Keen On America

Andrew Keen
  • 4.1 (81)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED DAILY

Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com

  1. God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America

    2H AGO

    God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America

    “Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon   To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:   1. Internet 2. Light bulb 3. Integrated circuit 4. Personal computer 5. Airplane   The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon validates the list. Gordon’s piece for the WSJ series is titled “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation.” His argument is that the United States was always in danger of falling apart and the telegraph saved the republic. Then radio, television, and even the now vilified internet knitted it even closer together.   Otto von Bismarck quipped that God looks after three things: fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Gordon agrees with the Prussian unifier of Germany. Nobody, he notes, has ever made money selling America short. As for the now venerable republic, he thinks it’s still in pretty good hands. The ever expanding national debt, however, is another matter. That certainly wouldn’t get onto Gordon’s top 250 most impactful American inventions.   Five Takeaways   •       Hanging by a Thread: The Communication Crisis at the Founding: George Washington’s fear was not philosophical: it was geographic. The original United States, stretching to the Mississippi, was larger than all of Western Europe. The trans-Appalachian West couldn’t get its commerce over the mountains — it had to go down the Mississippi, which was controlled by Spain. Washington said the West was hanging by a thread. Every subsequent expansion — to California in 1850, to Oregon and Washington — only deepened the crisis. The republic could not exist without communication. That is why the post office was almost constitutionally important in Washington’s time, and why the telegraph and the transatlantic cable were understood as national security technology, not merely as business.   •       The Atlantic Cable: Ten Days to Ten Seconds: In 1800, a transatlantic crossing took two months westbound and six weeks eastbound. By the 1850s, with steam, it was ten days either way. Cyrus Field — a paper merchant who knew nothing about cable technology — read about undersea cables and decided to lay one across the Atlantic Ocean. Gordon compares this to reading about Sputnik and deciding to go to Mars. It took six tries and ten years. William Thomson — Lord Kelvin — did the physics. The result: ten days to ten seconds. Basically simultaneous. The nineteenth century was right to call itself an age of miracles.   •       The Robber Barons Were Misunderstood: As early as the 1850s, the New York Times was calling Commodore Vanderbilt a “robber baron” — after the medieval German toll barons on the Rhine who wouldn’t let your boat pass without paying. Gordon’s verdict: the dead can’t sue, but they should. Vanderbilt built a faster, safer, cheaper transportation network than had existed before. He died the richest man in America in 1877, worth $105 million. Henry Ford did the same thing with the automobile: took a rich man’s toy invented in Germany and built one the average man could afford. Gordon sees Elon Musk’s reusable rocket in the same tradition. Nobody complained about their products. They complained about their wealth.   •       The Internet Is the Greatest American Invention: The Wall Street Journal’s ranking puts the Internet at number one, above the light bulb, the integrated circuit, and the personal computer. Gordon agrees. The Internet has changed everything in thirty years, and — he thinks — we’ve basically seen nothing yet. Scholars bless Google every day. Gordon spent decades going from index to index in the books behind him; today the entire intellectual world is at everyone’s fingertips. The railway, which actually unified the national economy by allowing factories in Worcester, Massachusetts to ship shoes across the continent at lower prices, doesn’t make the list. Gordon doesn’t quarrel with that either.   •       God Looks After Fools, Drunks, and the United States: Gordon’s July 4th assessment: optimistic about the republic, alarmed about the national debt. The debt, he says, used to be used only for wars and great depressions. It is now used to ensure that no member of Congress ever loses an election. The budget system of the federal government is an unbelievable national disgrace. But the republic itself? Bismarck was right. Nobody has ever made money selling America short. It remains, Gordon believes, a blessed country beyond any other in the history of the world. He’s not sure about the fools and the drunks. But he’s pretty sure about the Americans.   About the Guest   John Steele Gordon is an American business and technology historian and journalist. He is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable, and many other books. He writes for The Wall Street Journal and Commentary.   References:   •       John Steele Gordon, “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation,” The Wall Street Journal, 2026.   •       An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon.   •       A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon.   •       Episode 2874: Don Watson on From One Mad King to Another — the companion episode on American history and what has always made America America.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:   (00:31) - The Wall Street Journal’s most impactful US inventions: Internet at number one (01:52) - The founding fear: the US was t...

