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How to Fix the Future

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Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world.
In his new book, How to Fix the Future , Keen focuses on what we can do about this seemingly intractable situation. Looking to the past to learn how we might change our future, he describes how societies tamed the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, which, like its digital counterpart, demolished long-standing models of living, ruined harmonious environments, and altered the business world beyond recognition. Traveling the world to interview experts in a wide variety of fields, from EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, whose recent €2.4 billion fine to Google made headlines around the world, to successful venture capitalists who nonetheless see the tide turning, to CEOs of companies including The New York Times , Keen unearths approaches to tackling our digital future.
There are five key tools that Keen regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, and education. His journey to discover how these tools are being put into practice around the globe takes him from digital-oriented Estonia, where Skype was founded and where every citizen can access whatever data the government holds on them by logging in to an online database, and where a “e-residency” program allows the country to expand beyond its narrow borders, to Singapore, where a large part of the higher education sector consists in professional courses in coding and website design, to India, Germany, China, Russia, and, of course, Silicon Valley.
Powerful, urgent, and deeply engaging, How to Fix the Future vividly depicts what we must do if we are to try to preserve human values in an increasingly digital world and what steps we might take as societies and individuals to make the future something we can again look forward to.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2017

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About the author

Andrew Keen

12 books73 followers
Andrew Keen is one of the world’s best known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution.He is the author of three books: Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo and his current 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 salonFutureCast 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”. His next book, How To Fix The Future, will be published worldwide in January 2018

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
Profile Image for Jenna ❤ ❀  ❤.
853 reviews1,499 followers
October 22, 2018
In order to fix anything, we first must establish how it's broken, indeed, that it even IS broken. I don't feel that Andrew Keen did a very good job of that in this book, and thus only 3 stars.

How to Fix the Future is somewhat dismal in its outlook, though without leaving the reader exactly sure as to why. It deals mainly with issues of privacy in the digital age. and what problems we might see in the future if the big tech companies aren't reined in but instead allowed to gather more and more of our data. Actually, it doesn't get much into the latter part, of how exactly that can be used against us, only asserted that it won't be a good thing. I think most of us already are aware of that, and don't need a book to say, "Hey! Technology could be bad if it gets into the wrong hands and used for nefarious purposes!". Technology can always be used for good or bad, from fire-making to cars to the profligate installation of surveillance cameras that Singapore has installed. It can save billions of lives or it can take them away. Most technology is neither good nor bad in itself.

I did find it interesting to learn about Estonia's technological and digital advances, where everyone has a digital identity that is owned by them and thus can't be tampered with or changed without the person knowing, and where the government is transparent when it comes to surveilling its citizenry as each person can see if their identity has been looked at, even if it's just by a police officer running their car's number plate. India too is working on a mammoth project of giving all 1.3 billion of its citizens a biometric ID through which they have access to everything from medical services to education to bank accounts.

Keen also talks briefly about countries that are now offering each citizen a basic income, in order to prepare for a future where most humans will be redundant, as AI takes over more and more of our jobs. He talks about how some countries, notably Singapore, are intent on educating their young people to succeed in a digital age.

Keen addresses these issues mainly by talking with the experts involved in these projects. It was interesting much of the time, and a bit informative on certain subjects, but again, I don't feel he really established HOW the future is broken, nor even how exactly we should aim to fix it. It was rather all over the place at times, not exactly the most coherent of books. Still, it gets 3 stars because I did learn a few things and because there were some interesting concepts.
Profile Image for Apar Gupta.
27 reviews48 followers
March 15, 2018
Inaccuracy undermines credibility and reader confidence

Will you continue reading non-fiction book if you discover inaccuracy? When doubt grows? When it masticates your confidence, slowly - page after page - till it completely overwhelms and you abandon it midway? Though routinely common for readers, such feeling does not become any less unfortunate or tiring. It may one day even deserve it's own German word.

Andrew Keen though may be better known as the author of polemics against silicon valley sets himself up to be the perpetual contrarian. Having shown foresight in his previous books for calls of greater concern over the influence and impact of technology, at points that were awash with techno-optimism, with, How to Fix the Future he aims to cut against the prevailing angst. By building a diverse toolkit of proposals from anti-trust regulation to civic education, he aims to literally fix our future. Many of these proposals seem reasonable but their reasoning fails on closer scrutiny. While one does not expect the rigour of a doctorate thesis, lazy policy tourism pervades the book which only adds up to the author's frequent flier miles.

