here you are back at that ted speech. back in 2012. >> we are being sold something also. it is a scam. something which is undermining who we are as a species. one of the previous speakers talked about the importance of community.

what i call a cult of the social. the idea that community is everything. all you ever hear about is community, community, community. community is supposed to be so wonderful. these books, too many of them, all about the we. how important it is to work together. all premised on this absurd idea that technology will enable community. if any of you have read marx's german question, it is really taken from the idea that technology allows us to realize our species'being. we have this network -- all this data, dna. we are all becoming information and we can share that information and become community. but of course, it is nonsense. and worse, it is dangerous nonsense. >> why dangerous? >> it is dangerous because it is not true. it is dangerous for two reasons. firstly, as mill realized in his great work "on liberty," it is

the interior that is important. in our own government, is to protect the interior. i end the book at a museum in amsterdam, with me gazing at a vermeer, the great artist of the interior. i am a believer in that liberalism. the millian idea of protecting the individual to think for themselves. the social tends to lend itself to conformity. i'm not against being social, i don't think it is a bad thing. i'm not in favor of going back to the cave and separating myself from my fellow man. but the other problem is social media in the digital age is not social. it is an extension of the self. it is an extension of the culture of narcissism that is increasingly pervading the internet.

when you go on facebook, you are not really networking. you are not really being social. some people are. but more people, on instagram or twitter, you are using it to broadcast yourself. to show off your self. ironically, it is more and more alienating. as i show, in "the internet is not the answer", the more people use facebook, the more lonely they are. it is alienating. it is atomizing. you see that in political terms. we were told that social media would create these great movements, the arab spring occupy. but look what happened to occupy. it was simply an explosion of individual voices. there was never any successful molding of those voices, it was a quilt of individuals. that quilt never formed into a political organization. in the middle east, we know the

catastrophe that followed the arab spring. >> you mentioned karl marx in this last clip. how much of a follower are you of him? >> i am not a follower of marx. in "the internet is not the answer", i write about my great uncle who was a follower of marx. he was the bagman of the english communist party who recycled soviet money through england. like so many jews, our families are made of either merchants or idealists. i'm not a follower of marx. i think he was wrong. but i also think he was wrong in a fascinating way, in a brilliant way.

in the german ideology for example, he writes about the postcapitalist age when technology will free us from work. he says, famously, you can fish in the morning, and farm in the afternoon, and write poetry in the evening. you can see this in many internet idealists. technology will free us from the banality of work. free us from having to rely on the factory. but of course, the catastrophe of our current wave of technology, is it is not freeing us. what it is doing is actually destroying jobs. it is doing away with labor. this means we will not have the cash to be farmers or fishermen or poets. >> you mention you run a salon. is it televised?

>> i hope you guys televise it. it is called future cast. it is at the at&t foundry in palo alto. i wear your hat, symbolically. i am the guy who sits with someone interesting. we talk about the impact of technology. in contrast with this, it is not broadcast. it's kind of like ted. it is supported by at&t and erikson, the big swedish telecommunications company. it is held about six times per year. we have taken it on the road. we do some in san francisco, atlanta and dallas. it gives me the opportunity to ask hard questions. >> you do an interview series. is it still on techcrunch? >> no, it has shifted to techonomy, a rival.

let's watch. >> technology continues to dramatically change the world. so dramatically that even politicians, current politicians, are realizing that digital technology can change dramatically and revolutionize government. perhaps the first to realize this is gavin newsom. lieutenant governor of california. the number two guy. he is famous, almost legendary for his insights into technology and particularly into search. stephen wolfram, welcome.

he is the founder and ceo of wolfram research. he has come out with a new book. it is a book that is very dark. >> thank you for having me here. it is not dark, it is full of optimism. >> you are nostalgic for the future. >> this is another example of something the internet provides you an opportunity to do. was this expensive? >> i don't pay for it. techcrunch paid for it. >> does it work for them? >> i don't know if it works for them. it works for me. if i admit something here will everyone know about it? >> everybody. >> you do certain things and this is why this economy is challenging. i do this techcrunch interview-- i did that, now i do the techonomy one.

it allows me to meet really interesting people. secondly, it gets my name out there. thirdly, it is a great way to research. in the acknowledgments of that book i thank everyone who was on my show. it was my way of doing research. it pays something but not a great deal. techcrunch's main business model is advertising and events. but videos don't get the kind of page views that text does . i don't think techcrunch tv was enormously profitable. but i love the opportunity to ask questions. there is nothing more fun than being able to sit with someone and ask them anything. as i said before, they usually answer. >> techonomy is what, and how much of a competitor are they? >> they are slightly above techcrunch.

it was mostly young people who thought they would be the next mark zuckerberg. techonomy is run by someone who is one of the most smartest and interesting technology journalists. i re-launched the show with walter isaacson and it was really fun. >> your book, you mentioned this earlier, is in memory of v. falber and sons. your uncle? >> victor farber was my great uncle. he dragged his son, my great-grandfather, to the west end. they eventually ended up buying a store in london. i use them in the book, not just for nostalgic reasons or the

opportunity to talk about myself, but because they represent an example of the way technological change affects business. i write about them as people who first rode the wave of technology innovation, with the invention of the industrial sewing machine. it allowed traders in fabric to sell stuff to women who would then take it home and make their own dresses. then you have another technological revolution which made their business redundant. cheap, off-the-shelf dresses. women's lives change, they can work. they do not have the time or interest in making their own stuff. suddenly their business became redundant. ironically enough, it is coming back now with 3-d printing. now everyone can be a dress designer. as a explain in the book, there are challenges with business models, because if everyone has access to the same software, and you are buying these 3-d

printers which are essentially factories, it is not clear what their business model is. it is unclear whether the traditional fashion industry will get swept away. >> you talk about a nine-year-old boy that you had in a video i watched. we had it in the bookstore in 2007. would that make him 16 or 17 now? >> 16 or 17. >> how many kids you have? >> two. >>what do they think of all this stuff you are writing about? >>they are embarrassed. my son is an avid internet user. he is typical of his generation. they are smart. --very smart. but i have a feeling he is much more glued to his device than he is to books.