    39 min
  2. We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware

    22H AGO

    We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware

    “It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland   Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The hackers themselves pocket around a billion. As Anja Shortland, professor of political economy at King’s College London and author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware, puts it: “it’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses.” The sunglasses are the ransom. The wrecked car is the damage to the rest of us.   Shortland is an expert in extortive crime — transactions where a legal entity has to make a deal with a criminal group under conditions of zero trust. She has studied kidnap for ransom, Somali piracy, art theft, and now the booming business of ransomware. What fascinates her is not the crime itself but the institutions that emerge in the space between the legal world and the criminal underworld: the insurance companies that price the risk, the negotiators who manage the transaction, the norms that make it possible for a corporation to pay a criminal gang and actually get its data back. In Russia, hacking Westerners isn’t even a crime. In North Korea, it’s an actual department with a small army of government employees. In Iran, it’s a foreign policy. Criminality, Shortland thus argues, is defined by whoever holds power.   The game-changer, she argues, is cryptocurrency. Without it, ransomware doesn’t work — you can’t move money anonymously at scale without it. Regulate cryptocurrency, and you take the profit motive out of most of what she studies. The irony is that the current American administration is amongst the most crypto-friendly in history. Meanwhile, AI — specifically Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, the hacking model that was leaked rather than released — is about to give criminals tools that only well-resourced banks and corporations can currently deploy defensively. So cybercrime will continue to boom. Expect a pile-up of wrecked cars on our information highway. Five Takeaways   •       We Know You Can Pay a Million: The title of the UK edition of Shortland’s book is the most revealing line in ransomware. Criminal gangs don’t pick ransom figures arbitrarily. They spend weeks inside the victim’s systems, studying cash flow, cash reserves, and insurance coverage, before setting a demand on the painful side of affordable. The victim usually pays — because the alternative is losing access to patient records, customer data, or patents permanently. The hackers know this. The negotiation that follows is, in Shortland’s framing, a transaction between parties with zero trust and one thing in common: both want a deal.   •       In Russia, It’s Not a Crime: Ransomware is not a uniform global crime. In Russia, theft and extortion directed at Westerners is not considered a criminal act. In North Korea, hacking is organised as a government department — a state revenue stream, not a criminal enterprise. The line between crime and legitimacy is drawn by whoever holds power. This complicates any enforcement response: you cannot extradite a North Korean government employee. You cannot prosecute a Russian hacker in a Russian court. The only effective levers are diplomatic, financial, and technical — and all three are currently being weakened.   •       Insurance Orders Criminality: Shortland’s most counterintuitive argument: insurance companies are not passive bystanders in ransomware. They are active market-makers. By pricing the risk, they create the conditions under which a corporation can make a rational decision to pay. By negotiating on behalf of victims, they create norms — what a fair ransom looks like, what proof of decryption looks like, what happens if the hackers don’t deliver. Insurance, in Shortland’s telling, is what makes the criminal market function. Most people think insurance is boring. They are not thinking about this.   •       Cryptocurrency Is the Real Game-Changer: Ransomware as a profitable business model did not exist before cryptocurrency. Without the ability to move money anonymously at scale, without blockchain verification that payment has been received, the transaction between criminal and victim cannot be completed. Regulate cryptocurrency — apply the anti-money-laundering frameworks that govern wire transfers and bank accounts — and you take the profit motive out of most of what Shortland studies. The irony: the current American administration is among the most crypto-friendly in history, and the president’s own family has direct financial interests in the sector.   •       Claude Mythos and the Asymmetric AI Problem: Anthropic’s Claude Mythos — the AI model built to find software vulnerabilities, which was leaked rather than formally released — is the next phase of this war. The defensive use case is real: a well-resourced bank can use it to find and fix its vulnerabilities before attackers do. The problem is asymmetry. A large financial institution can deploy Claude Mythos defensively. Wiltshire County Council, a local hospital, a dental practice, a legal firm — the soft targets that ransomware gangs prefer — cannot. The hackers will eventually get it. The debate about who should be allowed to use it, and under what conditions, has not happened. That is what worries Shortland most.   About the Guest   Anja Shortland is a Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London and the author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware (Princeton University Press, 2025; US edition April 2026) and Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business. She was a member of the Ransomware Task Force.   References:   •       Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware by Anja Shortland (Princeton University Press, US edition April 2026).   •       Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) — referenced in the interview as the origin story of hacking culture.   •       Episode 2885: Keith Teare on Adulting — the week Anthropic’s Claude Mythos was discussed; the Shortland interview is the companion piece on what it means in practice.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the histo...

