Ian Burrell: The internet Antichrist who is converting online evangelists

Andrew Keen, the British-born and self-styled "Antichrist of Silicon Valley", has a problem. The internet evangelists who once heckled and abused him for his heretical questioning of the accepted wisdom of the digital future are now starting to agree with him.

Keen is a strange concoction. Based in Santa Rosa amid the cream of the world's technological innovators, he has long been a lone voice, warning of the potentially corrosive effects of the internet. In his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, he claimed that a medium that had created opportunities for everyone to become film-makers and writers and to obtain all the music they wanted for nothing was ruining our culture by undermining the industries that support professionally produced material. He became a hate figure. "I was accused of being an elitist and a reactionary," Keen told me over tea in a London hotel last week.

His latest tome, Digital Vertigo, highlights what he sees as the insidious nature of social media, which he believes is actually destabilising personal relationships rather than strengthening them. Suddenly he has found some unlikely supporters. "I made a speech in Belgrade about three weeks ago to an audience of real hardcore internet activists. It was packed and I thought when I give this speech they are going to eat me alive. But afterwards there was this massive applause and hundreds of people came up to me and said 'I agree with what you said'."

In spite of his unfashionable views, Keen gets listened to because he talks with the authority of a Silicon Valley mavin. His supporters include Sir Martin Sorrell, a great enthusiast for digital advertising, who says Digital Vertigo might be one of the few books that in 20 years' time "will be seen to have got it right".

The furore around the Facebook initial public offer (IPO) has come at a good time for Keen. He claims that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was never trusted by the more altruistic internet activists. "Zuckerberg is disliked and the company is disliked by more and more people who see the internet as a vehicle for freedom and justice and improving the world. There are very few people who think Facebook is improving the world and it's not just this stock (market) thing."

Indeed he thinks Facebook, with its reliance on advertising rates (which are tumbling), is a flawed business. "I wouldn't buy Facebook stock if you gave it to me," he says. "Why would Facebook be worth $100bn? It's a company that doesn't have much technology, has an unproven business model, a young CEO, and is on the internet, where we know from the MySpace example that millions of people change their mind over a few months and go somewhere else."

He is only slightly more sympathetic to Google, just as he believes internet radicals feel warmer to its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, than they do to Zuckerberg. "I don't think Google will become a (fallen giant like) AOL or Yahoo, the worst fate of Google would be to become a Microsoft and become slowly irrelevant – whereas Facebook could conceivably crash through the ice."

The growth of social media is "the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution," says Keen. In his book, we find him back in Britain, eating grilled kippers, drinking bitter and returning to his alma mater of University College London, where he gazes on the cadaver of Jeremy Bentham preserved in its glass case, according to the wishes of the great 19th century social reformer. "Like the corpse locked in his transparent tomb, we are all now on permanent exhibition," he reflects.

He is an avid consumer of news and believes newspaper businesses must charge for content. He admires the New York Times soft paywall that allows access to digital content for his $25 a month subscription to the Sunday edition. He is also a fan of the Wall Street Journal's more restrictive model. "(Rupert) Murdoch gets a lot of flak for not knowing what's going on but I think he has done a pretty good job with the Wall Street Journal, they have adapted as well as anybody to digital." And he notes with amusement that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has recently bought American publication The New Republic (founded 1914). "It's very ironic that the people who are supposed to be revolutionaries in media – who have made a lot of money out of rather fly-by-night schemes like Facebook – then reinvest their capital in buying old media products."