Keen On America

According to the Californian political sociologist Peter Phillips, American capitalism is facing an existential crisis. In his new book, Titans of Capital, he argues that the concentrated wealth of investment companies like BlackRock and Fidelity not only threatens human rights and democracy, but also the future of planet. Perhaps. But where Phillips really goes out on a limb is to argue that the Chinese state controlled model of capitalism which, he says, has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, is more humane than the free market American model. Seriously?

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994, former Director of Project Censored 1996 to 2010 and President of Media Freedom Foundation 2003 to 2017. He has been editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of Censored, co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (2006), editor of two editions of Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism (1999 & 2004). His most recent book is Giants: The Global Power Elite. He was a co-host of the weekly Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio with Mickey Huff from 2010 to 2017, originating from KPFA in Berkeley and airing on forty stations nationwide. He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociological of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies and Investigative Sociology. He was winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in 1997 for Best Political Book, PEN Censorship Award 2008, Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications 2009, and the Pillar Human Rights Award from the National Associations of Whistleblowers 2014. He lives in a redwood forest near Bodega, California with his wife Mary Lia.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” which ran in this month’s Harper’s. But, as she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have been entitled: “Her Gay Romp Through Jewish Poland” - in honor, of course, of Mel Brooke’s satirical “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” from his 1967 movie The Producers. And there is certainly something Brookean about Gold’s predilection for outrage - a healthy thing, I suspect, especially given the soporific quality of much contemporary Holocaust writing.

Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist, who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times (London), amongst other publications. She was awarded Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2010, also being nominated for Columnist of the Year, and was commended in the Feature Writer of the Year category in 2009.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last year, we had a great conversation with Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequality, about how classical economists like Smith, Riccardo, Marx and Pareto analyze inequality. Our guest today, David Lay Williams, asks the same question - but from the perspective of political philosophers like Rousseau, JS Rousseau and Hobbes. In his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues, Williams traces how economic inequality has shaped political theory over the last two thousand years. And in our age of increasingly sharp economic inequalities, Williams reminds us, what Plato called “the greatest of all plagues” is anything but an academic problem.

David Lay Williams is Professor of Political Science at DePaul University. He earned his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (2007), Rousseau's 'Social Contract': An Introduction (2014), and The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (2024). He has frequently written on themes in the history of political thought for outlets such as the Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Hill, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Time Magazine, among others.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Something interesting is happening in downtown Austin. Next month, The University of Austin (UATX), a new undergraduate college claiming to “be dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”, opens its well financed doors. Launched as a supposedly “anti-woke” university, UATX has some heavy hitting advisors including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Larry Summers, Andrew Young, Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss. It’s founding president is the Shakespeare scholar, Pano Kanelos, who is described as “an outspoken advocate for liberal education”. And so, when I sat down with Kanelos on the UATX campus, we talked about the idea of a “liberal education” and why there’s a need in contemporary America for one more liberal arts college.

Pano Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Kanelos served as the 24th President of St. John’s College, Annapolis. After earning degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), he taught at Stanford University, the University of San Diego, and Loyola University Chicago. An outspoken advocate for liberal education, he oversaw the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, comprising a network of more than 100 colleges and universities. Among the earliest participants in the Teach for America program, President Kanelos is as passionate about teaching as he is about writing and scholarship. He founded the Cropper Center for Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and is a noted Shakespeare scholar, having served as the resident Shakespearean in the Old Globe MFA Program and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As the author of the bestselling Master Algorithm, University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos is one of the world’s most respected AI experts. So I was a little surprised that his new book, 2040, is a science-fictional satire of American politics & Silicon Valley. In 2040, Domingos is, however, also using fiction to write a critique of the current Silicon Valley mania for AI. The book is both a warning about the technological limits of AI as well as an investigation of the way that it could truly democratize American politics. And so, by 2040, Domingos promised me, we really might be close to the reality of what he calls “an agora in a Presibot”.

Pedro Domingos is a leading AI researcher and the author of the worldwide bestseller "The Master Algorithm", an introduction to machine learning for a general audience. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He won the SIGKDD Innovation Award and the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, two of the highest honors in data science and AI, and is a Fellow of AAAS and AAAI. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Wired, and others, and is a highly sought-after speaker.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

At the DNC last week, the Warriors coach and former Bulls star Steve Kerr spoke of his excitement at his return to Chicago’s United Center, the home of some his greatest basketball triumphs. According to the Columbia University historian Frank Andre Guridy, there’s nothing coincidental about this convergence of American politics and sports. In his intriguing new book, THE STADIUM, Guridy reimagines America through the history of sports stadiums like Candlestick Park & Madison Square Gardens. It’s a story of politics, protest and play in which these sports stadiums act as mirrors and prisms to all the most troubling and hopeful aspects of American history.