I discovered specifically in the context of India, where it treated complex narratives of privacy and digital identity with shocking irreverence. This occurred repeatedly in the context of the Government's biometric ID program called Aadhaar which is now a compulsory pre-requisite for almost any essential service in India including bank accounts or mobile phones, for the poor their food rations or old age pensions.

How to Fix the Future contrives a false equivalence between Aadhaar and Estonia's digital ID program despite their vast differences. Mischaracterization plagues this portion as one of the architects of the Aadhaar program, Viral Shah while sounding off concern on privacy, fails to mention that Aadhaar is an important factor in retarding the growth of a data protection statute in India. This even went to the extent to which the existence of the fundamental right to privacy was challenged in the Supreme Court of India.

It does not get better from here. There is a false statement made by Sharad Sharma who claims that the pro-Aadhaar lobby group ISprit is Mozilla supported. There also seems to be a lack of research into his background as even a casual internet search would show that Mr. Sharma has publicly apologised for running sockpuppet accounts on twitter to threaten and harass digital rights activists. However, without mention, he is presented as a credible spokesperson for Indian home-grown innovation. This is not to be unfair to the book. But given the theme of Keen's writing has been a critical assessment of the social and individual impact of technology there is a high chance that such errors are taken to be a reasonable assessment by a reader, not soaked in the dull world of internet and technology policy.

While the specific reason for complaint arises from the faulty and acontextual treatment of India, which by itself is tangential to the contents of the book, this undermined my confidence in the authority of the commentary. I believe that the structure, prose and the objective of a non-fiction book services the function of advancing knowledge and truth. Such an obligation comes at a higher threshold for a book-themed to advance moral, ethical and legal accountability to quell a growing social panic over technological change. Sadly it seems Andrew Keen wants to fix the future, without patiently engaging and understanding the problems of the present.

Disclosure: I serve as a lawyer on the Aadhaar case and personally hold a dim view of this project. While I do have a strong bias the primary reason for this review is not the opinions within the book but the mischaracterization of factual instances and the lack of context. This does not remove my bias and I encourage readers to read, research and form their own opinion.
Profile Image for Wei Li.
129 reviews16 followers
November 20, 2019
A rather generic proposition riddled with repetitions and typos, no doubt because this book was rushed to the printers. I really enjoyed Andrew's previous book, The Internet is Not the Answer for its research, insight, and acerbic wit. While this book has plenty of research, little of it is Andrew's and so the wit cannot really come out to play. He's really just compiling the research done by other people, something which he baldly admits to in the Acknowledgements, but it's rather disappointing because I had been so looking forward to Andrew's arguments. After all, he is the name on the cover. (Also, there's been far too many references to Thomas More's Utopia in the journalistic doom-and-gloom as of late. Let's leave More in peace.)
Profile Image for Camille McCarthy.
Author 1 book37 followers
May 7, 2018
A promising subject but the delivery was all over the place at times. I liked how he tied in Thomas More's "Utopia" to the idea that we are working on creating our future, and it was interesting to see these issues of inequality and job scarcity from the perspective of tech, something I don't know much about. It was sometimes difficult to pin down exactly what he was talking about, however, because he would skip around to different subjects and anecdotes without quite finishing the point he had started off with.
The book definitely got more interesting for me towards the end, when he started talking about how technology would really affect the future and different takes on it. He had a very liberal stance on everything and his explanations of Marxism were lacking. One important thing was that he views everything as a top-down structure, reminding me of the Utopian socialists, because he is making points about which choices to make based on the idea that whomever is in charge will decide all these things for everyone, rather than thinking that people might be more democratically involved in every aspect of their lives in the future.
The book made me want to read his earlier books about the issues with technology and the internet, and I also have a desire to read more by Jaron Lanier, who writes about similar subjects but in a much more cohesive and understandable way.
I did appreciate all the research that went into this book but wish he had had more background information or a deeper explanation rather than putting in all the different Uber rides he took and describing where he had all of his interviews for the book. It also got me thinking about problems I have never thought much about, like how musicians can be paid fairly for their work in a digital age.
Profile Image for Simeon W.
1 review2 followers
May 25, 2019
Fine as a quick canter through some of the issues around online privacy, machine learning and digital regulation, and as a superficial introduction to some of the approaches being taken around the world, though certainly some major ones are missing (And I must confess that I skimmed it very quickly..)

But his proposals are all rather basic. He does acknowledge that at the end, in fairness, and they're difficult challenges so I wasn't expecting the world. Clearly a balance of new regulation, market innovation and education are needed - and inevitably coming - but I think what he describes is the world that is almost here, not necessarily a solution for how to navigate the challenges of tomorrow.

