Kevin Kelly

Year 2008: Current passions, incidental details

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:18:41 -0800

I am still writing my next book which is about what technology wants. I'm posting my thoughts in-progress on The Technium, a semi-blog.

Most of what I write these days is born digital. In addition to the Technium I run or post to 9 other blogs. They are:

Cool Tools – One new tool recommendation per day
Current Trends – One new cultural and technological trend per day
Street Use – Visual glimpses of how people actually use technology
True Films – Rave reviews of great documentaries and non-fiction films
The Quantified Self – Self-monitoring methods for self-knowledge
Asia Grace – My on-going love affair with Asia
Geek Dad – Summaries of projects completed by nerdy dads
Long Views – Reports on efforts to encourage long-term thinking
Kevin Kelly – Personal doings that only my mom cares about

All these bits are consolidated into one uber-blog I call my Lifestream. Anything that I write on any blog will be posted in this stream. (Anything written by other authors on my blogs will not be posted here.) This is an easy way to keep up with what I am working on, thinking about, messing with.

My passion for documentaries goes beyond my True Films website. I've seen thousands of non-fiction films in the last 5 years, and have reviewed 200 of the very best ones available on DVD (at consumer prices). I took these "must see" titles and created a book version called True Films 3.0. In an experiment in new media publishing I've released this book as a free PDF, which I hope you will download and enjoy. You have the option of seeing contextual ads alongside the book's pages if you have the most recent version of Acrobat Reader.

The Long Now Foundation (I am a board member) hosts a public seminar each month feature a talk on long-term thinking. Past speakers include Brian Eno, Paul Hawken, Jared Diamond, Danny Hillis, among the better known, and many other equally talented original thinkers. I co-host the evening with Stewart Brand. They happen approximately every second Friday of the month at a venue in San Francisco, often Fort Mason. If you are in the neighborhood, please join us. The talks are free.

One of our Long Now projects is Long Bets, a forum for making long-term bets about the future. The intent is to foster accountability in our predictions; when you are wrong it should hurt. Recently a few high-profile bets have been won and made.

Six years ago I began a non-profit foundation to help catalog all the living species on Earth. Part of that project was to make a unique web page for every one of the 1.8 million species Science knows about. As we discover and name additional species of the 50-100 million others probably living on this planet, we'll give them a page too. We raised $1 million to start the All Species Inventory, but did not get very far. The foundation is currently moribund, but thankfully others have taken on the vision and are making it happen. Recently the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations, together with the Smithsonian Institution, began funding the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) -- a web page for every species. E.O. Wilson, who was on our board and who has been talking about similar goals, is the visible spokesperson for the EOL and articulates this essential vision very well. It's a relief to have such capable professional biologists working on this collective grand mission -- to discover, name and describe all the life on Earth in the next 25 years.

I am still an incurable magazine junkie. I remain the Senior Maverick for Wired, a magazine I helped co-found a decade ago. My most recent published writings are listed here, in chronological order.

A couple of years ago I was granted my 15 seconds of second-hand Hollywood fame. This short edited video clip from The Matrix Revisited (the making of the Matrix) has Keanu Reeves recounting how each actor had to read my book Out of Control (and 2 other books) before they could open the original script. There is a series of interviews with me on the "The Roots of the Matrix: Hard Science" disk in the 10-disk DVD Ultimate Matrix Collection series.

My further doings are outlined comprehensively in this narrative. My history is covered in this chronology. Details are summarized in this biography.

All my books and their translations can be found on this catalog. Official portraits of me are downloadable from here.

I work in a sunny studio in Pacifica, California, along the coast in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I can be contacted by emailing kk at kk dot org.

My Books

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:20:37 -0800

Out of Control

1994

The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

Read it online »

Available from Amazon

New Rules for the New Economy

1998

10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World

Read it online »

Available from Amazon

Asia Grace

2002

Available from Amazon

Cool Tools 2003.1

2005

$3.50, PDF (146 pages, 24 MB) via PayPal

$20, softcover, black & white, available from Amazon

Bicycle Haiku

2001

$1.88, PDF (156, 83MB) from Lulu

$9.53, softcover, available from Lulu

Bad Dreams

2003

$3.00, PDF (107 pages, 6.4 MB) via PayPal

Softcover, coming soon to Lulu

True Films 3.0

2007

Free, ad-supported PDF (201 pages, 7.2 MB)
Graciously mirrored here and here

True Films 2.0 (2006, print)

$9.54, black and white, softcover, available from Lulu

$29.81, color, softcover, available from Lulu

Contact

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:15:27 -0800

Kevin Kelly

149 Amapola Ave (map)
Pacifica, CA 94044

(Looking to buy a cool tool? I DO NOT sell any tools. I recommend only. You can purchase tools from the vendors indicated by the RED links on the tool pages.)

