Is Andrew Keen really an idiot and flat out wrong?

Was reviewing the various presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, when I came across this response by Tim O'Reilly about Andrew Keen (from a question by Nancy Williams)


Tim O'Reilly on Andrew Keen from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.

To refresh - the day before, Keen had written a piece predicting the death of the $0.00 business model - this is his basic argument:

In his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational, MIT behavorial economist Dan Ariely suggests that most of us are irrational when it comes to determining the value of our labor. I’m not sure. I may not have Ariely’s grasp of behavorial economics, but I’m pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice.

So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue. "Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

In other words, a lot of the "free" work to date has been done by people making money elsewhere, and when they lose their jobs or benefits this will stop. (What Nick Carr calls "Digital Sharecropping" is currently being funded by benign employers or national social security systems)

I was also quite surprised that Tim called him out as "an idiot, and flat out wrong", as Tim said not that dissimilar things in his own presentation at the Expo event the night before - ie that startups will need to think of ways to make money, the funding for frivolity wasn't there, and value needed to be added. Not only that, he gave me the stage at the conference to point out things not dissimilar to what Keen was saying about the economics of $0.00 business models (see my talk here). In fact, I was talking at his conference at the same time as he was talking in the above clip. He also put the very sensible but possibly optimistic Martin Varsavsky on and took the devil's advocate position. In other words, Tim is doing more than his fair share to get the message out as well, and I think his recent posts pulling people back to the original meanings of Web 2.0 are a great step in the right direction - its was never all about social media esoterics, useless widgets and rivers of user generated cr*p.

So more to the point, whats going on when two guys seem to be diametrically opposed, yet in fact are saying much the same thing?

The quick take is that maybe both are parsing the credit crunch from their own positions and moving to a similar endpoint without realising it, like those movies where two protagonists are backing up and bump into each other, only to turn round and recognise the other - Aaaaargh!.

The longer take is no more subtle, but it is more brutal - its the race for the high ground going forward. To an extent, both needed the pre-Crunch world to hold the poles apart in the polemic. With bubblenomics gone though, the more silly excesses of Web 2.0 are going / gone, but so therefore is the ability to gain kudos by lampooning those same excesses, because the underlying Web trends are very real. What will the "During and Post" Crunch Tech Meme look like. Will Web 2.0 look like another spent force lying among the fallen dot.com daisies - or will Keen look like the sort of guy who called the falling sky with every breath, but now it has fallen people will say "OK now what have you got - is that it?"

It is at this time that new voices will emerge, as the Zeitgeist shifts, and this is the risk both sides' A list protagonists now face. I suspect that those who have been beating either too fluffy, or too pessimistic a drum, will both be seen to be part of "yesterdays story", their pages yellowing on the interwebs as people pass them by. (I think this was what Dennis Howlett was really getting at - the big picture has changed, but some people's narratives haven't)

But what shall replace these Old Tales then?

I have remarked a number of times on this blog on how hard it's been to hold an analytical middle ground in the last year or so - the hypemonkeys are so far off the planet ( heads up in the Cloud - don't get me started....) that just being realistic makes you look like you are a hopeless pessimists, while the pessimistic counterpointers have been able to scare the cyberchildren with their tales of the bogeymen in the digital woods. I hope the time for more reasoned council returns.

We need it.

(I do predict far fewer companies with silly names with 2 "oo"s in them going forward thank heavens - in fact my first recommendation to any VC is NameChange in these more sober times)