I also thought he was overly selective in how he described certain models. The Estonian model can only deal with some of the problems he expects it to, and isn't immune from some of the same problems he first introduces us to. He is too optimistic about state involvement in regulation for me, and I felt that he didn't give enough time to the reasons why the West has not gone down the same road as Aadhar or Singapore. While he peppered reference to different philosophers throughout, I didn't find his summaries of their views at all robust - for example, his historical reinterpretation of the reformation as a debate between humanism and predetermination is frankly bizarre.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Matus Miksik.
107 reviews39 followers
October 4, 2019
thought provoking and thorough journey to the possibilities of near-future, especially recommended to all those leftists who think that absolutely free market is not the answer to everything (or anything, really) and people who feel the urge to think through the problems humanity faces today rather than caving in and start doomsaying
Profile Image for CatReader.
409 reviews32 followers
November 29, 2023
A quick read, but as other reviewers have pointed out, I don't think Keen does a good enough job at demonstrating concrete problems for which we need fixes, and therefore laying out a coherent narrative. He speculates a lot and writes about his travels to Estonia and Singapore to interview interesting people who are trying to prepare those countries for the digital age we already live in -- this was the most interesting part of the book for me -- but he also makes an inordinate amount of references to Thomas More trying to shoehorn in an analogy that ultimately doesn't fit well.
2,415 reviews46 followers
May 30, 2018

“In the 1960s, we swam through waters with only a few hooks: cigarettes, alcohol and drugs that were expensive and generally inaccessible. In the 2010s, those same waters are littered with hooks. There’s the Facebook hook. The Instagram hook. The porn hook. And so on. The list is long-far longer than it’s ever been in human history, and we’re only just learning the power of these hooks.”

So says NYU psychologist Adam Alter. Keen along with the likes of Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier remains one of the more familiar and vociferous opponents of our current hyper-connected online world, which is dominated by the so called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google). He claims that, “The first step in fixing the future is to avoid the trap of either idealising or demonising technology.”

Keen ends up in some interesting places, from, the Alte Teppichfabrik, (the old Berlin carpet factory) to the Smart City of Singapore (or Disneyland with the Death penalty!) and many spots throughout the US. Though perhaps the most intriguing location he finds himself is in Estonia, who would have known that Estonia has “The most start-ups per person, the zippiest broadband speeds, and the most advanced e-government in the world.” It’s here they have an apparently fully transparent system, that keeps the government and the population honest. He speaks with former Estonian Prime Minister, Toomas Hendrik Iilves, who insists that with his country’s system, “There can be no digital anonymity. Everything people do-from paying taxes online to ordering medicine to posting opinions to driving cars-is done under their own names.” Apparently this does away with trolls, making the net an all round better place, as well as making people accountable for spreading fake news, racism, sexism and other poison. He concludes, “Our goal is to make it impossible to do bad things without consequences. We want to teach people to be good on the internet, to use it responsibility.”

Our author offers five tools for fixing the future, which include, regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice and education, which all sound reasonable enough. He talks to entrepreneur and investor, John Borthwick, who is under no illusion about there being a magic bullet to fix the future, but his manifesto of sorts, which consists of i. Open technology platforms ii. Antitrust regulation iii. Responsible human-centric design iv. The preservation of public space. V. A new social security system. Also speaks a lot of sense, but the real issue of course is who will implement such ideas?...and how will they do it?...

According to Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, “We originally wanted three things from the internet-reliability, privacy and fun…we got the fun.” He goes onto say, “It shouldn’t be a security decision every time you click on a link.” Of the $89.46 billion in Google’s 2016 annual revenue, $79.38 billion was from advertising revenue. What Kahle describes as, “unaccountable online surveillance.” Or as Bruce Schneier, one of America’s leading security experts, phrases it, “The primary business model of the internet is built on mass surveillance.”

It has always puzzled me as to why platforms like You Tube, Pandora and Spotify have been allowed to get away with paying such pitiful revenue streams to the artists that they basically wouldn’t exist without for so long?...I dare say the fact that Google paid out more than $15 million in lobbying in 2016 alone, (more than Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin or any other internet company.) may well have been a factor. But this is what passes for democracy in the good old U, S of A.

Many of the groups and artists have obviously been incredibly upset about these bizarre arrangements, speaking out and even taking some action, like boycotting them by withdrawing their music, but one man has probably done more than most, David Lowery of the cult band, Camper Van Beethoven, who summed his thoughts up in one blog, “My song got played on Pandora 1 Million times and all I got was $16.89, less than what I make from a single T-shirt sale.” He later launched a $150 million class action lawsuit.

