Andrew Keen's new book The Internet is not the Answer takes a contrarian view to the digital revolution:

Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing inequalities – cultural, social and economic – whenever and wherever it has found them. Individually, it may work wonders for us. Collectively, it’s doing us no good at all. “It was supposed to be win-win,” Keen declares. “The network’s users were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But in a lot of ways, we are its victims.”

Andrew has forged a career from standing to the side of the Internet gold rush and saying, "wait a minute". This isn't a criticism; we need that voice, I think, to counterbalance the cheerleading role that the tech press typically fills. In particular, as the Guardian points out:

The US government’s decision, in 1991, to throw the nascent network open to private enterprise amounted, as one leading (and now eye-wateringly wealthy) Californian venture capitalist has put it, to “the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet”.

Wealth in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But what Keen seems to be suggesting is that this has actually in part been obtained by devaluing other peoples' jobs - it's not wealth creation, in the same sense that software is something created from nothing, but rather wealth redistribution. The jobs that were rendered obsolete have not been recreated; there is no employment equilibrium. In particular, the article and the book cite figures that show a significant downturn in jobs for creatives.

There's a tricky conversation to be had here. Some of those jobs were bolstered by models that should not continue to exist, while few of us would argue that we don't value art or creative work. New models must therefore be found to support artists. (Companies like my friends at the Creative Action Network are doing great work here.)

It's been pointed out to me more than once that the 20th century models for selling creative work were very temporary. After I posted recently that relying on donations wasn't a sustainable practice, my friend J. Nathan Matias also pointed out that nonprofit arts and cultural organizations have a higher survival rate than businesses in America (PDF link). Elsewhere, arts are often funded (I think rightly) from public money. I'm not sure how much of this funding goes into creative work online, but anecdotally, I'd love to see more.

Artists themselves need more freedom to experiment online. The first years of the web were highly experimental, and many of the first startups could be thought of as art projects. However, over the last few years we've seen this slip away, to be replaced with projects that are either obvious land grabs (Uber, Spotify, food delivery apps and laundry startups, for example) or have settled into homogenizing advertising display funnels (Facebook). It's worth saying that some of the best startups, like Slack, have avoided this pattern, and retained a sense of whimsical experimentation. Meanwhile, projects like CASH Music and the aforementioned C.A.N. are transparently fighting for the artists. I'd hope that creative workers feel that they can take our project, Known, and use it as the basis of their own creative sites. But it's now the exception rather than the rule.

Yet, I know I've discovered all kinds of new artists across mediums. Meanwhile, reductive lists like the Billboard Charts have massively declined in importance for many listeners (which I think is a very good thing). The Internet is not the same thing as its prevailing business models, and I simply don't buy the implied argument that the Internet has been a net negative. But I do think it's worth having a conversation about who is hurting - and if nothing else, using it to figure out who has a problem just waiting for a startup, or a non-profit, to solve.