Kevin Kelly

Abstract

Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is a college dropout who spent the 1970s photographing remote Asia, edited the Whole Earth Review, co-founded the Hackers’ Conference and was the founding executive editor of Wired. His books argue that technology behaves like a living system with its own direction: Out of Control (1994), which the Wachowskis made the cast of The Matrix read, and What Technology Wants (2010), which named that system the “technium.” His 2008 essay “1,000 True Fans” became the standard business plan for independent creators on the internet. He is the most consistent optimist among the writers who carried the Whole Earth counterculture into the computer age.

Asia and Jerusalem

Kelly was born in Pennsylvania in 1952 and grew up in New Jersey. He dropped out of the University of Rhode Island after one year and, from 1972 to 1979, worked as an independent photographer in Asia, traveling on about $2,500 a year through Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. He came back with 36,000 slides.

In 1979, after a stint editing an employee newsletter in Tehran, he went to Jerusalem. Locked out of his hostel, he slept on the spot where Jesus was supposedly crucified, and the next morning had a religious experience. He has described it as a plain instruction to live the next six months as if he would die at the end of them. He gave away most of what he owned, visited his family for what he thought was the last time, rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across the United States in about three months (his daily sketches became the book Bicycle Haiku), and returned home to “die” on Halloween. He became a Christian, and the story was later told on the first episode of This American Life.

Whole Earth and the Hackers

Kelly joined Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth publications in the early 1980s and from 1984 to 1990 was editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He also edited Signal, a Whole Earth catalog of communication tools: fax machines, satellite TV, cell phones, online systems.

In November 1984 Kelly and Brand brought programmers from three generations together at the first Hackers’ Conference, inspired by Steven Levy’s book Hackers that year (see The Hacker Culture). It was there that Brand said “information wants to be free.” Kelly was also involved in the launch of the WELL, the Whole Earth online community, in 1985, and he organized one of the first public demonstrations of virtual reality, a gathering at which 400 invited guests could try the existing prototypes.

Wired

In 1992 Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf hired Kelly as executive editor of a magazine they were starting in San Francisco. Wired’s first issue, dated March 1993, reached newsstands that winter, and Kelly ran its editorial side for its first seven years. Under him the magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1994, the first time it went to a start-up, and again in 1997. Wired’s colophon named Marshall McLuhan as its “patron saint.”

Kelly’s own theory of technology appeared in Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (1994). It argued that the most powerful systems, from beehives to markets to the internet, are not designed from the top but emerge from many small parts following simple rules, and that engineers would have to learn to grow systems rather than build them. The book became a set text for an unexpected audience. The Wachowskis had Keanu Reeves and the rest of the cast of The Matrix (1999) read it, along with Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and a book on evolutionary psychology, before they could open the script.

New Rules for the New Economy (1998) applied the ideas to business: in a networked economy, value comes from connections, and companies should give products away to gain the network. Kelly reissued it as a blog for its tenth anniversary and wrote that he would not retract a word.

The Technium

What Technology Wants (2010) is Kelly’s most ambitious book. He named the whole system of human technology, together with the culture, institutions and ideas around it, the technium, and argued that it behaves like a seventh kingdom of life: semi-autonomous, evolving and with tendencies of its own toward complexity, diversity and specialization. Its “wants” were not conscious, he wrote, but real in the way an organism’s are. Humans can steer the technium, but not stop it. The Amish, who decide technology by technology what to adopt, were his example of a society that steers well; the Unabomber was his example of the opposite reaction.

Critics found the argument hard to test; Kirkus wrote that the claim that the technium’s origins go back to the beginning of time “ultimately must be taken on faith.” The book has been influential on the optimistic side of the debate mapped in Silicon Valley Philosophies. The Inevitable (2016), on twelve technological forces Kelly expected to shape the next thirty years, became a New York Times bestseller.

True Fans and Cool Tools

Kelly’s most-cited text is a blog post. “1,000 True Fans” (March 2008) argued that an artist or maker does not need a hit: a thousand fans who each spend about $100 a year on their work would give them an income of about $100,000. The essay predated Kickstarter, Patreon and Substack, and became the standard argument for all three. Kelly practiced what it described: in 2021 he raised about $600,000 on Kickstarter to publish Vanishing Asia, a three-volume, 1,000-page book of 9,000 photographs from fifty years of travel in Asia.

He kept the Whole Earth catalog format alive online. Cool Tools, launched in 2003, has reviewed one tool a day for more than twenty years; a printed edition of nearly 500 pages followed in 2013. He is a founding board member and co-chair of the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock meant to run for 10,000 years, and he helped create its Rosetta Disk, an archive of about 1,000 languages. In 2023 he published Excellent Advice for Living, 450 proverbs he had first written down for his adult children on his 68th birthday.

Dead End: The Long Boom

In July 1997 Wired, with Kelly as executive editor, published Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden’s cover story “The Long Boom,” subtitled “A History of the Future, 1980–2020.” Its cover promised “25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world,” driven by networked technology. Kelly’s New Rules the following year made a similar case. The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 and lost about three-quarters of its value by 2002; September 2001 followed, then the 2008 financial crisis. Kelly’s optimism did not change. The motto on his website reads: “Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.”