Aside from shameless people like Tim Cook, the Apple CEO trying to convince the head of the competition commission in Europe that Apple paying 0.005% tax to the Irish government was in the public interest. We see that these multi-billionaire companies have all been granted a so called, safe harbour, a law which means in reality that it absolves them of responsibility. So this means that these companies are still allowed to avoid tax and make obscene profits, but they rarely have to take any responsibility for their user’s actions.

We learn the truth behind Zuckerberg’s, suspiciously generous offer, claiming that he will give away 99% of his fortune. In actual fact he put his fortune into a limited liability company that isn’t even officially considered a charity by the IRS- allowing them to invest their wealth in for-profit business. As Edward Luce from the Financial Times says, he “Has ensured that he will pay no tax on transfer of his estimated $45 bn in wealth while being showered with accolades for ‘giving it all away.’”

“With Facebook as our new front page on the world, we are simply being refed our own biases by networked software owned by a $350 billion data company that resolutely refuses to acknowledge itself as a media company because that would require it to employ armies of real people as curators. It would also make Facebook legally liable for the advertising that appears on its network.”

It’s interesting to see that in such an overwhelming male orientated environment, that two of the biggest opponents these corporations have faced in recent years are both women. The incredibly inspiring and reassuring actions of one, Margrethe Vestager, the Danish woman who is the European Commissioner for Competition. Vestager who not only openly stands up to the puffed up tax shy, online monsters, but she hits them hard, where it really hurts, in the wallet and the ego, actually hammering them with serious and meaningful fines to the tune of billions, $13 billion for Apple, 250 million Euros for Amazon and 2.4 billion Euros for Google for their outrageous greed and shameless monopolies.

There is also the US lawyer, Shannon Liss-Riordan who has fought many cases against the likes of Uber, negotiating a settlement of $84 million on behalf of 325’000 drivers in California and 60’000 in Massachusetts. She also pursued similar class actions against Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart.

There are reasons why many refer to these companies as private superpowers, after all America’s nine richest tech billionaires being collectively wealthier than the 1.8 billion of the world’s poorest people, gives us some idea of the extent of the ruthless greed involved. According to one former ‘design ethicist’ (no laughing please) at Google, Tristan Harris, “We all live in a city called the attention economy.” He argues that software developers should be made to sign a code of conduct, promising to create products that treat their users with respect.

Keen has written a few books on this subject now and he will no doubt write more, he knows his stuff and he knows his market and he has produced another thought provoking book on a highly topical and important subject. On the down side, he is prone to repeating himself a little too often, in particular with his obsession with Thomas More’s “Utopia” which was a bit overdone by the end. This book makes a good accompaniment to many of the other titles that have emerged over the last few years, books such as Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”, Brad Stone’s “The Upstarts” and Richard Watson’s “Digital Vs Human”.
Profile Image for Thijs.
Author 2 books5 followers
March 1, 2018
The goal of this book is to create a map of the future that places humans at its center. I think Keen succeeded in creating a map. He gives interesting and inspiring examples and keeps his vision nuanced. See below for more details (and spoilers).