Frank A. Guridy is Professor of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His latest book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and in other parts of the African Diaspora. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies. His writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on a wide variety of podcasts, radio, and TV programs, including the Edge of Sports podcast by The Nation, Burn it All Down, End of Sport, Texas Public Radio, the Houston Chronicle’s Sports Nation, Al Jazeera’s “The Listening Post,” WNYC Public Radio, among others. His fellowships and awards include the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library. He is also an award-winning teacher, receiving the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019. 

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As one of the victims of Donald Trump’s notorious 2020 dismissal of Inspector Generals, Glenn A. Fine — a longtime Inspector General of both the departments of Justice & Defense - knows a thing or two about both honest government. In his new book, Watchdogs, Fine presents the Inspectors General as the last line of defense for uncorrupt American institutions. In his words, they are “pillars of democracy” and, as such, we should think of these government officials as “broad shouldered" public servants” rather than “pointy headed bureaucrats”.

Glenn A. Fine formerly served as the acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense and as the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. He is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, and has taught at Stanford Law School.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“We don’t need no education”, Pink Floyd announced in 1979. “Teachers leave those kids alone”:

We don't need no educationWe don’t need no thought controlNo dark sarcasm in the classroomTeachers leave them kids aloneHey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

But today, almost half a century later, That Was The Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare believes that technology might be radically reinventing education and healing the historically fraught relationship between teachers and kids. Today, Keith argues in this week’s newsletter, kids like his 17-year old son are discovering that they love AI as a co-creative tool for educating themselves. And 21st century teachers too, he suggests, can reinvent themselves from annoying pedagogues into helpful guides to new AI technology. In other words:

You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the AI wind is blowing

All You Need is OpenAI and Anthropic.

Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

William Deresiewicz is a leading American writer best known as the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. And so, when Bill and I sat down in Portland for a KEEN ON America conversation, we discussed the crisis of a high-end university system that he, as a former professor at Yale, knows all too well. But Bill, a keen conversationalist, also talked about what it means to be both a Jew and an American in a country which simultaneously values personal reinvention and cultural identity.

William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which was published in a 10th-anniversary edition in May 2024. His most recent book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. His current project is a historically informed memoir about being Jewish. Bill has published over 300 essays and reviews. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time National Magazine Award nominee. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, and many other publications, has been translated into 19 languages and included in over 40 college readers and other anthologies. Bill taught English at Yale and Columbia before becoming a full-time writer. He has spoken at over 170 educational and other venues and has appeared on The Colbert Report, Here & Now, The New Yorker Radio Hour, and many other outlets. He has held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges as well as at the University of San Diego. In 2024, he is serving as an inaugural Public Fellow at American Jewish University. His previous books are The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, A Jane Austen Education, and Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. Bill is a member of the Board of Directors of Tivnu: Building Justice, which runs a Jewish service-learning gap year and other programs in Portland OR, of the Advisory Board of The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, a live-in study program in Catskill NY, and of the Advisory Council of Project Wayfinder, which runs purpose-learning programs in schools across the US and beyond. And, since you’re wondering, it’s /də-REH-zə-WITS/.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I have to admit that I’m always a little uncomfortable with non-Jews fetishizing the supposedly unique gifts & accomplishments of the Jewish people. A century ago, Winston Churchill did it. And now George Gilder, the influential tech futurist, picks up that Churchillian mantle in a new edition of his 2012 book The Israel Test. Israel’s “genius”, Gilder argues, “enriches” the world to such an extent that anyone who questions it is, by definition, a critic of innovation, freedom and progress - not to mention, of course, a rabid anti-semite. I’m not convinced. But then, as a secular Jew who would fail Gilder’s Israel Test, what do I know?

GEORGE GILDER‘s books have sold more than two million copies worldwide. In Wealth and Poverty, one of the most influential works of our time, Gilder made the moral case for capitalist creativity. In Spirit of Enterprise, Microcosm, Telecosm, Life After Television, Life After Google, a bestseller in both the US and China, and Life After Capitalism, Gilder achieved renown as a stunningly accurate prophet of the direction of technology development and enterprise, including Israel’s promethean contributions. With Men & Marriage, republished in 2024, he maintained a half century of rare insight in social theory. Long a contributing editor to Forbes magazine, Gilder has produced the annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference, now called COSM, offering leading edge forecasts and analysis from the world’s top technology firms and research centers. Gilder also heads Gilder Technology Group, focusing on breakthrough technologies, and writes or edits four investment letters for Eagle Publishing. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan presented Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. A founding fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, he writes for such national publications as The Wall Street Journal, Wired, National Review, The New Criterion, The American Spectator, and Claremont Review.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.