I’d never heard of this guy until Doc Searls wrote about his new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. I’ve ordered the thing, because it’s important for me to read this stuff, even though I can tell you it’s all bullshit.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Amanda Chapel, aka Strumpette, interviewed Keen (”interview” is perhaps too generous…”worship” would be better) and posted parts of it on her blog.

CHAPEL: Your book sounds like a total refutation of the premise and proposal that is the Cluetrain Manifesto. As Cluetrain is accepted as bible, that would make your book heresy! Your thoughts?

KEEN: Yes, my book is in the heretical tradition of modern dystopian writers like Huxley & Orwell as well as contemporary American cultural critics such as Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell and Neil Postman. Cluetrain established a biblical orthodoxy around the four C’s: “community”, “citizenship”, “customer” and, most ludicrously of all, “conversation”. What it tries to do is displace the ethical and cultural truths that have traditionally defined our civic life — and replace them with the feel-good language of public relations. At the ideological heart of Cluetrain is the absurd cult of the amateur with its denial that real “truth” or “expertise” can ever exist.

…CULT OF THE AMATEUR is not a book written for Web 2.0 radicals. Instead, it was authored for mainstream Americans — parents, business people and educators — who are troubled by the more extreme cultural and economic consequences of the hyper democratic internet. I expose the dangers not only of “citizen media” like blogging and wikis, but also of online pornography, gambling and identity theft. These are issues that have a significant impact on real people’s lives and need to be publicly discussed and debated.

To which Doc, one of the authors of Cluetrain, responded.

Good God. Where to begin?
Well, not only did Cluetrain contain no “four C’s”, but neither the words “citizen” nor “citizenship” appear anywhere in the original website or the book.
While Cluetrain certainly has an ideological heart, it’s not “the cult of the amateur”, or the cult of anything.
And while I don’t yet know which “ethical and cultural truths” Andrew is talking about, I’m damn sure Cluetrain’s authors would never hope to replace them with “the feel-good language of public relations”. Which we crapped on rather forcefully…

I predict that Mr. Keen will sell a lot of books, because there’s a lot at stake here, and he’s “tickling the ears” of those who wish things to stay exactly as they are. The mainstream press will give him all the publicity he needs to sell books and make money, and that’s really what this is all about.

I agree that the Modern culture is under attack, but who’s to say it doesn’t deserve it or need it. What exactly is Mr. Keen trying to protect? The 20% of the population with 80% of the wealth?

Damned amateurs!

And many people create, because it’s their life, not their livelihood (thank you, Harry Chapin). Ask funtwo if he feels slighted because 15 million people have seen his rendition of the Canon in D. Does he deserve a seat at Mr. Keen’s table?

I’m sorry, but the real tip-off about the foolishness of this book is its title. Calling amateurs a “cult” is an insult of the highest order, and Mr. Keen should be ashamed of himself. What about amateur astronomers, huh? They’re robbing the pros of all their glory, so why not attack them, too?

The biggest mistake all critics of the personal media revolution make is the assumption that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not, and we shouldn’t buy the books of people who try to make it so.

This book will no more derail the Cluetrain than any other self-serving diatribe from the status quo. The only train wreck here is Andrew Keen.

In the words of the immortal Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise!”

Viacom moved its Queen today in the high stakes game of chicken chess with Google/YouTube over those copyrighted videos that we’ve written about so much. Viacom filed the suit in U.S. District Court in New York and is seeking $1 billion in damages.

In a statement, Viacom lawyers said, “YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.”

This had to happen, and it will be interesting to watch. In essence, the entire Hollywood entertainment hegemony is in the hands of the judicial system now, and I think that even if it wins, it loses. This will simply accelerate chaos and the ultimate creation of a new “Hollywood” spawned by the people formerly known as its customers.

You see, as J.D. Lasica noted in the subtitle of his powerful book, Darknet, Hollywood is at war with the digital generation, not YouTube or Google. It’s their customers they have the problem with, and they can’t sue every one of them (they would if they could). It’s their customers who are uploading the videos to share with their friends, and let me tell you this, the potential for backlash here is pretty significant. And what does it say about the long-term value of an industry that resorts to suing its own customers anyway?

And don’t be fooled by the dollar amount here. It’s a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what’s at stake.

Reaction is pouring in, and I’m only going to provide one link here. It’s to Umair Haque, the brilliant economic guru who never met an archaic business model he couldn’t deconstruct:

Nice one guys - it’s like putting off going to the gym…by ducking into Krispy Kreme.

Gamesmanship doesn’t buy you time or space - it’s just (a desperate) excuse to not meet the fundamental challenge of deep, sweeping strategic reinvention.

It’s the mark of a truly great firm to embrace this challenge head-on. Conversely, not having the imagination, vision, or appetite to embrace this challenge is usually the mark of a once-great firm slowly dragging itself past strategy decay and into strategic irrelevance.

I love Umair.

A front page Wall Street Journal article today examines the history and the conflict between television companies and Google over YouTube and its hosting of copyrighted materials. It’s a pretty fair read with a couple of interesting quotes: (The article is behind the paper’s subscription wall, so I won’t provide a link.)

“The problem the media companies have in dealing with Google is that we’re not in a position of strength,” acknowledges a senior executive at one of the companies.”

…the current strife might eventually prove to be no more than hard-nosed negotiating…

Mr. Schmidt (Google’s Eric) said late last month that he was sure Google “will eventually do some very significant deals” with TV companies, but suggested that none were imminent. “I’m not in a great hurry on this issue,” he said. “It’s more important to get it right.”