• The goal of this book is to create a map of the future that places humans at its center.
• Andrew Keen is no longer called the Anti-Christ: his critisism of silicon valley has become main stream. p. xi
• Unless we act now, we increasingly risk beocming powerless appendages to the new products and platforms of Big Tech corporations This book is a call to arms in a culture infrected by a creepig tecnological determinism. In contrast with smart cars, the future will never be able to drive it self. p. xiii
• The firs step in fixing the future is to avoid the trap of either idealizing or demonizing technology. The second step is much trickier. It's remembering who we are. p. 16
• That's the story of mankind. We break things and then we fix them in the same way we always have. p. 16
• Thomas More's law, More's Law, is what it should mean to be responsible human being. p. 22
• We are confronted with Harari's"Dataism"versus "Humanism" p. 23
• Our relationship with smart tech will be the core of what it means to be human nowadays. p. 27
• Five tools to fix the future: regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, education. p. 45
• America's nine rechest tech billionaires being collectively wealthier than 1.8 billion of the world's poorest people. p. 57
• We wanted reliability, privacy and fun from the internet, but only got fun. p. 59
• The primary business model of the internet is built on mass surveillance" concludes Bruce Schneier, one of America's leading computer security experts. p. 60
• Personal data has been locked up in solos: centralized big data companies like Gooel, Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn. p. 61
• Berners-Lee: "We don't have a technology problem, we have a social problem."p. 61
• "As the Silicon Valley giants prosper," warns the Financial Timers's Rana Foroohar, "everyone else is falling behind." p. 61
• Fakenews and addicition problems.. Marketeers study how to build habit-forming products p. 67
• Time well spent: believes there need to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standars to ensure against addictive products. p. 68
• Keen repeatedly stresses the importance of trust and being transparant.
• "Governments are realizing that they're losing the digital ientities of their citizens to American companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple" Viik. p. 82
• Estonia: Our obsession with privacy is misguided, the real issue is dta integrity and transparancy. p. 88
• Putin's troll army in St. Petersburg. p. 95
• India's iD system: Aadhaar is based on biometric and emographic data and is designed to give a digital identity to all 1.2 billion Indians. There's still a lack of privacy in India and a need of 'social contract theory'. p. 98
• Singapore, smart nation, has a high trust rating in Edelmans Trust Barometer. p. 110
• The lesson: for the most part is fixing the future a political and social challange rather than just a technological one. p. 124
• Regulation: Keen sees Vestager and Europe as leading example in regulation. p. 126
• To regain believe in free market capitalism, monopolies need to be regulated. Otherwise we lack innovation. p. 127
• Monopolies in themselves aren't illegal. Instead, what is illegal under antitrust law is for a company to leverage it dominance in one economic area to benefit another part of its business. p. 132
• Steve Case, the founder of AOL believes in a Thrid Wave of innovation, in which government needs to play a much more central role in the digital economy. p. 147
• The Guardian found that Facebook actually hides or removes Holocaust-denial material only in the four countries where it fears it could be sued for the publication of this content: France, Germany, Israel, and Austria. So a private superpower like Facebook seems to respond only to realpolitik. p. 153
• The GDPR puts all the burden on the big data companies in terms of their accountability for the fate of online data. GDPR puts the citizen back in the driving seat. p. 157
• GDPR has the potnetial to trigger enormous innovation around privacy. p. 158
• Parralel with Unsafe at any speed - Ralph Nader: today's Big Data companies are unsafe at any speed. We are now at a time that people demand belts and safety procedures in the cars (big data companies) p. 190.
• Kant reminds us that with agency comes responsibility. p 200.
• What's needed in Silicon Valley are investments into down-to-earth schemes to win the future, and not just in personal endeavors to get a public shoulder path. p. 215
• In Oakland is a ethical tech movement emerging, which contrast vividly with what's going on over the Bay in Silicon Valley. p. 224
• Will there be a cultural renaissance? A strike lead by Youtubers, Uber drivers artists, hollywood stars? A strike against dominating platforms that abuse their power and pay their content creators little money? p. 245
• Some economists believe that we need to move away form the binary option of either the full-time employment model or the independent contractor model. p. 253
• How can we fix a future in which algorithms replace not only vast swtches of the manual labor force, but also skilled owrkers like lawyers, doctors, and engineers? p. 257
• In an ideal society, More is saying, work matters - but leisure matters even more. p. 258
• Education is often used to clean up the mess when we don't know how to solve a big problem. We shove this problem into the classroom and make underpaid and overworked teachers responsible for fixing it. p. 269
• The innovative start-up entrepeneur and the successfully educated student actually share many of the same attributes: independence, a propensity to take risks, and a willingness to rethink conventional assumptions, take moonshots, and fix the future. p. 275
• Our map is a multidimensional one. Our five tools for building the map of the future - regulation, innovation, social responsibility, worker and consuemr choice, and education - are all essential building blocks of the future. p. 289
• Designing a coherent map of the future requires a coherent knowledge of the past. That's why knowledge of the history of humanism is so valuable in an age in which we are once again grappling with the eternal issue of what it means to be human. p. 290
• Digital culture - especially obsessive social media usage - has become so stultifyingly orthodox that it will inevitably be rejected by future genreations of free-thinking kdis. p. 292
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Hugh.
830 reviews42 followers
September 6, 2021
As others have noted, Keen fails to clearly articulate what about the future is broken, so the book starts out on weak footing. He proceeds to check the usual boxes - disinformation, Tristan Harris, antitrust law, 'if it's free, you're the product', etc.

While some of the stories are interesting and I learned a few things, he has a tendency to distort things to suit his needs. The Edelman Trust Index is used to support his case, and forgotten when it doesn't (e.g. China ranks very high, and we agree that the Chinese government is...less than trustworthy).

While he admits that this book is a synthesis of other peoples' ideas, it relies on context-free quotes, rough summaries and loose interpretations of a lot of material to make the case that, well, "someone ought to do something!". It's unclear, vague and non-committal about anything, really.

