Quotes from Kevin Kelly

The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.

You should demand extraordinary evidence in order to believe extraordinary claims.

This is the curse of the postscarcity world: We can connect to only a thin thread of all there is. Each

Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified. The

That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook's remarkable success.

Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with.

By 2050 most truck drivers won't be human. Since truck driving is currently the most common occupation in the U.S., this is a big deal.

Embrace pronoia which is the opposite of paranoia. Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.

We are constantly surprised by things that have been happening for 20 years or longer. I

Right now no matter your age these are your golden years. The good stuff will yield golden memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons.

Re-visioning the ordinary is what art, literature, and comedy do.You can elevate mundane details into magical wonders simply by noticing them.

Shutting down civilization is actually hard. The fiercer the disaster, the faster the chaos burns out.

Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it's more fun and useful to them. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.

See that old person taking forever in line? That is the future you. Have patience.

The problem with constant becoming (especially in a protopian crawl) is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion. Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect. More

The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC's argument for ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.

Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid. In

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen

In the Network Era—that age we have just entered—dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.

Heavily cognified, incredibly smart filters can be applied to any realm

high-profile tech companies) are earning only an average of $3 per hour of attention—

The greatest social consequence of the Darwinian revolution was the grudging acceptance by humans that humans were random descendants of monkeys, neither perfect nor engineered. The greatest social consequence of neo-biological civilization will be the grudging acceptance by humans that humans are the random ancestors of machines, and that as machines we can be engineered ourselves.

Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can't see in a single isolated book.