"Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak." -- Kevin Kelly
This article refers to the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. For others by this name, see Kevin Kelly.
Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
"A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.""All imaginable futures are not equally possible.""An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.""An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.""An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.""And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.""Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.""But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.""But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.""But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.""Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.""Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.""Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.""Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.""Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.""In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.""It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.""It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.""It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.""Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.""Managing bottom-up change is its own art.""Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.""One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.""Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.""Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.""Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.""The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.""The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.""The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.""The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.""The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.""The organization and the environment are in concert.""The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.""The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.""The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.""This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.""We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.""We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.""When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at."
Kelly was born in Pennsylvania in 1952 and graduated from Westfield High School, Westfield, New Jersey in 1970. He dropped out of University of Rhode Island after only one year.
Kelly lives in Pacifica, California, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is a devout Christian. Conceptual Trends and Current Topics He is married and has three children; Tywen, Ting and Kaileen.
Interests
Among Kelly's personal involvements is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth, an effort also known as the Linnaean enterprise. The goal is to make an attempt at an "all species" web-based catalog in one generation (25 years).
Kelly's writings have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, The Economist and other periodicals ...in addition to the books he has authored and the magazines he either edited, founded, or helped to found.
When he was 27 Kevin Kelly was a freelance photo journalist, and got locked out of his hostel in Jerusalem due to being late for a curfew. He slept on the supposed spot where Jesus was crucified, and in the morning had a religious experience. He decided to live as if he only had six months left to live. He went and lived peacefully with his parents, anonymously gave away his money, visited his friends, and came back home to "die" on the night of Halloween.
In 1981, Kelly founded Walking Journal. He is a former editor of Whole Earth Review (see also CoEvolution Quarterly), Signal, and some of the later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. With Whole Earth's founder, Stewart Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL, a highly regarded online community. He has been a director of the Point Foundation, which sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984 (before the word "hacker" had its current common, negative connotation).
In 1994, Wired Magazine, for which Kelly was executive director, won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Kelly is now editor at large for the magazine.Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant and observer of "cyberculture".
Kelly's writing has appeared in many other national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harper's Magazine, Science, Veneer Magazine, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines.
Kelly's most notable book-length publication, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1994), presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization. The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain.
Andy and Larry Wachowski, writers/directors of the film The Matrix, required the principal actors of the film to read three books prior to the start of filming, including Kelly’s 1995 book The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. The other two were Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans.
Kelly can be seen in a series of interviews on The Roots of the Matrix disk in the 10-disk DVD The Ultimate Matrix Collection set.
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (Addison Wesley 1994, Perseus Books, 1995)
: (online complete text and reviews)
New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (Penguin, 1999)
: (online complete text)
Asia Grace (2002)
Cool Tools (2003) - Tool reviews collected from his weblog of the same name
Bad Dreams (2003)
“Photographers section: Kevin Kelly,” pp. 106—111, in Lloyd Kahn, editor 2004 Home Work (Shelter Publications, 2004)
True Films (2006)
What Technology Wants (2010)
Laws
Influenced by Pattie Maes at MIT and Joel Garreau author of Radical Evolution, Kelly created the Maes-Garreau Law which states "Most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point". As Kelly writes "The latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it is defined as The Maes-Garreau Point. The period equals to n-1 of the person's life expectancy".
Lectures
Speculations On The Future Of Science by Kevin Kelly. Lecture to Long Now Foundation, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. March 10, 2006.
The Next Fifty Years of Science by Kevin Kelly. Google TechTalk, May 9, 2006. (47 minutes)
What Does Technology Want? by Kevin Kelly Talk at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA, February 2005. (21 minutes)
The next 5000 days of the Web by Kevin Kelly Talk at the EG 2007 Conference in Monterey, CA, December 2007.