Others in the reviews have noted more alarming inaccuracies that I can't comment on, but it adds up to this:

Read Tim Wu. Read Rana Foroohar. Read Jaron Lanier, or Cal Newport or Zuboff or Tufecki. Don't bother with this one.

He quotes Gertrude Stein about Oakland and it applies to his goal with this book: "There's no there there."
Profile Image for Jill.
921 reviews1 follower
June 9, 2018
Sub-titled 'staying human in the digital age' this book suggests a number of strategies for controlling the excesses of the tech revolution described in his earlier book 'The Internet is Not the Answer'. These include regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, and education. At times his book reads like a travelogue as we read accounts of his visits to individuals, organisations and countries who are using these strategies with various degrees of success. In E-stonia citizens can access their on-line data and as a result have a high level of trust in their government. Singapore citizens are educated for a future digital world at government expense and in the US tech start ups with a community focus are promoted in Oakland. Unlike his previous book, Keen has a positive slant on the future of technology, but only if we all (especially governments) act to curb the excesses of the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Profile Image for Paul.
1,104 reviews26 followers
November 10, 2018
The bad quality of writing is absolutely shocking. The author needs an editor - he endlessly repeats the same points and even sentences. The whole book is a single rambling incoherent rant with no structure, just the author flying around the world talking to people who actually know things. The tone oscillates randomly between incomprehensibly upbeat predictions and despondency and dire lecturing and doom prophesying. The author pontificates on technologies he knows very little about and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You can't solve technical problems when you don't understand the technology. Smugly using analogies from history is not going to be useful.
Profile Image for Darnell.
1,185 reviews
June 8, 2018
Important issues, but too many broad strokes and platitudes. I learned about a few new things, but only on a fairly shallow level - someone better informed than I am might learn very little.

I am growing increasingly annoyed with books where the author jets around the world to have face-to-face interviews with people. There's rarely enough synthesis of the ideas for it to be anything more than a casual tour.
623 reviews7 followers
September 14, 2017
Keen reminds us of all that's messed up in the digital world - particularly the takeover by Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. But he ends on a positive note, believing that the upcoming generation will bring back digital trust and responsibility.
Profile Image for Ramiro Breitbach.
62 reviews4 followers
June 6, 2018
Very interesting ideas on privacy and individual rights on the digital age, but the text is often repetitive and I skipped a number of parts. To me, the most interesting parts were the comparation between the experiences of Estonia, Singapore and China with digital government
16 reviews
June 29, 2021
At times, this feels more like a travel journal than a guide for world improvement. His solutions are somewhat unclear. If you want to read a better version of this book, try reading the Jonathan Taplin book (Move Fast and Break Things) that Keen mentions.
Profile Image for Andrew Crofts.
Author 16 books43 followers
March 21, 2018
Excellent read

The book delivers exactly what it promises. No particularly startlingly revolutionary ideas but a nice balance between alarmism and optimism.
Profile Image for David Wineberg.
Author 2 books782 followers
January 21, 2018
Tech has created at least as many problems as it has solved, and there are more on the way. Andrew Keen has sacrificed his stomach, meeting with experts in every field in restaurants around the world to discuss the ways out. This rambling tour of the world touches down where thinkers have identified potential solutions. They all have their opinions and some are acting on them. But it is totally scattered and no seismic shifts are evident. Even the universal basic income, which has support all over the world, is still stuck in the pilot project stage, despite endless proof of concept. So the fixes are not very specific.

The framework for How To Fix The Future is Thomas More’s Utopia, now 500 years young. Keen keeps referring to aspects of it, showing how More’s ideas do or do not apply to our situation today, as well as how little things have changed. He is particularly enamored of Holbein’s map of Utopia, which can be viewed as human skull. Keen refers to it numerous times.

Basically, there are no new solutions, just old ones coming back to life. Musicians are striking against the streaming services. Uber, Lyft, UPS and Fedex drivers want recognition as full employees, not just “independent contractors”. Schools are focusing on developing inquisitive humans (as opposed to test takers). More millennials are purchasing their music and news. Estonia and Singapore are making a lot of data public, and protected from fraud by date stamps. All over the world, small steps are appearing. But for every Redfin, paying real estate agents a living wage plus benefits, there is a Walmart, keeping employees part time, minimum wage, and relying on Obamacare for their health benefits. For every Freada Kapor Klein, there is a Martin Shkreli.

