Kevin Kelly

Technology Visionary

BIG IDEAS

• We Are the Web
  In the past decade, the Internet rocketed from obscurity to mainstream. Despite a boom and bust, many of the promises made by early Internet boosters have come true: the web *has* changed how business, politics, education, and entertainment is done. All that, however, is merely the warm-up to much bigger benefits. The web will change more in the next 10 years than in the last 10. The first revolution was about wires and wireless, clicks and bricks, bits and bytes. The next 10 years of the web are about us. We are the web. The coming technological transformation is the power of humans within the web. The emerging technologies we all should be paying attention to will harness the collective activities and intelligence of several billion humans as they live inside the web. Three mega-trends are at work: The web becomes universal. It seeps into all objects; it is always on; screens become ubiquitous, and most of the Internet users in the world will be non-Americans. If it is not on the web, it doesn't exist. No other platform counts. Paper doesn't count; neither does broadcast, computer make, or operating system. There is only the web. As information sciences overtake biological sciences and saturate our entire culture, the web will shift and redefine our identity in the coming decades. Already the web is our memory. (It's easier to look something up than remember it.) Technology challenges our identity as males or females, national citizens, and eventually as humans. If we are the web, then what are we? Return of the social. The new power is in the collective intelligence of large groups, many small groups, or the "group of one" — you, over time. We think we are just selfishly clicking on the web, but in reality we are constructing the largest social machine the world has ever seen. Just as capitalism turns greedy individuals into a prospering invisible hand, the web is turning egocentric individuals into a powerful invisible mind, able to create new services and products, and consume in a new way of doing business. In the next 10 years, we are the web.
• The Emerging Participation Matrix
  You've heard of mass culture? We are now in the era of mess culture. This is the era of prosumers—where producers (artists, inventors) and consumers (audiences, users) are the same set of people. Where customers, rather than staff, create the value that businesses sell. Where ideas that are impossible in theory (a free reliable encyclopedia written by readers) are possible in practice. Where money is replaced by gifts. Where messy open access for anyone is more valuable than exact polish and fit. Where flexibility and liquidity in users hands is more important than corporate precision and safeguards. Where unlicensed amateurs count more than professionals. Where open-ended options to customize trump highly designed features. Where ownership is given to those who maintain and improve. Where the barriers to engage at a high level are so low, anyone can be a disruption. Where participation—rather than consumption—is maximized. This is the world being created by the web, nanotechnology, and bioengineering, as they proliferate in the lives of the young around the planet. It's a new world, an emerging matrix for participation unlike anything we've seen yet. There are new values—of sharing, of collective intelligence, of work and play, and of ownership and property—that must be mastered in the coming years.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Kevin Kelly has been a participant of, and reporter on, the information technology revolution for the past 20 years. Based in his studio in Pacifica, California, he immerses himself in the long-term trends of technology, tools, new media, and cultural behavior. He writes about the ripple effects and social consequences surrounding the culture of technology. Kevin Kelly is currently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. During Kelly’s tenure as editor at Wired, the magazine won two National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of two Oscars). He is also currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990, Kevin was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy, and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control (called “required reading for all executives” by Fortune). In addition, he writes for prominent publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire. Earlier in life, Kevin was a photographer in remote parts of Asia (instead of going to college), publishing his photographs in national magazines and recently in the photo art book Asia Grace.

A Closer Look at Kevin

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Kevin's current research agenda?

• Kevin is currently researching his next book, in which he hopes to answer the question, “What does technology want?” He’s posting his thoughts-in-progress on The Technium, a semi-blog.
• He feeds his ongoing obsession for great tools with a weekly email notice containing personal reviews of gear, books, and software that he and others find indispensable. Anything that assists individual education, empowerment, or possibilities is a candidate. To subscribe, go to http://www.kk.org/cooltools/subscribe. (Furthermore, if you know of something that should be included but isn't, please write to him.)
• Kevin serves as Chairman of the Board of All Species Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth.
• He’s also heavily focused on the exciting work at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board. Long Now is a non-profit group dedicated to fostering long-term responsibility as an antidote to the extremely short-term horizon of most contemporary organizations. Kevin and Stewart Brand co-host Long Now public seminars each month featuring talks on long-term thinking. Past speakers include Brian Eno, Paul Hawken, Danny Hillis, among the better known, and many other equally talented original thinkers. The forums happen every second Friday of the month at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and they are free to the public.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Kevin's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Kevin’s ideal speaking engagements are interactive and represent as much of a learning experience for him as for those with whom he is working. He frequently discusses changes in technology, the future of technology, and the cultural ramifications of technology. He is particularly interested in the social and spiritual consequences of technology and the future of that. As such, his content often bridges technology and philosophy. What does technology mean to us? Is it contrary to human nature? What’s the spiritual dimension of technology?

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Kevin's thinking and inspires his work?