Camille Cloutier, Research Librarian

Biography and Other Details

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:55:43 -0800

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly 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.

Longer Bio

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is now Editor-At-Large for Wired. In 1994 and 1997, during Kelly's tenure, Wired won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (the industry's equivalent of two Oscars).

From 1984 to 1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. The non-profit Whole Earth Review (formerly called Co-Evolution Quarterly) is a small, yet influential, journal that consistently published trend-making topics years before other publications noticed them. Under Kelly's direction and editorship, Whole Earth was the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, Internet culture and artificial life (to name just a few early trends).

In the late 80s, Kelly conceived and oversaw the publication of four versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs. Whole Earth Catalogs are award-winning compendiums evaluating all the best "tools" available for self-education. (Over a million Whole Earth Catalogs have been sold.) The kind of tools reviewed include hardware, power tools, books, and software -- anything that leverages power to individuals. In 1988 Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a Whole Earth Catalog of personal communication tools, which evaluated the technologies of faxes, satellite TV, cellular, digital retouching, online systems and the whole emerging world of digital technology.

Kelly was a founding board member of the WELL, a Sausalito-based teleconferencing system. The WELL is a pioneering online service started in 1985 by the Point Foundation (Kelly was director of Point from 1985-1990). The WELL is considered by the growing Internet population to be a model of online culture, and a pioneer in developing online communities. It currently has 10,000 members.

As director of the Point Foundation, Kelly was involved in initiating several techno-culture experiments. He launched Cyberthon in 1990, the first round-the-clock virtual reality jamboree. This brought together for the first time, all existing virtual reality prototypes and allowed 400 invited guests to try them out. It was the first chance the lay public had to try VR. Kelly was also co-founder of the annual Hackers' Conference, a weekend rendezvous which in 1984 brought together three generations of legendary computer programmers for the first time.

Kelly is the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems, published by Addison Wesley (1994). This wide-ranging book is about how machines, the economy, and all large human-made inventions are becoming biological. Fortune magazine called it "essential reading for all executives." His most recent book is New Rules for the New Economy published in 1998 by Viking/Penguin in the US and by 4th Estate in the UK. New Rules was a bestseller in the US and has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese and Estonian.

Kevin Kelly's writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines.

Kelly is a member of the Global Business Network, a consulting group based in Emeryville, California that specializes in creating scenarios of the future for global businesses. He is a Fellow at the Center for Business Innovation, run by Ernst & Young. He is on the Board of Directors at the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He serves on boards of high tech companies and is a frequent speaker at conferences and corporate meetings, and is represented by the Leigh Bureau.

Kelly is a member of the board of The Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org), which is a group of concerned individuals building a clock and library that will last 10,000 years. A working prototype of the unique mechanical-digital clock has been built and demonstrated, and a mountain top in eastern Nevada purchased as a site to build the monumental clock. The purpose of the project is to foster long term responsibility.

His current passion is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth. This project, called the All Species Inventory (www.all-species.org), received its first million dollars in funding and is currently endorsed by most taxonomic groups as an idea whose time has come. It hopes to make a web-based catalog of all species on earth in one generation, or the next 25 years.

Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 1970s he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. He wrote a monthly travel column for New Age Journal. In the early 1980s he published and edited the first magazine devoted to walking, and ran a mail order catalog specializing in budget travel around the world.

Kelly lives in Pacifica, California, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is married and has three wonderful children. He was born in 1952. He has no college or university degrees.

Portrait

These portraits can be used for all purposes; no need to ask permission.

Click on an image and a new browser window will open with a larger version ready for saving to your disk. The full size color images are approximately 4" x 5".

Affiliations

	Organizations:	All Species Foundation Global Business Network The Long Now Foundation Rosetta Project The WELL Whole Earth Wired Magazine

	Advisory Boards:	All Species Foundation, Chairman The Long Now Foundation, Secretary Launchcyte, Advisor

Narrative

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:34:56 -0800

(Stuff I'm interested in now, or was interested in before.)

Currently, I am Chairman of the Board of All Species Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. We'd like to give each organism its own web page. The genesis of this idea is described in this account.