Keen separates fixes into five buckets:
-government or legal regulation (more accountability, and anti-trust activity)
-competitive innovation (encouraging and democratizing startups against the winner-take-all)
-social responsibility by citizens (relying on tech billionaires to do the right thing)
-consumer choice (including trade unionization)
-education (more physical activity, less screen time)

Keen admits these fixes are not star-crossed. They won’t necessarily work or change the world, and they provide their own risks. But for Keen, who has been criticizing the internet for years, this is a turnabout.

David Wineberg

Profile Image for Sanjeev Kotnala.
96 reviews10 followers
March 19, 2020
I knew all along, there was something drastically wrong with the way the future is unveiling itself. I was on the lookout for a debate on ‘How to fix the future’. Andrew Keen’s session at the IAA World Congress held at Kochi, India in February this year probably opened new spaces for the discussion.

The future is broken.
We are under constant surveillance. Our behaviour is slowly being nudged towards what the dominant biggies Google, Amazon, Facebook of the business want. It is the new era of ‘Winner-takes-it-all’ business that is creating polarisation of wealth rather than distributing it.

We are ignorantly working towards bettering their algorithms. We believe we are getting all this free. Not realising there is nothing free.

The internet is a boon but may be the price we are paying for its services outweigh the benefits. Internet is the new morphine. Like many of us, I feel trapped in the system. I am addicted to it. I am unable to withdraw or detox.

After having read ‘Internet is not the only thing’ by Andrew Keen, and having an equally polarised view of the internet, it was logical for me to pick his next book ‘How to Fix The Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age’.

And if this is the trailer, what profound changes Artificial and Alternate Intelligence can unleash on mankind, unless we pre-plan to control the damage. History is witness to the fact that we are blinded by our vision of advantages and rarely humans have thought of the future repercussion while it adopted a new regime of services and products.

Read more-http://sanjeevkotnala.com/andrew-keen...
Profile Image for Jon Stonecash.
251 reviews3 followers
April 23, 2018
This is an important book for those who are concerned with the impacts of technology upon society. Andrew Keen covers a lot of those actual and potential impacts. He also tries to propose some solutions for softening the negative impacts. Ultimately, it comes down to having citizens act for the good of the community.

The problem that I have with the book is that Keen has very decided views upon what is good for the community. No one paying attention to what's going on in the public sphere would perceive that there is anything close to unanimity in deciding what that public good is. There is a loud, noisy, and irrationally exuberant debate about almost every point that one could bring up in that public forum. But Keen seems to ignore all of that confusion. He has an answer and never seems to have any doubt that the outcomes that he finds desirable are the right ones for everyone.

For example, he decries the disruptions brought about by the activities of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, requiring that the tech titans think through what the impacts might be before taking any actions. But, on the other hand, he applauds the disruptions brought about by Ralph Nader when he challenged the safety of American-made automobiles in the last half of the 20th century, even though those changes were just as profound. Understand, I don't think that Nader was wrong and that the tech billionaires are right. I just think that the authors viewpoint could be a little more nuanced.

Still, it's a good book to read as long as one reads with some skepticism.
Profile Image for Onno Bruins.
113 reviews5 followers
June 19, 2018
Ever since I saw Andrew Keen speak at The Next Web conference in 2008, and read "the cult of the amateur" I have been watching the technological developments with less enthusiasm than before. In his last book he clearly showed all the sectors of society that are being wrecked by internet based technology.

Keen has been a prophet of doom, 'the antichrist of Silicon Valley', for years. Now that most people acknowledge he has been right all along, it is very refreshing that his latest book is an optimistic one. How to fix the Future is a book about the way humanity can regain its agency in this age of technological change.

Not all his examples are equally great, but Keen clearly shows that with Regulation, innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, and finally a new way of educating our kids, the future may very well be as bright as we once hoped it would be.

It's a well written book that takes us from some important internet history and the ruins of the Kodak empire to the big data projects in the city state of Singapore and the e-government in Estland. Keen's style is easy to read and the book is full of historical anecdotes and themes that keep coming back and really put some persistent thoughts in your mind. If you work in technology, or in a business that is threatened by technology (aren't we all?) or you have young children, read this book.
Profile Image for Naum.
160 reviews20 followers
March 18, 2018
Andrew Keen, internet naysayer, made his authorial mark in previous books decrying the hope and optimism over entrenched net culture. In this edition, instead of exclaiming "I told you so!" he explores how we can "fix the future" and carve out a better way not dependent upon predatory consumer surveillance capitalism that is still all the rage in Silicon Valley circles.

There are a lot of "I sat down to lunch/dinner with Mr./Mrs./Miss $X…" and profiles of Estonia & Singapore, 2 nations that have went all-in on internet, but are focusing on *trust* and empowerment of the citizenry.