    44 min
  3. The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease

    1D AGO

    The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease

    “Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin   Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and homes. So widespread, indeed, that it seems naturally hardwired into us. Our species-being, so to speak.   But, for Dr. Gary Slutkin, there is nothing inevitable about human violence. Slutkin — an epidemiologist who spent years fighting cholera, tuberculosis, and AIDS in Africa before focusing his medical mind on violence — argues that violence is neither a character flaw nor a moral failing. Rather than being baked into our natures, Slutkin sees violence as a contagious disease. It meets the clinical definition of a plague, he says. The more violent our homes, communities, media, politics, the more virally it spreads.   Slutkin’s new book, The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic, makes the case that violence has been misdiagnosed for centuries. We analyse it as a crime problem, a character problem, an inter-state problem. So we punish, incarcerate and bomb. But none of these approaches confront the contagion. This can only be done, Slutkin argues, with what he calls “violence interrupters” — people from within the infected community who find the most at-risk individuals and cool things down before they escalate. Communities that have applied this approach have seen reductions in violence of 40 to 70 percent, Slutkin boasts, with Cherry Hill, one of Chicago’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, experiencing 450 days without a shooting.   There will be a time, he promises, when the plague of human violence will be mostly overcome. I hope Dr. Slutkin is correct. But suspect that his brave new violence-free world, like Huxley’s, might be simultaneously utopian and dystopian.   Five Takeaways   •       Violence Meets the Clinical Definition of a Contagious Disease: Slutkin is not speaking metaphorically. Violence meets the definition of a disease: characteristic signs and symptoms causing morbidity and mortality. It meets the definition of contagious: it causes more of itself. One violent event leads to another — in a home, in a community, in a region, in a war. The more you are exposed to it, the more likely you are to do it. This is the same mechanism as measles, as cholera, as COVID. Susceptibility varies — for violence, it has to do with how much you feel humiliated, how much social pain you carry, how much grievance a leader has taught you to feel. But the operating system is the same.   •       Violence Has Been Misdiagnosed: For centuries, we have treated violence as a moral failing: a matter of bad people making bad choices. The response has been punishment, incarceration, war. None of these interrupt the contagion. In fact, incarceration concentrates the infection. The misdiagnosis has cost millions of lives. The correct diagnosis — epidemic disease spreading through exposure — changes everything. You don’t blame a cholera patient for drinking contaminated water. You don’t punish a COVID patient for breathing. You interrupt the spread. You treat the susceptibility. You cool it down.   •       Violence Interrupters: The Epidemic Control Playbook: Cure Violence Global trains and deploys violence interrupters: people from the same community, who speak the same language, who have often been involved in violence themselves. Their job is to find the most at-risk individuals — the ones most likely to shoot or be shot next — and intervene before the next event. The approach works. Communities that have applied it have seen reductions of 40 to 70 percent. Over a dozen American cities are at fifty- or sixty-year historic lows. Cherry Hill in Chicago went 450 days without a shooting. Baltimore, New York, and other cities have had similar results.   •       Authoritarian Violence Disorder: Chapter eight of The End of Violence is called “Infections of the State.” Slutkin’s argument: authoritarian leadership is itself a form of epidemic violence. It spreads violence outward into its own population — through ICE raids, through threats, through the approval and scripting of violence by others. It also spreads it abroad, through war. Violence doesn’t know borders. The mechanism is the same: exposure increases transmission; grievance and humiliation increase susceptibility. Trump’s Iran war is not just a war. It is authoritarianism causing war. And the spread doesn’t stop at the border.   •       Uganda Dropped HIV 85 Percent with Behavior Change Alone: In 1987, Slutkin arrived in Uganda, then the most infected country in the world, where a third of the population had what was then a 100 percent lethal disease. Using the epidemic control playbook — no medicines, just behaviour change interventions — they dropped the rate 85 percent. The same approach drove down Ebola, drove down TB long before medication existed. Slutkin’s point: we do not need pharmacological intervention to eliminate violence. We need the right people doing the right interventions with the right understanding of how contagion works. We have done it. We can do it again.   About the Guest   Dr. Gary Slutkin is an epidemiologist and the founder and CEO of Cure Violence Global. He is the author of The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic (Health Communications, Inc., 2026). He is a Professor of Epidemiology and Global Health at the University of Illinois Chicago and a former WHO epidemiologist.   References:   •       The End of Violence: Eliminating the World’s Most Dangerous Epidemic by Gary Slutkin (2026).   •       Cure Violence Global — Slutkin’s organisation. cvg.org.   •       Episode 2887: Steven J. Ross on The Secret War Against Hate — the historical companion on American violence and authoritarian disorder.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify

