Quotes from Kevin Kelly

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

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.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.

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.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

What technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an 'infinite game.' … A finite game is played to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing.

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.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

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

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the 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.

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.

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.