"Amateur" charge infuriates blogosphere

By Eric Auchard

BERKELEY, California (Reuters) - Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter.

Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favor of the amateurism of blogs, MySpace and other popularity-driven sites.

"Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys ... are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity," Keen writes in a book published Tuesday.

His views have infuriated bloggers and others, especially in Silicon Valley, who argue he is an elitist intellectual, a conservative pining for a return to old ways, and a writer who cannot keep his facts straight.

The villains in Keen's narrative are a "pajama army" of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, "intellectual kleptomaniacs," who search Google to copy others' work and the "digital thieves" of media content in the post-Napster era.

For a technology industry used to basking in the glow of self-promotion, Keen's work is shocking for its unforgiving view of Silicon Valley's utopian aspirations.

The book "is designed as a grenade," Keen, a native of north London who now lives in California, said at a recent debate with bloggers and journalists in Berkeley. "It is not designed to be particularly fair or balanced."

The title of his polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture," attacks what he calls the "cut and paste" ethic of Web users, who he says are robbing professionals of their livelihoods.