A lot of my attention is focused on the exciting work at the Long Now Foundation, where I serve on the board. Long Now Foundation is a non-profit group dedicated to fostering long-term responsibility as an antidote to the extremely short-term horizon of most contemporary organizations. The most interesting project we have going is the 10,000-year clock that the Foundation is building, a clock conceived and designed by Danny Hillis. I have also been actively involved in the creation of a Rosetta Disk, an archival disk of 1,000 languages to put in or near the 10,000-year Clock. The Rosetta Disk has spun off a dynamic web site that serves as an all language archive, called the Rosetta Project.

I have been a long-time member of Global Business Network, a small think tank and consultancy based in Emeryville, California.

Since 1998 I have been a Fellow at the Center for Business Innovation, run by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. The role of Fellows is to conjure with developments on the fringes of business.

I also serve on a number of advisory boards for a few high tech companies or foundations.

Recent writings of mine include these pieces:

The future of music. I have been a steady promoter of the concept of "following the free." But the free is widely misunderstood. As Richard Stallman says, "It's free as in freedom, not as in beer." I tackle the consequences of free music in this cover story for the New York Times Magazine on the free (as in free-flowing) nature of digital media.

Have a look at an outrageously optimistic view of the future, headlined in Wired in the summer of 1999 as The Roaring Zeros. It's a scenario that asks: what will be the unexpected effects of two more decades of ultra-prosperity? Despite everything that has happend since then, it is still a plausible scenario.

The article that launched my book New Rules for the New Economy first began as this article in Wired, published in summer of 1997. It's still a handy summary, and I think has not dated much.

I was invited to commence a year-long series of essays on culture and science in the journal Science. My contribution, called the Third Culture, is about the emerging culture surrounding technology.

On a personal note, I attended a two-year workshop on science and religion sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. My paper based on that experience is called Nerd Theology .

On an even more personal note, I told my story of a religious conversion many years ago to Ira Glass, host of This American Life, a public radio series that features long narrative stories. His edit of my story has been played a number of times on NPR. You can find an audio file on the This American Life web site. It is the second story on the program called "Shoulda Been Dead".You need the RealAudio player to listen to the story; you can download RealAudio here.

A list of my other past writings available on the web is found here. I'm not a very organized person so I do not have a complete bibliography of everything I have written.

I have three books in print. The two older ones are available in paperback in English, and in nine other langauges. The third, just released, is now available in hardcover (see Asia Grace below).

My first book, a labor of love, is very long, very complex, very broad, and hard to summarize. It's about decentralization, and about the way machines are becoming biological, and how the internet and a rainforest are connected. I have been surprised at how many people have read the whole thing. The title is slightly opaque, but it was the best I could do at the time: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. It is not only still in print, it is selling better now than when it first came out.

Out of Control was one of the first books to be available in its full text online. All 230,000 words are still available for free on the web here. (This fortuitous opportunity came about because my literary agent, John Brockman, was among the first to realize the value of online rights before the publishers did, so when he negotiated my book deal in 1990, we kept the online rights.) I mention this elsewhere, but its worth repeating: You are free to print out the whole book; if that will help you read it, please do. But I can save you the hassle, time, and paper spent printing it out. Click here to get a printed version, nicely bound between color covers and mailed to your desk, all for about $16. Think of this as a printing service, not a book.

Here are a few reviews of Out of Control. (It was mostly ignored when it first came out.)

Here is a list of other languages into which Out of Control was translated.

New Rules for the New Economy is about the logic behind all the crazy events we see happening in the high-tech world. I make a stab at trying to tie them together. Read the full text of New Rules for the New Economy online. Or you can purchase a printed out version, ready to mail to you here.

Here are published reviews of New Rules for the New Economy that I know about. (Let me know if I've missed any.)

Here is a list of translations for New Rules for the New Economy.

Occasionally I'll be interviewed by the press; if they remember to send me an url, it is here.

I'm interested in documentary films, educational programs, non-fiction cinema, and what the British BBC empire calls "factuals." I call them true films and I'm trying to round up recommendations here, at truefilms.com. It's way embryonic, so be gentle.

My life long interest in art and science has recently converged to an exploration of how artists might benefit corporations. I am using this page as a place to deposit my research on the subject. (Actually it is the research of Michele McGinnis.)

In the near future my kids will start to leave home. I'd like to give them each a box of tools and a book containing ideas of tools and possibilities that they might not encounter otherwise. With that in mind I've been reviewing tools. Some of those reviews have appeared in recent issues of Whole Earth Review. Here are my recommendations, in PDF format.

