The Cult of the Silicon Valley Antichrist, or lack there of.

The Internet: It's a free country

My attitude towards Keen's Cult of the Amateur is this: If you don't want it stolen, don't put it online. In "today's democratized Internet culture," it is just common knowledge that once something is posted online, it's fair game. That's just the way it is, and the way it will be.

There are plenty of ways to protect your content, if you just know where to look. You can post your writing in a certain way that people will not be able to copy and paste, without going through the arduous task of taking a screen shot and re-writing it verbatim. Also, in addition to having your work copyrighted, you can now redefine those copyright rules by using an online service called Creative Commons. CC copyrights the works you put online and lets people know what they can and cannot take for personal use.

Get on with it

Keen make some very good points, but he's fighting an uphill battle. I agree with him that there needs to be gatekeepers, people with a long list of credentials who are recognized as experts and authority figures within their given field. But complaining about Web 2.0 is nothing more than white noise. The Internet is here and it's not going anywhere. We can change some of the ways we do business within the online community, but other things he will just have to get used to. People are going to post videos of their cat and their baby, and they may even post a video they stole from CNN. People are going to steal someone else's photos from Flickr and use them in their blog. And in that blog, they may even steal, copy and paste some excerpts from a book of his. That's just the way it is, and the sooner he accepts it, the sooner he can move on to real solutions.

Cutting and pasting, of course, is child's play on Web 2.0, enabling a younger generation of intellectual kleptomaniacs, who think their ability to cut and paste a well-phrased thought or opinion makes it their own.

Original file-sharing technologies like Napster and Kazaa, which gained so much attention during the first web boom, pale in comparison to the latest Web 2.0 "remixing" of content and "mashing up" of software and music.

In a twisted kind of Alice In Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole logic, Silicon Valley visionaries...laud the appropriation of intellectual property.