The Utopia Project: Can Silicon Valley Fix the Future?
Amid growing anxiety over new technologies, an effort to recapture the idealism of the 1990s is under way
By John Thornhill
An increasingly common refrain of our times is to argue that the internet revolution has been betrayed, and to agitate for renewed struggle to reclaim the lost utopia. A powerful new technology that promised to liberate knowledge, enrich democracy and decentralise power has been hijacked by malicious trolls, authoritarian regimes and rapacious capitalists. In a world grown nostalgic for the future, how can the internet’s original promise be reclaimed?
Andrew Keen, a British entrepreneur and writer who has long worked on the US West Coast, was among the first tech commentators to declare the internet broken. “Digital technology has, indeed, taken a treacherous turn,” he writes in his new book How to Fix the Future. But he urges us all to take up arms in a new fight to resist the “creeping (and creepy) technological determinism” and reclaim control of our destiny.
One of his most intriguing arguments compares the power of the US tech giants today and the motor industry in the 1950s. At that time, the big three US manufacturers, Ford, GM and Chrysler, were busily churning out flashy and…
