"We are all Scoble now," Keen writes. Who? Scoble, a tech blogger who gained a measure of microcelebrity when Microsoft hired him a few years ago, makes videos so boring that Fast Company, his most recent employer, fired him. His lackluster videojournalism was not why anyone paid attention to him, of course; they're more attracted by the spectacle of his incessant use of microblogging service Twitter, where he has 67,000 "followers."

Keen argues that we must all follow Scoble's example and cultivate meaningless relationships that allow us to promote our work — that, indeed, with the collapse of Wall Street and Detroit, self-promotion is the only industry America has left. It's a depressingly accurate thought: A nation of Scobles, never producing anything but distracting people from that emptiness at our core by constantly talking.

He's certainly trying his best himself, assiduously courting the Twitterati to promote his next book, and ridiculing authors who do not engage in self-promotion, like Jonathan Littel, the writer of Holocaust epic The Kindly Ones:

For writers, the great publishing transformation over the next few years has nothing to do with the Kindle 2 or anything other supposedly miraculous technological device. No, the real revolution will be in the way we writers can take advantage of all this new digital technology — blogs, Twitter, interactive television, Internet radio etc etc — to better promote ourselves and our work. All writers — from $1,000,000 lottery-winners like Littel to the tens of thousands of professional writers like myself living off much smaller advances — need to think of self-promotion, both in physical and digital form, as intrinsic to our value.

A shy writer in the 21st century is a starving writer. Diffidence is death. Littel should set a better example. Come to America, Jonathan, and tell us more about your epic Nazi book. It's actually surprisingly nice here.

Ah yes, that's what we need: 140-character tweets about the Holocaust.

For that reason, writes Keen in the Daily Beast, we should not spend billions of dollars upgrading U.S. Internet connections. Expanding broadband access to the great unwebbed, at a time when the economy is in the tank, will just lead to the spread of halfbaked conspiracy theories and the rise of populist anger.

Wait, what happened to blogs stopping the rise of Hitler? Oh, well, Keen's a bit of a snob: He doesn't like blogs, YouTube, MySpace, or basically anything on the Internet that anyone else likes. But we had no idea he was actually, provably stupid.

First of all, let's get real about the broadband plan. It's not going to get that many more people on the Internet. Already, 90 percent of U.S. Internet users are on broadband. The ones who aren't are mostly happy with their dial-up connections, which they use to check email and download photos of their grandkids. And people who aren't online are generally old rather than poor. Anyone a demagogue would want to reach, they already can today.

No, what the broadband stimulus package really amounts to a bailout for phone companies, which would otherwise have to spend their own money upgrading their networks for higher capacity. This, in turn, will allow for faster delivery of online video.

And who's going to pay for all that video? Why, advertisers. And finicky advertisers are far better regulators of loopy extremists than the government will ever be. They hate controversy! As do Internet companies, if only because it means having to spend money on customer-service personnel. So much easier to let the community flag a video as "offensive" and take it down.

So the Father Coughlins of the world will be left broadcasting low-resolution bile over the slowest of connections, constantly running into bandwidth caps. Meanwhile, safe, apolitical pablum will zip speedily over government-subsidized lines, safely narcotizing the masses. Sure, we have plenty to fear from a national broadband plan. But it's not Andrew Keen's racist, classist paranoia that he might run into someone poorer and less white than him in a chat room.