    53 min
  4. How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War

    2D AGO

    How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War

    America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House, is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my children, when I know I’m a monster?”   On George W. Bush, Benedict is unambiguous. “He was a war criminal,” she says. On the Iraq war, she is equally clear: America went in on lies and killed nearly a million Iraqis, used depleted uranium in violation of international law. Today, Trump is repeating the same catastrophic playbook in Iran.   In The Soldier’s House, Benedict shows how Iraq turned some American soldiers into monsters. “War is morally corrosive — especially a war where the soldiers can find no justification for what they’re doing,” Benedict says. That’s the unintended consequence of even the most morally clean war. Expect the same in Iran. If Trump’s half peace becomes a George W. Bush total war.   Five Takeaways   •       He Was a War Criminal: Benedict’s verdict on George W. Bush, stated flat and without hedge. He went to war on lies. He killed, depending on who’s counting, somewhere near a million Iraqis. The Americans and the British used depleted uranium in violation of international law — polluting the land and spreading poison, producing an epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi civilians and, some veterans claim, among their own children. The forgiveness of Bush — common on the left since Trump — is, in Benedict’s view, memory loss. He was not better than Trump. He was better in some things and just as bad in others. The bar is not very high.   •       The Other Half of the Story: The Iraq war produced reams of American writing about American soldiers. For years, nobody thought to write about how the civilians felt. Benedict’s novel is structured to correct that: Naima, the Iraqi widow, is given equal weight and depth as Jimmy, the American veteran. The point is to push back against the worldwide demonization and scapegoating of Muslim refugees by creating characters who are just as human as anyone we know — who could be your friend, your sister, yourself. She had soldiers and Iraqis read the manuscript to ensure accuracy on both sides.   •       Why Fiction, Not Nonfiction: Benedict had already written the nonfiction: The Lonely Soldier, three and a half years of research and interviewing. But no matter how intimate the interviews, she always felt she couldn’t get deep inside the experience. In interviews, people put up self-protective barriers: things they don’t want to remember, things they are ashamed of, things that are private. Fiction allows her to go where nonfiction cannot. Take everything learned in research. Apply imagination to it. Fill it out. Illustrate the interior experience of war from moment to moment. That is the territory of the novel, and nothing else.   •       Moral Injury: The War Turned Me Into a Monster: Benedict’s central subject across all her books on war is moral injury: the damage done to a person’s conscience when they do things they know, deep down, they had no right to do. A war without justification is maximally corrosive because the soldier can find no frame in which the violence makes sense. It just becomes about violence. Soldiers come home carrying that. It affects everyone who knows them. It affects towns, villages, countries. We bring the war home with us. Every poet who has written about war has said so. Benedict’s novels make it visible.   •       The Afghan and Iraqi Interpreters: A Betrayal: Trump’s abandonment of Afghan and Iraqi interpreters — people who risked their lives and their families’ lives working for the US military — is both morally appalling and strategically stupid. Benedict has met many soldiers and marines who agree. They made promises: I will save your family. I will protect you. Now they are forced to break those promises, and it hurts them. Trump started closing these programs in his first administration. The current proposal to send Afghan interpreters and their families to the Democratic Republic of Congo, or return them to the Taliban, is a betrayal of everything America promised. Nobody is going to trust us at all.   About the Guest   Helen Benedict is a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and the author of The Soldier’s House (Akashic Books, April 2026), The Good Deed (Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist), The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a dual British-American citizen and lives in New York City.   References:   •       The Soldier’s House by Helen Benedict (Akashic Books, April 2026).   •       The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict — the nonfiction companion to the novel.   •       The Good Deed by Helen Benedict — Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist; about the Greek refugee crisis.   •       Episode 2882: Peter Wehner — Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong in America — the companion episode on Hegseth’s unholy war, referenced in the interview.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:

