Keen and The Liquid Library

I think one of the reasons I’m having a hard time dissecting this Keen book is the sheer amount of information crammed into it. For example, I just read a short section (not even a chapter, like a sub-chapter) called “The Liquid Library” that was about four pages, but it gave me so much to think about and discuss.

The section is about Kevin Kelly, who Keen calls a “Silicon Valley utopian.” “Kelley wants to kill off the book entirely,” Keen writes. “As well as the intellectual property rights of writers and publishers.”

Doesn’t that sound like Keen is being a little harsh? Well, it’s pretty true. In a 2006 New York Times Magazine article, Kelly basically said he wants all of literature to be on the web and “cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Wow. To Kelly, it means “a web of names and a community of ideas.” To Keen, it means “the death of culture.”

Both of these arguments are hard to swallow whole because both of these guys are playing in the extremes. I think that’s where all of these arguments for and against Web 2.0 break down. When you say something as incendiary as “no more intellectual property rights,” it’s easy to attract a deluge of naysayers, and it’s equally true if you say something as incendiary as “Web 2.0 will kill culture.” Haven’t these people ever heard of balance?

I’m guessing this is where so much of the criticism and anti-Keen backlash is coming from. He’s one of those all-or-nothing kind of guys. He’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater, along with the bathtub and maybe even the whole bathroom. And even if Keen is wrong, or a blustering Goliath, he’s successfully stirring up debate and thought on what will be the long-term effects of the shift from regular old Internet to Web 2.0. That can’t be discounted.

I can’t wait to read who he attacks next.