About Andrew Keen, host of AfterTV.

Let me begin with a confession: I’ve always fancied myself as another Terry Gross.

Not literally – since I wear neither glasses nor ornate earrings. But I’ve always wanted to be a chat show host. Not only is hosting a chat show a perfect excuse to talk with lots of interesting people but it is also a great way of hearing first about the latest ideas on media, culture and technology.

In addition to being an aspiring Terry Gross, I am also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and impresario. I founded Audiocafe.com in 1996 and built it into a cacophonous, generously funded digital media business. In 2000, I was the Executive Producer of MB5: The Festival for New Media Visionaries, the legendary show that captured the most lucid prophesies and worst hubris of the Nineties Internet mania. Since 2000, I’ve played executive roles at a number of high profile, venture backed technology companies including Pulse 3D, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where I currently direct the company’s global strategic sales.

Before my vertiginous adventures in Silicon Valley, I was a university professor. Born in North London, I attended London University and earned a First Class Honours degree in History. I was a British Council Scholar at the University of Sarajevo in Yugoslavia during the mid Eighties. I did my graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a fellow at the Macarthur funded Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behaviour. I have lectured about politics, history and modern culture at a number of New England schools including Tufts, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts.

A second confession: I am a media, culture and technology junkie. I have written extensively about music, cinema and politics for many magazines and newspapers in both America and Europe. My own media obsessions include the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, the music of Bono and U2 and the books of W.G. Sebald. My three most cherished pieces of media all happen to be called Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Sebald’s Vertigo (1999) and U2/Bono’s “Vertigo” (2004). Beyond Vertigo, I like to read other people’s anti utopian visions -- particularly those of Franz Kafka, Edmund Burke, William Gibson, George Orwell and Jorge Luis Borges. What particularly interests me about all these dystopian writers is the way that their work exposes the great seduction of their particular age. In homage to this tradition, you can read my own anti utopian thoughts at my blog.