    37 min
  5. The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism

    3D AGO

    The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism

    “All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross   It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall too. There is what the historian of American neo-Nazism, Steven J. Ross, defines as the “too many Führers Problem.” This, he says, is the central weakness of American neo-Nazism over eight decades. Every far-right leader from the 1940s onward demanded a united fascist movement — and every one of them insisted on being the Führer in charge of it. The result was the permanent fracture of the American far right. That is, until the latest wannabe Führer, Donald Trump, came along.   Last week, the Justice Department sided with the Ku Klux Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Center — the country’s main watchdog against antisemitism, racism, and far-right violence — was accused of running agents within radical right-wing organisations and using charitable funds for improper purposes. In his new book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross says that this has all happened before.   The Secret War Against Hate tells the story of three undercover spy operations — run by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League — that infiltrated every fascist, Nazi, and racist group in America from the 1940s through the 1970s. When government fails to protect its citizens, Ross suggests, it falls to citizens to protect themselves. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was obsessed with communists and mostly indifferent to antisemitism and racism. Rather than the solution, the G-Men were one more problem.   In May 1945, a few days before VE Day, the three spy chiefs — working in offices a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan — wrote the identical memo on the same day. If right-wing groups, fractured by the “too many Führers problem,” ever found a way to communicate instantaneously with one another, and if one of them ever peeled off into a mainstream political party, they warned, American democracy would be in big trouble. That was their “Too Many Führers Problem.” Springtime for an American Hitler. Today this problem is no longer a joke. Five Takeaways   •       The Justice Department Sides with the KKK: The opening frame of the interview: last week, the Justice Department accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of running agents within radical right-wing groups and using charitable funds improperly. Ross’s argument: the same accusations were levelled at the undercover spy operations run by the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League from the 1940s onward. Those operations, which operated because government had abrogated its responsibility to protect minorities, foiled plot after plot. The FBI informants doing the same thing were never prosecuted. The pattern — government targeting the anti-hate watchdogs while ignoring actual hate — is not new.   •       J. Edgar Hoover: The Enemy Within: Hoover ran the FBI from the early 1920s until his death in 1972, and throughout that period he cared almost exclusively about communists. Correspondence with his Atlanta special agent-in-charge referred to the Anti-Defamation League as the “Anti-Deformation League.” Ross stops short of calling him an antisemite and racist — no burning gun — but says the correspondence smells like both. In 1940, the German-American Bund was operating freely in Los Angeles: the LA ports were open to Nazi spies, propaganda, and payoffs in ways that New York’s — under the watchful eye of Mayor La Guardia — were not. Because of Leon Lewis’s undercover spy network, every Nazi plot in Southern California was foiled.   •       Three Memos, One Day, Three Authors Who Didn’t Know Each Other: In May 1945, a few days before VE Day, the leaders of the three undercover operations — working in offices a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan, unknown to each other — each independently wrote the same memo. Their two shared fears: first, that if fractured right-wing groups ever found a way to communicate instantaneously with one another, the resistance would be overwhelmed. Second, that if any of them ever peeled off into a mainstream political party, bringing their antisemitic and racist views into the mainstream, the republic would be in real danger. Both predictions, Ross observes, have now come true.   •       The Too Many Führers Problem: Every right-wing leader from the 1940s onward called for a united fascist front — and every one of them wanted to be the Führer in charge of it. The result was permanent fracture: each group too small and too self-important to unify with the others. What changed with Trump, Ross argues, is that the far right said: here is our Führer. He is articulating what we say. After Charlottesville — “there are good people on both sides” — the deal was sealed. The internet gave them the ability to communicate instantaneously. Trump gave them the figurehead. The two conditions the 1945 memos feared most had arrived simultaneously.   •       Jefferson’s Long-Term Solution: Educate Everyone: Ross ends his book with Thomas Jefferson — the right wing’s own favourite founding father. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson warned that every so often a political huckster would come along and convince Americans that what was good for him was good for the country. Americans would believe it for a while. But a collectively educated citizenry, really studying the issues, would always come out on the side of democracy. Jefferson called for a constitutional amendment mandating universal education in perpetuity. Ross’s verdict: look at the voting patterns. Look at what is happening to the Department of Education. The attack on higher education is not incidental. An uneducated public is the most vulnerable public.   About the Guest   Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the author of The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy (Simon & Schuster, April 2026) and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (Pulitzer Prize finalist). He lives in Los Angeles.   References:   •       The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy by Steven J. Ross (Simon & Schuster, April 2026).   •       Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross — Pulitzer Prize finalist; the companion volume.   •       Episode 2882: Peter Wehner on Trump’s Unholy War — the companion episode on the moral coll...

