Quotes by Kevin Kelly

Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability

...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?...The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.

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.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

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.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

An organizations intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

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.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

An organizations 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.

Its generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

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.