Keen On America

While many of us fear a future in which all our online interactions are with algorithms, the young Florida based programming prodigy, Michael Sayman, actually looks forward to this brave new world. I…

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the dearth of high quality contemporary music and movies. The music writer, David Rowell, agrees with Taplin, but goes one step furthe…

A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, about the death of the American dream which, he argued, can be dated from on 5 June 1968 when Bobby Kennedy wa…

On the week that the price of Bitcoin rose above $100,000 and Trump appointed David Sacks as his “AI and Crypto Czar”, has Silicon Valley finally succeeded in conquering Washington DC? In today’s Tha…

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist …

Few people deserve their place in the Internet Hall of Fame than Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker. Since co-founding the Mozilla Project in the late Nineties, Baker has been one of the most consiste…

Few people are better at demystifying the byzantine complexities of the American healthcare system than the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Robert Pearl, MD. So what does Pearl make of Trump’s nomin…

If Silicon Valley has an official matriarch, it might be the Palo Alto based educator and writer Esther Wojcicki. Popularly known as the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”, Wojcicki is the mother of form…

Steve Blank is one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent hackers. As the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, Blank has changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is c…

If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff. One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became …

As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy show, which will be going into its seventh series next year, Andrew Keen has given much thought to the health of American democracy. In this KEEN ON episo…

Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab chairman Bill Gross. Having founded Idealab in 1996, Gross has been a participant in every wave of digital inno…

This week’s tech news is all about Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy’s DOGE ambitions to supposedly reinvent the Federal government. But as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this…

If the 20th century was the American Century then, for Kishore Mahbubani, the controversial Singaporean writer and diplomat, the 21st century is the Asian Century. In his new memoir, Living the Asian…

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference, today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick, author of The…

As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International, myboldb friend Frank Vogl has always the nose for a good story. So it was particularly interesting to get Frank’s take on th…

Last week, we featured an interview with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy, the former Newsweek techno…

In this KEEN ON Andrew Keen special, guest host David Masciotra interviews Andrew about his controversial book Cult of the Amateur. While David generously describes it as prescient, Andrew focuses mo…

Every digital tech revolution over the last forty years has promised decentralization but each one only seems to have recentralized power. So will the AI revolution be different? Can AI be the tippin…

How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War, the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building …