Synopses & Reviews
Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers of the Internet to our culture and society. His most recent book, The Internet Is Not the Answer was praised even by Kazuo Ishiguro in the New Statesman (UK), who called it compelling, persuasive, and scary. That book showed how the Internet, if left unchecked, will be insidiously destructive to our economy and our world. Keen s compelling new book, How to Fix the Future, based on research, analysis, and Keen s own reporting in America and around the world, showcases global solutions for our digital predicament. After the huge changes of the Industrial Revolution, civilized societies remade nineteenth-century capitalism into a more humane version of itself, and Keen shows how we can do the same thing in the wake of the Digital Revolution.
As consensus builds around the importance of making sure the Internet remains a force for good, we need a road map of what actions we can take as individuals, businesses, and as a society to ensure that the Internet works for us, and not the other way around. Keen identifies five broad strategies to tackle the digital future: competitive innovation, government regulation, consumer choice, social responsibility by business leaders, and education. Traveling the world in order to identify best (and worst) practices in these five areas, Keen moves from Estonia, where the cofounder of Skype and the forward-thinking president Toomas Ilves are forming a model for Internet digital governance, to Germany, whose automobile titans are acting carefully to navigate the future of self-driving cars, to Scandinavia, Korea, India, and, of course, Silicon Valley.
Powerfully argued and deeply engaging, How to Fix the Future provides hope that the economic inequality, unemployment, cultural decay, war on privacy, and individual alienation that the digital upheaval is causing may still be solvable, and that the future may yet become something that we can look forward to."
Synopsis
As our world continues to be fundamentally changed by the Digital Revolution, this essential book by a leading Internet commentator shows how to preserve the fundamentals of humanity and civilized society in our perilous digital future.
About the Author
Andrew Keen is one of the world’s best known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution. He is the author of Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, and the international hit The Internet Is Not The Answer, which the London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening read” and the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe.” He is executive director of the Silicon Valley innovation salon FutureCast, the host of the popular Internet chat show Keen On, a Senior Fellow at CALinnovates, a columnist for CNN, and a much acclaimed public speaker around the world. In 2015, he was named by GQ magazine in their list of the “100 Most Connected Men”.