Andrew Keen is author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture, and is widely regarded as the leading contemporary critic of the Internet. The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that "every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen."
In the mid Nineties, Andrew was a member of the pioneering generation of Silicon Valley visionaries who first "got" the Internet. He founded Audiocafe.com in 1995, and, securing significant investment from Intel and SAP, established it as one of the most highly trafficked websites of the late Nineties. As the Chief Executive of Audiocafe.com, Andrew became a Silicon Valley celebrity. He spoke regularly on the digital media circuit and was featured and quoted in many newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Industry Standard, Business Week, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and The London Guardian.
In 2000, Andrew produced MB5: The Festival for New Media Visionaries, a futurist show featuring some of Silicon Valley's leading pundits. Since then, he has held senior management positions at a number of venture capital backed start-ups including Pulse, Santa Cruz Networks and Pure Depth. Andrew is currently the Founder and Chief Executive of afterTV LLC, a firm that helps marketers optimise their brand desirability in the post-TV consumer landscape.
Andrew's next book which is a defence of privacy in the social media age will come out in 2011. It's a critique of networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter whose rapidly growing businesses are premised on us revealing more and more about ourselves on the Internet. He will argue that rather than uniting us, this social media revolution is making us lonelier, more isolated and more unequal. But rather than blaming technology, Andrew looks at deeper contemporary cultural and economic forces which, he will explain, are the real reason why privacy is under threat and why we are all being swept into the social media revolution
Andrew writes a syndicated column for the UK's Daily Telegraph, as well as for the leading Dutch paper Volkskrant and the Belgium daily De Standaard. He has written for many other publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Guardian, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Prospect, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly.