How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age

In How to Fix the Future, Andrew Keen combines his experiences in Silicon Valley with extensive interviews and analysis to identify the strategies we need in order to tackle the huge challenges of this digital century. This ground-breaking book is the result of extensive travels around the world, from India to Estonia, Germany to Singapore. He examines the best (and worst) practices in five key areas - competition, innovation, oversight, self-regulation and social responsibility - and concludes by examining whether we are seeing the beginning of the end of the America-centric digital world. Throughout he shows that the stakes could not be higher: how can we remain human in an age of digital machines?

About the Author :
Andrew Keen is an author, broadcaster, speaker and entrepreneur and one of the world's best-known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution. He is the executive director of the Silicon Valley salon FutureCast, a columnist for GQ magazine and the author of three acclaimed and prescient books: The Internet Is Not the Answer, Digital Vertigo and The Cult of the Amateur.

Review :
A truly important book and the most significant work so far in an emerging body of literature in which technology's smartest thinkers are raising alarm bells about the state of the Internet, and laying groundwork for how to fix it. How to Fix the Future, by longtime tech critic Andrew Keen, avoids simplistic condemnations, offering instead a progressive plan to ease the growing discomfort with emerging technologies that only a few years ago were being celebrated. The book provides compelling examples of ongoing experiments addressing new ways of developing and integrating socially responsible technology into our lives, especially in media, government, and education . . . Keen genuinely believes that, yes, we can fix the future. With his new book, Keen switches from sarcasm to a kind of pragmatic optimism . . . Like Churchill, he offers mostly blood, sweat and tears; but at least he has a program of what needs to be done . . . It makes sense, as Keen seeks to do, to take the long view of our current dilemmas. In [Keen's] acerbic, articulate global survey of human-centered solutions, he examines best practice in consumer choice, education, innovation, regulation and social responsibility . . . An invigorating mix of principle and vision. After years of giddiness about the wonders of technology, a new realization is dawning: the future is broken... In this bracing book, Keen offers tools for righting our societies and principles to guide us in the future. In this engaging, provocative book, [Keen] outlines five strategies - regulation, competitive innovation, consumer choice, civic responsibility, and education - that, working in collaboration, can help ensure an open, decentralized digital future... Valuable insights on preserving our humanity in a digital world. Keen, has spent his career warning of the dangers of the Internet, takes a more positive turn in this complex yet accessible study. Comparing our current situation to the Industrial Revolution, he stresses the importance of keeping humanity at the center of technology. Eschewing much of the over-the-top luddism that now fills the New York Times, the Guardian, and other mainstream media outlets, Keen proffers practical solutions to a wide range of tech-related woes.