    49 min
  6. The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting

    4D AGO

    The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting

    “The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle   The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture, a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In its concluding essay by Brewster Kahle — founder of the Internet Archive, member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the closest thing the web has to an official librarian — he makes the case for preserving the online library system.   “Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.”   Today’s internet library system, Kahle argues, is worse than the analogue one he grew up with. It’s faster, he acknowledges, but shallower. The 1976 Copyright Act means that rather than buying digital books, libraries can only rent access in surveillance environments controlled by a handful of corporations. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. So an entire generation is growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century.   “The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free,” as the editor of Current Affairs put it. That is today’s internet. No laughter. Only forgetting. Five Takeaways   •       Carnegie Moment or Alexandria Moment: The Internet Archive’s pamphlet Vanishing Culture opens with a choice. Andrew Carnegie invested in public libraries during the early twentieth century: every town in America got one, and by the time the US was thrust onto the world stage after World War II, an educated public was ready. The Library of Alexandria burned. Kahle’s argument: we are at the same fork in the road. The digital transition can be a Carnegie moment — everyone with access to all human knowledge — or it can be an Alexandria moment. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. The library system we have is worse, not better, than the one Kahle grew up with.   •       The 1976 Copyright Act as Original Sin: Copyright used to be opt-in: you had to put a ‘c’ on your work and register it. The 1976 Act made it opt-out: everything is copyrighted by default, forever, with terms that keep being extended. The consequences: Wikipedia had to be written from scratch because the encyclopedias already written couldn’t be shared openly. Academic papers are walled inside publisher systems, which is why arXiv exists. Libraries can no longer buy digital books — only rent access in surveillance environments. The bargain between publishers, libraries, authors, and the public that functioned for centuries has been dissolved by lobbyists writing copyright law.   •       The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Kahle’s most quotable line belongs to someone else — the editor of Current Affairs. But Kahle endorses it fully. An entire generation is now growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century. People are genuinely confused about whether the Holocaust happened — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because it’s behind a paywall. What is free on the internet is what serves the interests of the platforms: viral, emotional, algorithmically optimised, frequently false. The deep, sourced, accurate record costs money to access. That inversion is not an accident. It is the business model.   •       Turnkey Tyranny: Kahle quotes Edward Snowden’s phrase for what surveillance capitalism has built: turnkey tyranny. All it needs is someone motivated to think tyrannically, and all the laws, policies, and technologies are already in place. The internet was built on a protocol: play by the rules and you’re in. That openness is gone. What replaced it is a small number of platforms with enormous centralised control of distribution, purchasing the upstream sources — Comcast buying movie studios, Amazon buying MGM. Whoever controls distribution, Lawrence Lessig’s maxim holds, will eventually control everything upstream from it.   •       AI Mass Larceny? The Real Loser Is People: Asked the binary question — is AI mass larceny, yes or no? — Kahle refuses it. His answer: the fight between publishers and AI companies is Coke versus Pepsi. The real dynamic is large corporations — whether you call them AI companies or publishing conglomerates — taking from people’s goodwill, their creative output, their authorship, and landing the value in very few hands. What Kahle wants is public AI: ClimateGPT, reading the Sri Lankan 1953 fish reports and seeing the patterns in them. AI that serves the public good, not the shareholders of one, two, or three gigantic players. The answer isn’t either Coke or Pepsi. It’s water.   About the Guest   Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the author or editor of Vanishing Culture (Internet Archive, 2024). He was previously the founder of WAIS and Alexa Internet. He lives in San Francisco.   References:   •       Internet Archive — archive.org.   •       Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Disappearing Digital Heritage, ed. Brewster Kahle et al. (Internet Archive, 2024). Available free at archive.org.   •       arXiv (arxiv.org) — the open-access preprint server that routes around academic publishing.   •       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous. The counterpoint to Kahle’s wariness about AI centralisation.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:   (00:30) - The internet’s librarian: forgetting vs. surveillance (01:55) - Carnegie moment or Alexandria moment? (03:20) - Andrew Carnegi...