I've done so many public speaking events, that I have lost track of them all. In order to cut back on the amount of travel I have to do, I've cut back on the number of invitations I accept by upping my fees, which believe me, keeps down the number of invites. If I don't accept an invitation, please understand that saying no is the only way I can preserve some time to create something interesting to say when I do say yes. I am represented by the Monitor Group Talent Network.

What did I do before all this?

My educational background is minimal. Instead of college, I went to Asia. That was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I traveled in the 1970s as a poor, solo photographer in the hinterlands and villages of Asia, between Iran and Japan. I traveled on about US$2,500 per year and came back with 36,000 slides. I have put them together into a gorgeously colorful photographic book called Asia Grace, which is now available at better bookstores or here. I hope the book works as a cinematic experience. There are no words, no captions, no page numbers. The idea is to fall into the images. People tell me it works. The story of this adventure, and all the pictures at low res, are available online at the book's website.

I returned to the US in 1979, and rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across the US. The reasons for the trip are describe by my NPR story (see above). I kept a journal and sketchbook on the 3-month trip. Each page of the book contains a sketch and a haiku for one day. I recently had a couple of hundred copies of it printed up so others can enjoy it. If you'd like a copy, it's available here.

In about 1982 I began a mail order company called Nomadic Books, selling budget travel guides. In 1983 I started a magazine about walking that was sadly ahead of its time. I began writing about travel for magazines. I had a monthly column about travel in New Age Journal. Here is a New Age Journal cover story I wrote in 1984 on this weird new territory called The Network Nation.

In 1984 I moved to California to co-edit Co-Evolution Quarterly, published by the Whole Earth Catalog, which was owned by the non-profit Point Foundation, and founded by Stewart Brand. After the magazine changed its name to Whole Earth Review. I became its editor in chief and publisher. Whole Earth Catalogs are award-winning compediums evaluating all the best "tools" available for self-education. (Over two million Whole Earth Catalogs have been sold since 1968.) The magazine was a journal of unorthodox technical news that consistently published trend-making topics years before other publications noticed them. Following my interests, Whole Earth was the first general magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, techno culture and artificial life (to name just a few pioneering trends).

In 1985 Point Foundation, with funding from a for-profit called Neti, launched one of the first online teleconference systems, called The WELL. As director of Point, I had a small part in the early genesis of the WELL as it became one of the first public access ramps to the internet. I also helped initiate the Hackers' Conference, which has become an annual event now run by others.

While directing Point I launched new Whole Earth Catalogs: The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, The Whole Earth Ecolog, the Fringes of Reason, and Signal: a Whole Earth Catalog of Commication Tools, which I co-edited. (All are out of print, but you can probably find used copies on Amazon or Ebay.)

In 1989 I designed Cyberthon, a round the clock 24-hour marathon try-out of Virtual Reality, the first public access to VR.

In 1992 I joined a small team which launched Wired magazine in January 1993. I served as Executive Editor from September 1992 to January 1999. During my tenure Wired won the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice (in 1994 and 1997).

A map to my office.

A recent portrait of myself ready to download. These can be used for all purposes; no need to ask permission.

Did I go to high school with you? Most likely not. There are probably about 100,000 guys in the world by the name of Kevin Kelly. Like you, and probably most Americans, I actually went to high school with another guy named Kevin Kelly, and have worked with several other Kevin Kellys, and have done things similar to other Kevin Kellys. Yes it is confusing. I can't begin to tell you. Most Kevin Kellys lead interesting lives. The other Kevin Kelly you are probably looking for may be listed here, at our secret Kevin Kelly clearinghouse.

If I have missed anything you know about, please contact me.

My biography is available here if you want to know more. The same information, in a more boring way, is also organized in this chronology for better searching.

You can find out how to contact me here.

Handy Tips

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:38:56 -0800

A few months ago I spoke at the EG conference, held at the Getty Museum, and organized by Mike Hawley and Ricky Wurman, of TED fame. Instead of following the usual procedure and handing out swag to the speakers, Hawley came up with the clever idea of producing a stack of custom trading cards which both audience and speakers could swap.

The cards would have entertaining colorful cartoon portraits of each speaker on one side, and a "gift" on the other. Attendees would swap the cards to get swag they wanted. The cartoon portraits were happy mimics of Roy Lichtenstein-style pop-art comic-book masterpieces, produced by the artists at the online service AllPopArt. They started with a digital photograph and Photoshopped it in into pop art, as seen below. (Check out the other styles on their website. It's not a bad gift for the perfect someone.)

