Episode 2013: Candida Moss on how Christian slaves helped write the Bible and why this will outrage some American evangelicals
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
10h ago
In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, riffs off this Nietzchean idea by suggesting that enslaved Christians, as well as artisans and women, might have actually written (or, at least, transcribed) the Bible. This precariat of antiquity were, Moss argues in her new God’s Ghostwriters, not much different to the Amazon delivery men and Uber drivers who now make up the labor force of our dig ..read more
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Episode 2012: David Donnelly on the catastrophic costs to humanity of Silicon Valley surveillance capitalism
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
22h ago
Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENIENCE, trots all the familiar charges that we’ve heard over the years from KEEN ON guests like Shoshana Zuboff , Jaron Lanier, Nick Carr and Roger McNamee. It’s good stuff, I guess, even if we’ve heard these existential warnings many times before. The problem is what to do about it. Like most Silicon Valley critics, Donnelly’s fixes - from more education and regulation to g ..read more
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Episode 2011: Peter Wehner as the conscience of both American conservatism and Christianity
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
3d ago
Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblind”, Wehner told me. And, in contrast with the ethically monochromatic Trump, Peter Wehner’s moral palette is akin to a sophisticated painter. In a wide ranging KEEN ON AMERICA conversation about his life in and out of Republican politics, Wehner explains why there is nothing “conservative” about Trump or “Christian” about many right-wing evangelicals, and how the Republican ..read more
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Episode 2010: How everyone, even business school professors, are joining the anti big tech church
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
3d ago
Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka’s THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn’t clear to me is how we are supposed to distinguish good big tech guys like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, & Reid Hoffman from the evil Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk. Lalka’s fetishization of “ordinary people” might be well meaning, but it doesn’t really address today’s alchemic chal ..read more
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Episode 2009: Keith Teare on why Big Tech might be getting even BIGGER
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
4d ago
All the tech news this week seems to be about how Big Tech is, for better or worse, getting BIGGER. There’s the Department of Justice anti-trust case against Apple, a hail-Mary attempt by Biden’s DOJ to transform to the high-end iPhone into a lower-end Android device. There’s Microsoft’s “acquisition” of InflectionAI, orchestrated by Reid Hoffman, both a co-founder of InflectionAI and a Microsoft board member. There’s a new Saudi $40 billion AI fund. There’s Elon Musk’s Neuralink announcement of an astonishing breakthrough in brain implants. So what becomes of the little guy, the genuine innov ..read more
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Episode 2008: Chris French on the Science of Weird S**t
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
5d ago
As we approach Easter and Passover, it’s worth noting that our mainstream monotheistic creeds are based on a belief in what Professor Chris French, the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths college at London University, would call “weird s**t”. So as French, the author of new MIT press book THE SCIENCE OF WEIRD S**T, explained to me, maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised with all the weird s**t about pizza parlors and extraterrestrial invasions that seems to have invaded all but the most scientific minds. Nobody seems to believe anything any ..read more
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Episode 2007: Bethanne Patrick's guide to a literary March madness
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
6d ago
We would all be way more ignorant without omnivorous book critic and regular KEEN ON guest Bethanne Patrick. This month she recommends six new books by Russell Banks, Adam Philips, Percival Everett, Andrew Dubus III, Marie Mutsuki Mockett & Adelle Waldman. So don’t complain you’ve got nothing to read. No excuses. Bethanne Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200,000 followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angele ..read more
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Everything you wanted to know about sex but didn't have the imagination to ask
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
1w ago
Warning: this is an adults-only show. David Baker, the Australian based author of The Shortest History of Sex, takes us through two billion years of sexual evolution. And, from the first microbial exchanges of DNA to Darwin and Freud, Tinder and sexbots, it’s not a pretty story. The good news, however, is that neither Baker nor I took off our clothes or confessed to any unusual fetishes. But we did talk about the sexual significance of Baker’s mustache which, I suspect, represents a kind of climax to two billion years of procreation and recreation. David Baker is a history and science writer w ..read more
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Episode 2005: Why the Pete Rose story is as much about the rise and fall of America as it is about the fate of Charlie Hustle
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
1w ago
Even if it isn’t quite Spring, the professional baseball season begins today in, of all places, Korea. And to celebrate this premature rite, I spoke with Keith O’Brien, the author of CHARLIE HUSTLE, the new Pete Rose biography already acclaimed as a “masterpiece”. Rose himself, O’Brien reveals, was anything but a masterpiece - a gambling addict who reflected all the gendered, class and racial realities of late 20th century America. Far more than a baseball story, O’Brien explains, the Pete Rose story is as much about the rise and fall of 20th century America as it is about the fate of Cincinna ..read more
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EPISODE 2004: Jacob Heilbrunn on conservative America's 100 year romance with foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Pinochet, Orban and Putin
Keen On Democracy
by Andrew Keen
1w ago
In his new book AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that American conservatives have always had the hots for foreign dictators like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet. And so, he argues, it’s no great surprise that contemporary rightists like Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have all fallen so heavily for contemporary European enemies of democracy. It’s a fatal attraction, Heilbrunn describes this illiberal infatuation with autocrats like Orban and Putin. And it reflects the weakness, rather than the strength ..read more
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