The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture

1 The Great Seduction First a confession. Back in the Nineties, I was a pioneer in the first Internet gold rush. With the dream of making the world a more musical place, I founded Audiocafe.com, one of the earliest digital music sites. Once, when asked by a San Francisco Bay area newspaper reporter how I wanted to change the world, I replied, half seriously, that my fantasy was to have music playing from "every orifice," to hear the whole Bob Dylan oeuvre from my laptop computer, to be able to download Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concertos from my cellular phone. So yes, I peddled the original Internet dream. I seduced investors and I almost became rich. This, therefore, is no ordinary critique of Silicon Valley. It's the work of an apostate, an insider now on the outside who has poured out his cup of KoolAid and resigned his membership in the cult. My metamorphosis from believer into skeptic lacks cinematic drama. I didn't break down while reading an incorrect Wikipedia entry about T. H. Huxley or get struck by lightning while doing a search for myself on Google. My epiphany didn't involve a dancing coyote, so it probably wouldn't be a hit on YouTube. It took place over fortyeight hours, in September 2004, on a twoday camping trip with a couple of hundred Silicon Valley utopians. Sleeping bag under my arm, rucksack on my back, I marched into camp a member of the cult; two days later, feeling queasy, I left an unbeliever. The camping trip took place in Sebastopol, a small farming town in northern California's Sonoma Valley, about fifty miles north of the infamous Silicon Valleythe narrow peninsula of land between San Francisco and San Jose. Sebastopol is the headquarters of O'Reilly Media, one of the world's leading traffickers of books, magazines, and trade shows about information technology, an evangelizer of innovation to a worldwide congregation of technophiles. It is both Silicon Valley's most fervent preacher and its noisiest chorus. Each Fall, O'Reilly Media hosts an exclusive, invitationonly event called FOO (Friends of O'Reilly) Camp. These friends of multimillionaire founder Tim O'Reilly are not only unconventionally rich and richly unconventional but also harbor a messianic faith in the economic the cult of the amateur and cultural benefits of technology. O'Reilly and his Silicon Valley acolytes are a mix of graying hippies, new media entrepreneurs, and technology geeks. What unites them is a shared hostility toward traditional media and entertainment. Part Woodstock, part Burning Man (the contemporary festival of self-expression held in a desert in Nevada), and part Stanford Business School retreat, FOO Camp is where the countercultural Sixties meets the freemarket Eighties meets the technophile Nineties. Silicon Valley conferences weren't new to me. I had even organized one myself at the tail end of the last Internet boom. But FOO Camp was radically different. Its only rule was an unrule: "no spectators, only participants." The camp was run on open-source, Wikipediastyle participatory principleswhich meant that everyone talked a lot, and there was no one in charge. So there we were, two hundred of us, Silicon Valley's antiestablishment establishment, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars, gazing at the stars from the lawn of O'Reilly Media's corporate headquarters. For two full days, we camped together, roasted marshmallows together, and celebrated the revival of our cult together. The Internet was back! And unlike the Gold Rush Nineties, this time around our exuberance wasn't irrational. This shiny new version of tAndrew Keen is the author of 'The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385520805 and ISBN 0385520808.