Quotes from Kevin Kelly

Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless.

for every expert there is an equal and opposite anti-expert.

Death is the only teacher in evolution

You can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into.

As the old joke goes: "Software, free. User manual, $10,000." But it's no joke.

We should really call AIs "AAs," for "artificial aliens." An

The industrial age was driven by analog copies—exact and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies—exact and free.

Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keeping a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I

The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are.

The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper," he claimed. "Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure." Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of "interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce" with one word: "baloney.

Do you own your own thoughts, or are you merely accessing them?

Communities saturated with anonymity will either self-destruct or shift from the purely anonymous to the pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind a persistent invented nickname.

A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs.

Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness is wanting what you already have.

A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.

No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of "becoming," everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.

we can get the most from the technologies when we "listen" to the direction the technologies lean, and bend our expectations, regulations, and products to these fundamental tendencies within that technology.

The Sensory Substitution Vest takes audio from tiny microphones in the vest and translates those sound waves into a grid of vibrations that can be felt by a deaf person wearing it. Over a matter of months, the deaf person's brain reconfigures itself to "hear" the vest vibrations as sound, so by wearing this interacting cloth, the deaf can hear.

Before the internet there was simply no way to coordinate a million people in real time or to get a hundred thousand workers collaborating on one project for a week. Now we can, so we are quickly exploring all the ways in which we can combine control and the crowd in innumerable permutations.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT's Media Lab, once quipped in the 1990s that the urinal in the men's restroom was smarter than his computer because it knew he was there and would flush when he left, while his computer had no idea he was sitting in front of it all day. That

For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important.

To keep young kids behaving well on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite unwrapped candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave.

A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either. None

Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all.