Description

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The current crisis of democracy, the growing economic inequality between rich and poor, our narcissistic social media culture and the looming menace of AI all threaten us as never before. The challenges presented by technology have long been central in these issues, but how can we take advantage of the opportunities it provides to shape a better 21st century? The most important division of our age is between the 'tomorrows', those who believe that the future can be better than the past, and the 'yesterdays' who harbor a nostalgic desire to return to a rose-tinted past. This division is encapsulated by how we answer a simple question: can we trust the future? In Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays, Andrew Keen discusses the issue with some of the most influential thinkers of our time. The book is split into four sections. The first identifies the challenges of our digital age. The second focuses on the failure of the internet revolution to realize its ambitious goals. The third untangles the complex relationship between populism and digital media, before the final part presents possible solutions to the challenges of our age. The result is an insightful examination of the most important issues facing us today, and essential reading for anyone interested in the impact of the digital revolution.

About the Author

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Andrew Keen is an author, broadcaster, speaker and entrepreneur and one of the world's best-known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution. He is the executive director of the Silicon Valley salon FutureCast, a columnist for GQ magazine and the author of four acclaimed and prescient books: How to Fix the Future, The Internet Is Not the Answer, Digital Vertigo and The Cult of the Amateur. He lives in Berkeley. 

Interviewees:

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Barack Obama and called "This generation's Das Kapital" by Zadie Smith. She is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She was one of the first tenured women at HBS and the youngest professor to receive an endowed chair. She has been a columnist for Fast Company and BusinessWeek.com, and strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the 11 most original business thinkers in the world. She lives in Maine.

John Borthwick, founder and CEO of betaworks, has been a leader and early-stage investor in New York technology for over two decades. Companies built by betaworks include Giphy, Dots, bitly, and Chartbeat. Previously, he was SVP of Alliances and Technology Strategy for Time Warner Inc.; CEO of Fotolog, one of the first social photo sharing sites; and head of AOL’s product development studio after they acquired his first company, WP Studio, one of Silicon Alley’s first content studios. He lives in New York City. 

Maria Ressa is a Filipino journalist and author, best known for co-founding Filipino news site Rappler as its CEO. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN. She was included in Time's Person of the Year 2018 as one of a collection of journalists from around the world combating fake news. In May 2019, Ressa won the Columbia Journalism Award from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and in June 2019 she received the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Tribute honor, which recognizes a journalist who has made an impact on the international stage.[43] She is one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. 

Rana Foroohar  is Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN’s global economic analyst. Her book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business was shortlisted for the Financial Times McKinsey Book of the Year award in 2016. Prior to joining the FT and CNN, Foroohar spent 6 years at TIME and 13 years at Newsweek.. During that time, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. She has also received awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs and the East West Center. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She lives in Brooklyn. 

David Kirkpatrick is the author of The Facebook Effect, former Senior Editor of Internet and Technology at Fortune, and the founder and CEO of Techonomy Media, Inc., a tech-focused conference company. He lives in New York City. 

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of 20 books, including Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism. He is a columnist for Medium, technology and media commentator for CNN, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Future. He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News and Larry King to the Colbert Report and Bill Maher. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Eli Pariser is the author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. He became executive director of MoveOn.org in 2004, and is the cofounder of Upworthy and Avaaz. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Kenneth Cukier is coauthor of the New York Times bestselling Big Data, a journalist at The Economist (and host of its weekly tech podcast), and a regular keynote speaker. He lives in London. 

Peter Sunde is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician who is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine. 

Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist, author and TV producer. He is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. His writing has been published in the Financial Times, NewYorker.com, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Daily Beast, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly.

Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known novelists and political commentators. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Der Spiegel. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots, and the Ambassador of New Europe Award. She currently lives in Zagreb, Croatia.

Catherine Fieschi is director of the Global Policy Institute at Queen Mary University London and author of Populocracy.

Ian Bremmer is an American political scientist political scientist, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, and the founder of GZERO Media, where he hosts the television show GZERO WORLD with Ian Bremmer. He is the author of 10 books, including the New York Times bestseller Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism, he serves as the foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for Time magazine, and he teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.Martin Wolf is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. His books include The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis. He lives in London. 

