Quotes from Kevin Kelly

Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases—although

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today

We'll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.

A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.

Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too. Wikipedia works so well because it removes an error in a single click, making it easier to eliminate a falsehood than to post a falsehood in the first place.

Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long counterproductive. A

More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic.

Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

their social influence (how many people followed them and what their influence was) in order to optimize attention and influence per dollar. Done at the scale

The hydrogen atoms in a human body completely refresh every seven years. As we age we are really a river of cosmically old atoms. The carbons in our bodies were produced in the dust of a star. The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look. For

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, remix ideas, quote experts, and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

My prediction: By 2026, Google's main product will not be search but AI.

I have not met a speculative utopia I would want to live in. I'd be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining.

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. This

We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.

The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.

In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things—an automobile, a shoe—and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continuously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

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

Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening." Indeed

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.

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.

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.