Keen draws parallels to past technological upheavals, from the Reformation to the onset of the Industrial Age. He also frames his book in a clash of More's Law (Thomas More *Utopia*, "Team Human", agency to address systemic & structural problems of advancing technology with humanistic means v. deterministic means) v. Moore's Law (doubling of processor power every 18 months, that technology itself moves humanity forward). He posits that just like past ages, chaos & unrest must be addressed with regulation, innovation, education, & social responsibility.
Profile Image for Warren Mcpherson.
195 reviews29 followers
June 22, 2018
A survey of attitudes toward technology across the world.

It looks at how technology impacts civilization and how people are responding. The issue of mass surveillance is a challenging one with major implications for democracy. Technology also drives massive inequality. Some people approach technology as a development opportunity, some see it as a weapon. Some focus on the importance of information integrity and some focus on the need for privacy. Given how much technology is designed to be habit forming and addictive it is interesting how people try to protect their children. The reflection on Ralph Nader's book Unsafe and Any Speed is very interesting. The suggestion is the very design of technology needs to be reconsidered and there are similarities to what we saw with the development of the auto industry. It looks at different efforts to safeguard society and culture including regulation, private development, and education. The book has a nice way of focusing on human issues rather than technical ones.

The book has an interesting collection of observations but it didn't feel the author developed a compelling synthesis or analysis.

Profile Image for Shubham Gupta.
23 reviews4 followers
August 31, 2020
Andrew keen is neither a pessimistic like Luddites and romantic conservatives of 19th century who wanted to destroy the latest technologies, nor is he an idealist ,like free market capitalists.
He belongs to the category of reformers and the realists who focuses on using human agency to fix the many problems created by this new technology.


He hopes to bring in more innovation, transparency, creativity and a healthy disruption to make the world a better place.


The solution which Keen suggest is a series of legislative, economic, regulatory, educational and ethical reforms to fix our common future.

The five tools for building the map of future according to him are - regulation, innovation, social responsibility, worker& consumer choices and education.

Wholsomely, the book tries to preserve human values in an increasingly digital world and what steps we might take as societies and individuals to make the future something we can again look forward to.
Profile Image for Rachael.
11 reviews1 follower
April 18, 2018
Where were the editors on this book? Not only did I notice a pretty egregious typo (misspelled Hillary Clinton), but it’s just so poorly written. Absolutely littered with the patronizing phrase “[as] you’ll remember”, to remind the reader of people or things mentioned earlier in the book, or even of historical events, which one, such as myself, may in fact not remember due to age (no, I don’t remember that one anti-trust case against Microsoft in the 1990s because I WAS ONLY JUST BORN). Honestly, this book is just a fairly bad compilation of quotes and research from other reports and sources, such as The Economist. There may be some good (3-5 star) ideas in this book (which don’t even feel like the author’s own ideas), but overall a one to two, maybe three if you’re feeling generous, star reading experience. Don’t like this author at all. Further let down by poor editing.
45 reviews
July 12, 2018
Really enjoyed the book. It connects the industrial revolution to today's digital revolution. It gives me hope as I am really uncomfortable with the assault on privacy and attention silicon valley has made on humanity. Hopefully we will wake up and work to regulate and keep technology in check. Trust is at the center of it all and it will be more and more difficult to build in our current post-truth reality. There are people working on these problems, we just need the rest of society to wake up to the exploitation of data and to use technology to make our lives easier, hopefully fullfilling the self improvement vision found in More's Utopia referenced throughout the book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Mysteryfan.
1,698 reviews20 followers
November 1, 2018
I haven't read this author before, but apparently he takes a dim view of the current web scene. In this book he looks at various countries (the EU, India, Estonia, Singapore) and how they are attempting to solve the problems of the digital age. He sees five necessary approaches: regulations, competitive innovation, social responsibility, worker and consumer choice, and education.

Using Singapore and India as examples is problematic for me. Their citizens give up a great deal of privacy and choice. But I do agree that the focus is shifting away from the US approach towards decentralization and competition. The book is thought-provoking.
244 reviews3 followers
April 17, 2018
I read How to Fix the Future after hearing an interview with Andrew Keen. I have to tell you, I enjoyed the interview much more than the book.

Keen offers five strategies for helping to ensure an "open, decentralized" digital future - regulation, competitive innovation, consumer choice, civic responsibility, and education - in that order. My libertarian leanings make me quail at the first. Sheeple make the third and fourth unlikely. But, the book is readable enough; draw your own conclusions.
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