On the other side of the card, some speakers offered a coupon for a recent book, or a free sample of their goods,etc. Being new-book-less at the moment I offered a short list of handy tips. In case you can't read them, here they are:

HANDY TIPS

To get a human at Amazon call their unlisted number 800-201-7575.

Always pour acid into water, never the other way round.

To move your library, stack your books up and wrap them in plastic wrap. No boxes needed.

Plan on $1 of repairs for every $1 of gas you put into your car.

For financially happiness, live below your means.

With bolts and screws remember: Righty tighty, lefty loosey.

A laminated color copy of your passport will work for most non-border purposes.

When playing Monopolopy always buy Railroads, never buy Utilities.

Get a sheet of shower tile board from the lumber yard for a cheap, huge whiteboard.

Protect your sabbaticals (from your work, diet, routine, or discipline) religiously.

When bargaining on the street, aim for 50% of the asking price.

Keep flattery and requests separate.

This I Believe

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:06:49 -0800

Every year I send out a year-end letter and a small gift to my Christmas list. The gift is something creative, maybe a self-published book I made in the past year, or a photo, or sometime personal. This year the gift was a letter that got out of hand. I got going while writing a few thoughts prompted by a book assignment and the missive got long. Once it grew, I added a few of my own photographs. The story wanted to be small in the hand, sort of miniature. It needed a design so I fired up InDesign. It wanted to be printed. Then it needed a few staples. The next thing I new it was a small 16-page booklet. I mailed it out.

Lots of folks sent back kind words. Jay Allison, independent producer, co-founder of Transom, and a friend in the radio business thought it should be on the radio, and the next thing I know, I am in the studios of KQED reading a 500-word excerpt of the letter on a show called This I Believe.

NPR sent notice that this 5-minute rant will air in the Bay Area on Sunday, February 3 on KALW (91.7FM) between 3:30 and 4pm, a fairly safe time when no one will be listening. But you can listen to it (streaming), or download it (at least for two weeks) from here, or on iTunes.

As part of the show, they asked if they could post the letter in full, and I said okay. So a very handsome web version of the letter lives here on the NPR site. I will also put up a PDF version of the letter soon, just because I had it and might as well round out the media choices.

The Two Percent Perspective

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:59:15 -0800

Last Christmas morning you were probably not listening to the radio as you opened presents. I know we weren't. But that is when Morning Edition broadcast a short interview with me on the subject of progress. I guess in the spirit of things cosmic and joyful, they let me rant about the reason I am an optimist. You can listen to the segment here, but I can sum the story by saying that I am optimistic because I think that while disease, illness, stupidity, wickedness, problems, and evil fill 49% of the world, health, wisdom, light and goodness fill 51% -- and that tiny 2% difference compounded over time is what makes civilization and cultural.

More audio details at "Weighing the Good and Bad at Christmastime", NPR Morning Edition, Christmas Day 2007.

Entertaining Gathering

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:11:26 -0800

Two weeks ago at the Getty Museum in LA, I gave a talk at EG, the Entertainment Gathering, hosted by Michael Hawley, formerly of the Media Lab. In addition to my presentation there were some 65 other talks in 48 hours. Each presentation was 18-20 minutes, which I find is the perfect length for something new. It was a marathon learning adventure. I may have been the only one to sit through all 65 talks. Whew! My favorites: Magician Jamy Swiss teaching a magic trick, Ian Dunbar on how to train a puppy, A.J. Jacobs on his year living Biblically.

Matt Mullenweg, of PhotoMatt, blogged the conference. His fair summary of my talk is posted here.

Sounding Good on NPR

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:03:36 -0800

I was interviewed by Madeleine Brand on NPR's Day to Day today. They wanted to know about my Countdown Clock. Here is the streaming audio. What was interesting to me was that they sent a sound recordist to my home to record my end of the conversation on digital tape because the sound quality on our typical phone line (and call-in show) is so bad. While I was in my desk chair on the phone to Madeleine in LA, the sound recordist was sitting in my office pointing a huge boom mike at my face. She then uploads the file to NPR's ftp site and then the engineers there merge my side with Madeleine's side of the conversation. Mucho work. Isn't it odd that in 2007, when we can download movies to our home we can't have a high-fidelity phone line? Does anyone know how feasible it is to create or hack a hi-def home phone line? We have DSL; it should not be that hard.