From: The internet is killing our culture... to: The people look like ants.

Here's a fascinating NPR interview with Andrew Keen, who wrote "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture." Needless to say, he's negative about blogging and the like, but I love his attitude. When the NPR guy questions his theory and says that "cultural gatekeepers" are "often protecting entrenched interests who happen to be rich and powerful," he sneers: "That is a neo-Marxist argument."

But isn't it good the way the internet has enabled musicians to leap over the music business and get their work out to the public? Keen is negative. The people who are good at marketing will win, not the best artists. But he seems to think well of the the Arctic Monkeys.

Later, poking around on the bad old internet, I see this:

[Prefixmag]: So you guys didn't even know how to [put] your music on the Internet?
Arctic Monkeys: No, no.

PM: Are you guys Internet users?
Arctic Monkeys: Only to e-mail or whatever; iTunes, stuff like that. But none of us really knew how to. It was a guy at college who made the Web site. We had tried putting music on the site, but it didn't work properly. People couldn't listen to it properly.

PM: I notice you have a pretty popular site on Myspace.
Arctic Monkeys: We don't know about that, either.

PM: So that's not you guys?
Arctic Monkeys: No, no. The other day someone said to us, "I looked at your profile on Myspace." I said, "I don't even know what Myspace is." [When we went number one in England] we were on the news and radio about how Myspace has helped us. But that's just the perfect example of someone who doesn't know what the f*ck they're talking about. We actually had no idea what [Myspace] was.

What would Keen think of that? The musicians were good enough to inspire fans who were web-savvy enough to market them. It doesn't seem as though a whole lot of business genius is involved. But the group's name stuck in my head, and I happened to see a video of theirs when I was idly clicking around on YouTube today, and got to this video of "Leave Before the Lights Come On," which I liked enough to link to in an IM with John.

John responds:

mm, i'd like to hear more from them since they're playing a style of music I've been listening to a lot, but I'm not really a fan of that song. I think it's pretty generic....

the gimmick of starting a video out with someone on the ledge of a building contemplating suicide has been done.

He sends me this link to a video by Collective Soul, "The World I Know."

me: this is a much more professional video

john: yeah

me: I like the way the bird makes him think maybe life is worth living, then the ants seem especially cool, and then "the people look like ants" either means that seeing a cliché made real is so amusing that he wants to live or he actually suddenly appreciates humanity because he started off liking ants and then it was like oh, okay, since i know I like ants, maybe if people are like ants I want to live.

john: ha

john: you should blog that...

John was thus doing some gatekeeping, of the go on, go ahead variety that I'm sure would make the snobby old Mr. Keen cringe. What? We're publishing 9 p.m. IMs now? Yes, we are, old man.... like a million little ants.

ADDED: I see that Glenn Reynolds trashed Keen's book here:

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture... is basically an extended paean to the lost Golden Age of middlebrow taste-makers and big-media megaphones, and an extended jeremiad against an age in which people are free to make up their own minds, and make their own contributions. Keen is even sad about the declining influence of small-scale taste-makers: He decries the absence of the "deeply knowledgeable Tower clerk" in the world of online record sales, and he seems to think that the musical snobs in the book (and film) High Fidelity were supposed to be appealing characters.

Ha ha.