The Authorship Society

I don't usually link to the Weekly Standard, but here's a confoundingly wierd little Ayn Randy piece by Andrew Keen on the so-called Web 2.0 revolution, what many are calling the "authorship society." Keen first takes issue with the 60's Marxian utopianism of everyone-with-their-own-multimedia-blog thinking. While this is part of a the dream of "intellectual property communists" like Laurence Lessig, it's going to "flatten" the field of art into white noise. I applaud Keen for such a wonderful image. Strangely, Keen invokes the flattening metaphor that fellow neo-con Thomas Friedman uses to describe the equalizing tendencies of so-called free trade. Now there's a change-up. So, whither this authorship society? The horrors of anarchy or the wonders of unfettered free enterprise? Perhaps Keen shows his cards: the neo-cons have never been about free enterprise. Monopoly suits them much better. Art, Keen tells us, is supposed to be made by elites like...ahem...Hitchcock and Bono, who are the best the big monopoly studios have to offer. I wish it worked like that. Unfortunately, Keen fails to recognize that Hitchcock and Bono are the exception to his exalted Culture Industry. Britney is a much more honest illustration. I think I'm beginning to figure out the strange relationship neo-cons have to art and its production. Perhaps this relationship can be summed up this way: the art must be good; it came from the big art machine!