Richard Stengel was Time magazine's managing editor from 2006 to 2013, he was chief executive of the National Constitution Center from 2004 to 2006, and he served as President Obama's Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs from 2014 to 2016.  His books include a collaboration with Nelson Mandela on Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.Stengel is an on-air analyst at MSNBC, a strategic advisor at Snap Inc., and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian, and a Fellow at Oxford University. 

Toomas Ilves served as president of Estonia from 2006 until 2016.

Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, and a public speaker, author, and entrepreneur. His books include the New York Times bestseller The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. 

Praise For…

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"Keen has delivered 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." --Washington Post on The Internet Is Not the Answer

"The Internet Is Not the Answer is the most compelling, persuasive, and passionately negative thing I've yet read on this topic. It offers a scary picture of how the ultra-libertarian superstars of Silicon Valley are leading us inexorably into a future with the sort of social inequalities not seen in the West since the early days of the Industrial Revolution."―Kazuo Ishiguro, New Statesman (Books of the Year)


“The Internet Is Not the Answer claims that the only real best friend today’s tech titans have is money, and until policymakers intervene, or until the ‘digital elite’ adopt a more altruistic posture, the Internet will remain a winner-take-all marketplace that’s widening a yawning gulf between society’s haves and have-nots. . . . The Internet Is Not the Answer supports its convincing narrative with startling numbers and research cataloged over roughly forty pages worth of endnotes.” —San Francisco Chronicle on 

“Page after page of really interesting insight and research. I look forward to the much-needed debate about the problems that Keen articulates—which can’t be lightly dismissed.” —Larry Sanger, cofounder, Wikipedia and founder, Citizendium on The Cult of the Amateur

“Thoroughly engaging, brightly written pages” —Chicago Tribuneon The Cult of the Amateur
 

“How to Fix the Future, by longtime tech critic Andrew Keen, avoids simplistic condemnations, offering instead a progressive plan to ease the growing discomfort with emerging technologies that only a few years ago were being celebrated. The book provides compelling examples of ongoing experiments addressing new ways of developing and integrating socially responsible technology into our lives, especially in media, government, and education . . . Keen genuinely believes that, yes, we can fix the future.”―Washington Post

“In [Keen’s] acerbic, articulate global survey of human-centered solutions, he examines best practice in consumer choice, education, innovation, regulation and social responsibility . . . An invigorating mix of principle and vision.”―Natureon How to Fix the Future

“Ambitious . . . How to Fix the Future is a truly important book and the most significant work so far in an emerging body of literature in which technology’s smartest thinkers are raising alarm bells about the state of the Internet, and laying groundwork for how to fix it.”―Fortune

“Eschewing much of the over-the-top luddism that now fills the New York Times, the Guardian, and other mainstream media outlets, Keen proffers practical solutions to a wide range of tech-related woes.”―TechCrunch

“Despite the kinder, gentler approach, Keen fans―and there are many―needn’t despair. In the name of a newfound positivity, the British-American entrepreneur and writer hasn’t sacrificed his demon edge . . . Similar to his other works, Keen rejects the notion that these problems can be fixed by the tech giants themselves . . . Instead he calls for a cultural and political awakening, mainly in tech-obsessed America, where public servants are expected to fight these concentrations of power, rather than cater to them.”―Charles Turner, WikiTribune

“After years of giddiness about the wonders of technology, a new realization is dawning: the future is broken. Andrew Keen was among the first and most insightful to see it. The combination of the digital revolution, global hyperconnectivity, and economic dysfunction has led to a populist backlash and destruction of civil discourse. In this bracing book, Keen offers tools for righting our societies and principles to guide us in the future.”―Walter Isaacson, New York Times-bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci

“In this engaging, provocative book, [Keen] outlines five strategies―regulation, competitive innovation, consumer choice, civic responsibility, and education―that, working in collaboration, can help ensure an open, decentralized digital future . . . Valuable insights on preserving our humanity in a digital world.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Keen, who has spent his career warning of the dangers of the Internet, takes a more positive turn in this complex yet accessible study. Comparing our current situation to the Industrial Revolution, he stresses the importance of keeping humanity at the center of technology.”―Booklist