    43 min
  7. Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America

    4D AGO

    Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America

    “White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips   Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think so, but few others are convinced. Especially the Stanford educated Steve Phillips whose new book, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? is designed to “play offense” in the fight for American racial justice. The title of Phillips’s new book is, of course, a provocation. White men are 29 percent of the population, he tells us, but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all investment funds managed by money managers. Is that really because they’re smarter than everybody else? Or is it because the system is biased in favor of white dudes who graduated from Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.   After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Phillips argues, there was, albeit all-too-briefly, broad agreement that systemic racism existed and needed to be addressed. Then came the 2024 election and the MAGA war against DEI. It’s time to fight back, Phillips says. Rather than defending affirmative action, Phillips says that the question is why, in the richest country in the world, white men hold 90 percent of the power when they are only 29 percent of the population. Until that mathematical inconsistency is explained, there’s no point in pretending that the arc of American history bends toward justice.   Five Takeaways   •       29 Percent of the Population, 90 Percent of the Power: The book’s central data point. White men are 29 percent of the US population. They hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions. They receive 90 percent of venture capital funding. They manage 98 percent of all investment money in the country. Phillips’s argument: you don’t need to allege conscious racism to explain this. You just need to acknowledge that a system shaped by centuries of exclusion doesn’t self-correct. The question the title asks is the question nobody wants to answer: if the system is meritocratic, why do these numbers look like this? Either white men are smarter than everybody else, or the system is not meritocratic.   •       Playing Offense: The book began as a study of what happened to the post-George Floyd consensus. The broad agreement that systemic racism existed — widespread in June 2020 — dissolved within months. By 2024, the political momentum had reversed entirely. Phillips’s diagnosis: the left spent the intervening years playing defense — defending DEI, defending affirmative action, defending the language of equity. The result was a retreat. His prescription: stop defending programmes and start prosecuting the inequality. Make the other side explain the numbers. Reframe the question from “should we have DEI?” to “why do white men hold 90 percent of the power?”   •       The Biker Gang Analogy: To the objection — common from white Americans — that they personally didn’t create the racial wealth gap: Phillips offers the biker gang. A gang comes into someone’s house, takes all the resources, occupies the house, and passes it on to their children. The children can say: I didn’t do anything. But they inherited a structurally unequal situation. The GI Bill after World War II gave billions of dollars in wealth-building to white Americans while largely excluding people of color. The average white family has more than ten times the assets of the average black family. “I didn’t do it” is not the same as “I don’t benefit from it.”   •       The Confederates Never Stopped Fighting: Phillips’s underlying argument: the division in American politics is not left vs. right. It is an existential question that has never been resolved — is this a white country, or is this a multiracial democracy? The Confederates and their ideological heirs never conceded the answer. White fear and resentment at equality is the single most consistent driving force in Republican politics since 1965, the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of the white vote since.   •       America Can’t Pass a Bill to Study Reparations: The wealth of the United States was created by the labour of enslaved black people and on land taken from Native Americans. Banks and insurance companies trace their original capital to the bodies and labour of enslaved people. The racial wealth gap is the direct structural consequence of that history. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a bill not to pay reparations, but merely to study the question. Not a single vote to begin the conversation. Until America can have that conversation, it hasn’t begun to confront what is owed.   About the Guest   Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and the author of Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?, How We Won the Civil War, and Brown Is the New White. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former San Francisco school board president.   References:   •       Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else? Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America by Steve Phillips.   •       Democracy in Color — Phillips’s organisation focused on race and politics.   •       Episode 2883: Melvin Patrick Ely on A Terrible Intimacy — the companion episode on interracial life in the slaveholding South that immediately precedes this one.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:   (00:30) - Introduction: from slavery to the present — has anything changed? (01:11) - The short answer: no. And what it took to end slavery. (02:03) - Why the racial wealth gap persists (03:26) - The Confederates never stopped f...