Kevin is inspired by the members of the Global Business Network, particularly Brian Eno and Stewart Brand. He also gathers ideas by traveling overseas; he’s especially fond of Asia.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Kevin's must-read list?

Linking everything to everything

The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle

About five years ago John Battelle started pursuing his hunch that search technology like Google was the most powerful cultural force at work in the modern world. Few believed him. Back then search was pure nerd-dom. Ugly algorithms and no money. Geekware. The Google IPO in 2005 woke up the last doubters to the fact that search is at the heart of the next new new thing. Battelle has great sense of timing (John was one of the co-founding editors at Wired with me), and he delivers a marvelous introduction about where search came from and what search means in technology, in business, in society, and in ourselves. Listen to the technology, Carver Mead preaches; John Battelle has listened harder to search technology than anyone else, and he can tell us some amazing things it is telling us. —Kevin Kelly

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Real economies in imaginary places

Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, by Edward Castronova

Virtual reality is halfway here in the form of massive multi-player online role playing games like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Ultima Online. Outsiders think these games are silly diversions overrun by pudgy guys in dim basements pretending to be elves, but the millions of gamers themselves (most of them actually women) know better. This is, as the new game in town is called, our Second Life. It's old news that real things can happen in these unreal places. Julian Dibbell's under-appreciated 2001 book My Tiny Life, explored the weirdness of whether a virtual rape in a virtual world was a real crime. This new book, Synthetic World, goes further. It tallies up all the world-changing consequences stemming from market places in fantasy worlds. Edward Castronova is an economist who began studying the exchange rates of token money in these games, analyzing the emerging prices as powers and characters were sold on eBay. He quickly concluded that these games have robust economies as large and as "real" as many real countries. The clincher to this tale has been the recent stampede of newbies signing up for the game Second Life when USA Today revealed that amateurs were making hard cash (US dollars) selling virtual real estate in this unreal place. This is the fantastical stacked on the implausible stacked on the unexpected, but it is all very actual. —Kevin Kelly

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Accelerating into utopia

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil

This book offers three things that will make it a seminal document: 1) It brokers a new idea, not widely known; 2) The idea is about as big as you can get: the Singularity — all the change in the last millions years will be superceded by the change in the next five minutes; and 3) It is an idea that demands informed response. The book's claims are so footnoted, documented, graphed, argued, and plausible in small detail, that it requires the equal in response. Yet its claims are so outrageous that if true, it would mean... well ... the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of Utopia. Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Erlich's upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, it's the wave at epicenter you have to start with. —Kevin Kelly

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Former civilizations here

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann

The news in this book is that the New World was an old world. It was far more populated, far more developed, far longer before the arrival of Columbus, a orthodox history believes. Charles Mann makes the best case yet, in non-technical prose, for the emerging archeological view that native Americans (north and south) had created vast cities and civilizations on a scale that dwarfed Europe at the time. These bustling cities, not just in MesoAmerica, but in the Mississippi and the Amazon, were erased into invisibility ahead of settlers (and textbooks) by disease and environmental factors. In scope this book is a good compliment to Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel. But 1491 heightens the discrepancy of development described by Diamond because now we see how far along American civilizations were before they unraveled on contact with the old world. —Kevin Kelly

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It's all information, up and down

Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, by Seth Lloyd

What an astonishing book. Seth Lloyd, a quantum bit wrangler at MIT, proves that not only is the universe really a computer, but the universe is a computer we can program! He is not the first to see the world this way, but he is the first to translate this mathematical intuition into plain English. Lloyd is at the forefront of a revolution in science that says everything that exists (atoms, energy, space) is just bits of information. As the new mantra goes: all its are bits! The beauty of this book, and Lloyd's heroic achievement, is to transform that utterly mind-boggling view into a reasonable idea that anyone can begin to understand. A programmable universe is a scientific idea whose time will come in future decades, but you can read it here first. —Kevin Kelly

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MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Kevin tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Foo Camp – Wikipedia defines Foo Camp as “the annual invitation only, no-structure, no plan, tent on the lawns, hacker event hosted by publisher Tim O'Reilly.” Kevin calls it “cool and still evolving.”

Burning Man – (www.burningman.com)

Magazines – Kevin describes himself as an incurable magazine junkie and says, “I even read a lot of magazines I have no interest in because I feel like I should know about [those subjects.]”

OUTREACH
What are Kevin's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

 Kevin uses his website (www.kk.org) to solicit input, feedback, and ideas from others. Currently, new, “cool tools” are a real interest for him. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. Check out others’ recommendations or submit a tool by visiting http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.php.

The “Other Projects” link on Kevin’s site includes a “Help Wanted” section, where he writes, “Occasionally I have questions the collective intelligence of readers can answer best, so I'm using this space to post my queries. Anyone offering an answer can respond in the comment section of that query. Your replies will help greatly. I'm happy to credit anything I use.”