Neel Shah got his scandal-phone returned; Kevin Marks got retweeted by ghosts and Al Yankovic was surrounded by nobodies. The Twitterati were haunted, in a good way.

David Karp lectured the twittering masses on acting "classy," Lance Armstrong held forth on what Real Men don't do on the internet, and Andrew Keen detested your inspirational quotes. The Twitterati were feeling judgy.

Andrew Keen has gone insane. The author, who has railed against the Internet for destroying our culture, now says we all must become self-promoting, Facebook-friending, constantly Twittering monkeys like unemployed videoblogger Robert Scoble.

Imagine Father Coughlin, the hateful radio demagogue of the 1930s, spewing vitriol on YouTube. That's why poor people can't be trusted with the Internet, says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur.

Yesterday Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures quoted extensively from "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," a 2006 article in Philosophy Now by Alan Kirby. Kirby's piece does much to sum up the relationship of communications technology and cultural theory without the shrill demagoguery of anticrowdsourcing fanatic Andrew Keen:

Ever since Andrew Keen wrote his polemic The Cult of the Amateur, we've all had to deal with pretentious debates on Web 2.0's effects on culture. Enough. To settle the matter, filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen debuted a 45-minute documentary called The Truth According To Wikipedia at the Next Web conference last week. We've pared it down to a watchable 1 minute and 30 seconds — the length of most YouTube videos you like to watch.

"They're toads," Tony Kornheiser recently said about bloggers on a radio show for which he is paid good money. "They're little toads. Actually, they're pimples on the behind of the greater body politic in this country and in this city. And because, because they have access to airwaves and three or four people read them, they think, 'Oh, I'm very important.'" Kind of like radio hosts! But enough of that goofball, there are nine bigger blogger-haters who deserve derision — not because bloggers don't deserve constant mockery, but because insulting an entire class of people always guarantees failure.

• Thanks to that health nut Steve Jobs, your kids are gonna get Hot Wheels and Barbies in every Happy Meal from now on — just as Jobs becomes Disney's biggest stockholder, the Mouse stops signing Happy Meal toy contracts with McDonald's. [ZDNet]