    58 min
  8. Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up

    5D AGO

    Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up

    “Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare   This week’s editorial from Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.5 and Image 2.0, both outstanding, and then made a move Keith considers more significant than either — pivoting Codex from a programmer’s tool into the central interface for everything. The gravity has shifted from the model to the user interface. You shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore. You should be using Codex. Meanwhile, freemium is working: less tokens, much better output, a functional free tier, and the heaviest users paying for more.   Anthropic’s week was more complicated. The first four days were, in Keith’s word, awful: Opus 4.7 launched with a massive deterioration in performance, hallucinations back, service throttled, timeouts everywhere. Then Anthropic removed features from its paid product, got a furious backlash, and reinstated them within twenty-four hours — what Keith calls Dario’s adolescent-teenager moment. But Friday redeemed the week: Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment, Amazon added $5 billion. The money goes into data center capacity and chips — TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both competing with Nvidia. Two axes are emerging: OpenAI–Nvidia on one side, Anthropic–Google–Amazon on the other.   The bigger question: what does adulting actually require of AI? Keith’s reading of the week’s most interesting piece — on the future of work — is that the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector: nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers. Human-to-human is the scarce resource. Reid Hoffman adds: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires political will. And Altman himself, in his interview with Greg Brockman, described his best-case scenario as one in which abundance lifts everyone up but exacerbates inequality. Which is to say: even optimism, in Silicon Valley, ends in more inequality. Adulting, it turns out, has its limits.   Five Takeaways   •       Codex Is Now the Central App: The most significant move of OpenAI’s week wasn’t ChatGPT 5.5 or Image 2.0 — both outstanding — but the repositioning of Codex. What was a programmer’s tool has become the central interface: it does more things, has access to all the models, and represents a shift in where the gravity of the company sits. From the model to the user interface. Keith’s verdict: you shouldn’t be using ChatGPT anymore for any purpose. You should be using Codex. The freemium model is working because less tokens produce much better output, making the free tier genuinely functional — and the heaviest users still pay for more.   •       Dario’s Adolescent-Teenager Week: Anthropic’s first four days were, in Keith’s reading, a study in how not to adult. Opus 4.7 launched with massively deteriorated performance — hallucinations returned, the service was throttled, users got timeouts. The infrastructure was creaking under load. Then, to compound the problem, Anthropic removed features from its paid tier. The backlash was immediate and furious. They reinstated the features within twenty-four hours. Keith’s diagnosis: reactive, adolescent, exactly the opposite of what OpenAI was demonstrating that same week with deliberate, long-term thinking.   •       $45 Billion and Two Axes: Friday changed the Anthropic picture entirely. Google committed up to $40 billion in infrastructure investment — $10 billion initially. Amazon added an initial $5 billion. The money funds data center capacity and proprietary chips: TPUs from Google, Trainium from Amazon, both in competition with Nvidia. The implication: two separate technological axes are now forming. OpenAI and Nvidia on one side. Anthropic, Google, and Amazon on the other. Keith’s view: great for Google and Amazon; a long-term bet for Anthropic that they don’t need to be an Nvidia customer.   •       The Future of Work Is Human-to-Human: Keith’s most interesting read of the week: a piece on the future of work that argues the durable jobs in an AI economy will be in the relational sector — the jobs where the human element is the product itself. Nurses, therapists, teachers, craft brewers, live performers, care workers, spiritual guides. Not prompt engineering (transitional). Not monitoring AI systems (transitional). Human-to-human. Nursing is already the most popular university major. Keith’s extension: as work disappears, so does the social connection it provides — family, friends, colleagues. Which means religion probably makes a comeback.   •       Sam Altman’s Best Case: More Inequality: In his interview with Greg Brockman on the Core Memory podcast, Altman described three possible AI futures. His favourite: abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but also exacerbates inequality. That was the good outcome. The others were worse. Reid Hoffman adds a necessary corrective: technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own — it requires human agency and political will. Keith’s gloss, via Robert Heinlein’s For Us, The Living: the heritage check — a monthly dividend to all humans from the automated economy’s surplus. Money as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources becomes less meaningful when scarcity itself disappears.   About the Guest   Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.   References:   •       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “Adulting.”   •       Greg Brockman and Sam Altman on the Core Memory podcast — the OpenAI interview that anchors the week.   •       Reid Hoffman, “Faith in the Possible,” Substack — technology’s arc bends toward access, but not on its own.   •       Episode 2878: Victoria Hetherington on The Friend Machine — Keith weighs in on AI companionship and the loneliness question.   •       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

    36 min
See All (2K)

4.1
out of 5
81 Ratings

About

Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Keen
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    2K
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Andrew Keen
  • Show Website
    Keen On America

You Might Also Like