Exploring the Possible with Kevin Kelly
If ideas are your drug, you want Kevin Kelly as your dealer. His books, articles and podcasts are a wonderland of possibilities, concepts and hints of futures yet to be built. The wandering prophet of our digital future, for 40 years Kevin Kelly has helped Hollywood and Silicon Valley imagine and invent the Internet Age.
What makes Kevin Kelly’s writing so compelling is that it is grounded in the human and the real. Thinking about the future is part of what makes us human. More than any other force, the future is dictated by technology.
Kevin Kelly considers Technology broadly. He defines technology as anything invented; from language and culture to apps and ambulances. He observes emerging and latent trends and reasons about their natural trajectories, consistently relating our position to these technologies and what that might mean for us as humans. Contextualisation is what Kevin Kelly does. And he does it better than anyone else.
Six Articles.
Kevin Kelly doesn’t have top six articles; an attempt to rank them would be simply silly. These are six of my favourites. They cover topics from online commerce to the role of technology in the cosmos and the impending age of augmented reality. Sorted from shortest to longest.
- You are not late. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. Today is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit-to-risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now.
- Better than free. Digitisation and dematerialisation are fundamental trends driving society in the 2020s. The internet is a copy machine; its biases and tendencies tend toward copying and everything downstream of that. To thrive in a world with ubiquitous internet, it is better to swim with the current of copying than to battle upstream to where we came from. The principles that flow from a medium built on copying demand are: i) abundance breeds a sharing mindset, ii) generosity is a business model, iii) it is vital it to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.
- 1000 true fans. This is one of the foundational texts of internet business. This essay illuminates a core principle of life in the Internet Age. The number of possible ways of earning a living has multiplied exponentially. For the first time in history, we can each find and create monetary value in highly specific, personal niches.
- The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life. In many ways, this is the thematic source of much of Kevin Kelly’s work. It is the core of his Unified Theory of Technology. Technology is a natural extension of biological evolution. Understanding this allows us to reason about technology more effectively; to better understand where it’s headed. As a force, Kelly suggests that technology is greater than the organic and we have a moral obligation to help it evolve and expand the realm of the possible.
- What Mongolian Nomads teach us about the Digital Future. Technology is not Silicon Valley. While many technology trends emanate from northern California, the details of how technology is adopted and used throughout the world is often very different. Kevin Kelly’s writing has always chronicled the effect of modernisation and technology on the lives and lifestyles of those in remote communities. Here he maps the technologies used by Mongolian nomads, and extrapolates in turn what we can learn about our own future from their nomadic lifestyle and material minimalism.
- Mirrorworld. This article is the best overview of what Augmented Reality can be. While today’s apps are over-hyped and undercooked, I believe the potential of AR is massively underestimated. This article outlines what a world deeply infused with AR would look like. And what that might mean for us.
Sound & Vision.
Kevin Kelly interviews are a delight. A raw mix of down-to-earth, worldly wisdom and far-sighted visions of possibility. Whichever one you pick, you can’t go wrong. These are some of my favourites and a good place to start to learn more about his thinking.
- On Being with Krista Tippet (52 mins).“It’s very likely that the universe is really a kind of a question, rather than the answer to anything”. An overview of What Technology Wants and how technology fits in the grand scheme of things.
- Tim Ferriss EP25 (42 mins) The interview is split into 3 parts; the first covers broader life advice and Kevin’s views on long-term thinking and technology. Not to be missed.
- Cool Tools 213: Mike Liebhold (28 mins) Cool Tools is a podcast co-hosted by Kevin Kelly about uncommon or uncommonly good tools. The podcast sits at the crossroads of the very big and the very small. Big possibilities emanating from small, often non-demonstrative tools. Here Mike Liebhold of IFTF shares some of his favourite tools.
- This American Life (15 mins) This touching, surprising story reveals how Kevin Kelly found purpose and why he has dedicated much of his life to studying the future.
- Long Now Foundation: Next 30 Digital Years (90 mins). This is a talk given by Kevin Kelly as part of the Long Now Foundation seminar series. It’s an excellent overview of Kelly’s work on digital technology and is a good overview of his most recent two books.
Books
Kevin Kelly’s bibliography is kaleidoscopic. If technology is what you do, read these four books. Then read them again. In order of most accessible and most immediately useful as idea generators.
- The Inevitable. The future is not predictable. But it does leave clues to where it’s likely to lead. The Inevitable plots the trajectories of the 12 technological forces shaping the next 10-30 years. I’ve read this twice and skimmed it many more; it is central to crystallising how I think about the future.
- What Technology Wants.Technology is a natural extension of the evolution of life. It has biases and tendencies and we’d do well to harness these to steer technology to our needs.
- Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. “Changing consciousness and changing tools, they have always gone together”. A curated selection of the best tools available for individuals and small groups. This is a book of never-ending ideas and the means to make them.
- Out of Control. A roadmap to the arriving Age of Biology. This book is dense and a delight to untangle; it explores emergence and evolution. The actors in the Matrix were made to read it before reading their scripts. It’s a cult-classic amongst the Chinese Tech founder class; you should read it too.
Odds & Ends - Most Interesting
The most exciting thing about the work of Kevin Kelly is the sheer scale and audacity of it. Three of these projects stand out for taking aim at truly outrageous, important, long-term goals. If the following don’t expand your mind to the possible, I don’t know what will.
- Long Now Foundation. The Long Now Foundation aims to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. The project includes building a 10,000 year clock, a library of and for the deep future and other tools that help to explore thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time. It’s an important counter-balance to the flash-in-the-pan glitz of large swathes of the tech industry.
- All Species Foundation. This project launched by Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan in 2000 aimed to catalog all species on earth by 2025. The foundation has since been wound up but the mission continues at the Encyclopedia of Life.
- The Rosetta Project. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. Individual physical artefacts of the library have also been produced in the form of small physical discs that contains 3,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages microscopically etched and electro formed onto them.
- Back to small possibilities and immediate benefits. Kevin co-curates a newsletter, Recomendo, with 6 helpful, useful things that he shares each week. The back catalogue available on the site or as a $2 ebook; it is a magical filter to layer over the everything store. You will spend money, and you will be pleased.
I once thought I had read all of Kevin Kelly’s writing. In pulling together this piece, I now realise that can’t have possibly been true. I must have been trying to impress myself.
And so, I once again fell down the Kevin Kelly rabbit-hole. A rabbit-hole worth wandering again.