There is more at stake in this battle than meets the eye, for the very nature of contemporary copyright law is what’s being challenged. It’s a touchpoint between the controlled distribution of modernism and the shared distribution of postmodernism, and I don’t think anybody really knows where it’s all heading.

I do know that the whole concept of copyright needs to be reexamined by lawmakers, because the public interest is not served by current law. Content creators aren’t served by it either, only the copyright holders — the elite and tightly-controlled world of music, film, video, print and artistic publishers — is benefited, and this artificial government only has itself to blame for its current conundrum.

There’s a motive for creativity that’s rarely discussed in the light of copyright, but it’s expressed in many ways through creative works.

Harry Chapin’s “Mr. Tanner:” “Music was his life; it was not his livelihood.”

Bill Monroe, when I interviewed him in 1979: “I never wrote any songs; I just heard them before anybody else.”

From The Agony and the Ecstasy: “We’re artists. We’ll always be a slave to another man’s nickel.”

The movie “Crossroads” about an old blues musician: “Lots of towns, lots of songs, lots of women, good times, bad times. All he ever wanted to hear anybody say was, ‘He was good. He could really play.’”

Jeong-Hyun Lim (funtwo) in response to all the fuss about his “Canon in D” video on YouTube: “Some said my vibrato is quite sloppy, and I agree with that, so these days I’m doing my best to improve my vibrato skill.” The guy uttered not a word about money. It was all about his music.

So as we watch this whole thing unfold, let’s remember that this is really a cultural war underway. I don’t say that one side is right and the other wrong, because I don’t think that’s really the issue. However, the victor will write the rules for the future, and we ought to be prepared for it to go either way.

Sumner Redstone reveals his core assumptions about Viacom’s posturing with YouTube in a wonderful interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Go read the whole thing, but here are some snippets:

THR: Let’s talk about new media. There are some that say Viacom has missed the boat when it comes to the Web 2.0 revolution.
Redstone: Wait a minute, wait a minute. We don’t miss boats. Other people miss boats, and they may have missed the Viacom boat. The fact of the matter is, without copyright protection, there is no entertainment business. And so we instructed YouTube to remove 100,000 pieces of video from their site. Why? Because they were using it without paying for it. I don’t believe in that. If you want to use us, pay us. Or make a deal with us that is commensurate with the value of our product. We are the only totally content company, and our content has taken years and years to develop, with a lot of hard work. People who want to use it are going to pay us, or good-bye…

THR: Is taking your content off YouTube an indication that you would prefer to do it entirely on your own?
Redstone: I’m ambivalent, but if YouTube would come along and offer us a deal that is commensurate with the value of the programming that we spend so many millions and so much time to create, we would certainly look at that.

These are textbook economic scarcity arguments, and they make complete sense in the mass content distribution world. Redstone is right, then, when he states that without copyright protection, there is no entertainment business. The key assumption here is that control of scarcity is the vehicle for making money. It’s hard to argue with that.

Where things get messy, however, is this statement: “…THEY (emphasis mine) were using it without paying for it.” Here, he refers to YouTube, but the reality is that the “they” actually refers to the users of YouTube, not the company itself. The real matter then is one of sharing clips via a platform that makes it easy to do so. Let me sing an old song: we’ve been sharing copyrighted materials with each other for as long as content companies have been making it available. We swapped 45s with each other when I was a teenager. The first tool to make it easy was audio tape. Then video tape. Then digital. Now, via public platforms.

Each time one of these innovations came along, the copyright industry’s response was to raise prices. Citing losses of sales, $18 CDs were justified along with $10 movie tickets. Never was the pocketbook of the average customer taken into consideration, and if it had been, perhaps we wouldn’t be talking about this stuff today.

Where do you draw the line in all this? If I invite ten friends over to watch a DVD of The Departed, does that constitute theft? How about twenty friends? These are murky legal waters, the waves of which are currently washing over the whole entertainment business.

In Redstone’s interview, he compares the YouTube situation with cable companies that pay Viacom for their content. This seems a logical argument, but it comes from the notion that YouTube — as a company — is controlling the sharing of video clips. That it doesn’t is the monkey wrench in the argument of the content business, and that’s why I think it would be a whole lot smarter for Viacom to work with YouTube than against it.

The negotiations are continuing, I’m sure. Redstone wants a deal that is “commensurate with the value of our product.” The real question is who determines that value?

We must always remember that the Personal Media Revolution is very personal and a very real revolution. Who are people revolting against? It’s a sad business day, indeed, when your customers become your enemy.

I don’t normally do this, but this clip from YouTube so grabbed my heart this morning that I thought I’d share it along with a little commentary. There are two points here for media observers:

One, this is the real value of YouTube and “the problem” for the industry that has had a lock on the video niche for a half-century. I suspect that on this Valentine’s Day, many thousands of people will be touched by little Andrew. As of this writing, the video has been viewed 53,878 times. Let’s see what that is by day’s end. While all the publicity about YouTube centers around big media getting screwed, the users of the site keep populating it with items like this.

The second point is that the song in the video is by Akon, a Universal/Motown recording artist. It’s either playing on the radio or on a CD or MP3 in the car. That Andrew’s parents have now “recorded” the boy singing along with the copyrighted song is a violation of copyright law. A lawyer could argue that it’s a music video for which the artist, writer, band, studio and record company were not compensated.

And I suspect that I am, technically, complicit in breaking the law by sharing this copyrighted work here. This is the absurdity of the law in the digital age and why we need to re-write the thing.

So, whether you’re alone or not on this Valentine’s Day, enjoy Andrew singing Akon’s version of “Lonely.” He really gets into it about 2 minutes into the tune, so hang with it.