i think he is an example of someone with all the strength and weaknesses of this new digital age. he doesn't read enough books and isn't interested in depth, but my son is typical of a generation that speeds across the surface. he's very quick with making connections. on the other hand, he struggles to get beneath the surface. my 13-year-old is at a waldorf school. it is where the screen is essentially outlawed. you sign an agreement as a parent that will discourage kids from using devices like screens, ipads, computers. she has a more traditional education. ironically, this education came from a 19th century austrian educationalist. she has a different experience and still reads a lot of books. eventually when she gets to 15 or 16, she will get her hands on

these devices and will probably become more like my son. >> where did you meet your wife? >> my ex-wife. we were both graduate students. she was a student of history. i was a student of political science. soon-to-be to be thrown out. then she went to the harvard law school and became an environmental lawyer and now she is a waldorf teacher. she has an interesting arc too. >> did you actually get thrown out of uc berkeley? >>yeah. >>what happened then? >> i became unemployed, or rather, unemployable. actually, i think i became lucky because i didn't have a career. when i turned up in silicon valley in 1995, because my ex-wife moved from cambridge to san francisco, i didn't have much to do. i was a part-time music journalist.

part-time this or that. in reality i was doing very little. i was trying to be a writer, a journalist, trying to do different things. i was lucky to turn up in san francisco in 1995. i had the eclectic skills, the ability to talk and sell and think and write. this allowed me to be the first wave of internet entrepreneurs. it was a great time to be in san francisco. there were other people like me, sort of lay about people without clear skills who tried their hand. some of them succeeded. i am still very proud of that failure. >> what was the dotcom name? >> audio cafe. >> what did it do? >> i really don't know. we went from this to that to the selling of digital hardware. i think it was a great time to

just try something. it is different now. you can't do it. silicon valley is crawling with wannabe entrepreneurs. i had the head of intel's asian operation as the president of my board. i had other distinguished people in my board. it was a really exciting time. there was a funny story. we were destroyed by amazon. not the first or the last. the original focus was to sell audio equipment, hardware. in 1995. that is why it we got the investment of a company, an e-commerce platform.

we raised money and it was very exciting. then three months before we launched, amazon, which at that point was an online bookstore, launched their electronics store. we were kind of automatically dead. later i was making a speech, and afterward i was in the men's bathroom, and i turned around and there was this very loud voice. a booming voice. it kept saying, cult of the amateur. it had been in the audience and of course it was jeff bezos. we had a funny conversation where i told him the story audio cafe and how he killed my first business. which of course, had a happy ending because i became a writer. he is one example of a brilliant internet entrepreneur.

he is very articulate and at the same time, his business practices, as i explained, are questionable. >> we only have a couple of minutes. >> wow, this has been quick. >> i have to ask about two people you write about. franz kafka, and hannah arendt. >> kafka because he was describing a world of surveillance bureaucracy which we are falling into today. a world where it seems like you are always being watched. i make it clear that he was a student of a different kind of central european totalitarianism. that is not what is happening today, but there is something

kafkaesque about what is happening online. this world that we are embracing and yet we are being perpetually watched. even he couldn't have come up with anything quite as outrageous as what is existing. to add a third to that list, the argentine short story writer borges. in many ways, he imagined this much more accurately than kafka. arendt is interesting as the theorist of totalitarianism, as a person who argues that the origins of totalitarianism lie in the destruction of the institutions that lie between the individual and the state. that is what i feel is happening today with the internet. the internet is destroying so many institutions. what arendt was so brilliant at

was describing the evil of fascism, and i feel that in the right economic circumstances we could find ourselves in a similar situation. >> we have seen you speaking. we have seen you interviewing. and we have talked about your book writing. and you alluded to this earlier. how do you make your money? >> that's a secret. >> a secret? >> i make my money in a lot of different ways. writing is not lucrative enough to pay for my kids' school and mortgage payments and everything else. i am paid as a speaker. i do some consulting and investments.

i'm paid the executive producer of future cast. i am paid as a senior fellow at a company called calinnovates. i am paid in many different ways. a friend of mine, who was one of the original internet capitalists, he was on my original board. he grew up in detroit in a poor family. grew up in the ghetto. when he was growing up, when he was in a room he always had to have more than one place to escape. the way i make my living, i don't want to rely on one thing. if the book doesn't work out there is speaking. if speaking doesn't work out there is production. i think my career is a kind of model for this new world. because we have to be entrepreneurial. the idea being a pure writer and sitting in a room and churning out masterpieces, that doesn't work. you need to learn how to be

entrepreneurial and take risks. you need to play a lot of the boards and a lot of the tables simultaneously because you should never rely on a single thing or a single company or a single idea. not a single enterprise. >> our guest has been andrew keen. the title of his book is "the internet is not the answer". and we thank you very much. >> thank you. for free transcripts were to give us your comments, visit us at q&a.org. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

q&a interviews are available online. you can watch them all at c-span.org. here are a few of the comments we've recently received on the state of the union address. >> i heard a lot of great things about -- talking about science and nasa. i can really appreciate the president's position on expanding nasa's role. i know there's a lot of great people there that do very good science. we look forward to the future instead of the past. >> a couple of points i wanted to raise of the