A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience.
For the thirty years I've known him, Kelly has been making bold declarations about the world we are crafting with new technologies. He first began to attract notice when he helped found Wired as the first executive editor. "The culture of technology, he notes, "was the prime beat of Wired. When we started the magazine 20 years ago, we had no intentions to write about hardware—bits and bauds. We wrote about the consequences of new inventions and the meaning of new stuff in our lives. At first, few believed us, and dismissed my claim that technology would become the central driver of our culture. Now everyone sees this centrality, but some are worried this means the end of civilization."
The biggest change in our lives is the rate of change and while for many, Facebook and Twitter are a fact of life today, it's interesting to note that this week marks only the 10th anniversary of the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg. When Forbes Magazine published their Billionaires List in 2004, it occured during the Edge Dinner in Monterey, California. Larry Page, present at dinner, made the list for the first time. When he showed me the Forbes headline, it was on his Blackberry pager. It wasn't until 2006 that Twitter was founded. If you got your news electronically at that time, most likely it was on a pager. "Sharing" was something you did at a Chinese restaurant.
Kelly recently successfully published an over-sized book based on his blog Cool Tools. He is one of the few actually making a living from a blog, while he is also reinstating print as a great publishing medium (Carr’s point). He doesn’t just pontificate; he innovates himself. He was one of the founders, for example, of the “quantified self” movement.
Kelly is well aware that his complete embrace of what he calls "The Technium", is a lightning rod for criticism. But, he points out that "we are still at the beginning of the beginning. We have just started to make a technological society. The technological changes in the next 20 years will dwarf those of the last 20 years. It will almost be like nothing at all has happened yet."
In the meantime Kelly is doing what he's been up to for decades, acting as a sensing and ruddering mechanism for the rest of us, finding his way through this new landscape.
How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?
The question that I'm asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we're going to stop sharing, and how far are we're going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there's no end to how much we can track each other—how far we're going to self-track, how much we're going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there's going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.
How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can't stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there's no tracking in a temporary basis. I don't know, but this is the question I'm asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?
For the thirty years I've known him, Kelly has been making bold declarations about the world we are crafting with new technologies. He first began to attract notice when he helped found Wired as the first executive editor. "The culture of technology, he notes, "was the prime beat of Wired. When we started the magazine 20 years ago, we had no intentions to write about hardware—bits and bauds. We wrote about the consequences of new inventions and the meaning of new stuff in our lives. At first, few believed us, and dismissed my claim that technology would become the central driver of our culture. Now everyone sees this centrality, but some are worried this means the end of civilization." The biggest change in our lives is the rate of change and while for many, Facebook and Twitter are a fact of life today, it's interesting to note that this week marks only the 10th anniversary of the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg. When Forbes Magazine published their Billionaires List in 2004, it occured during the Edge Dinner in Monterey, California. Larry Page, present at dinner, made the list for the first time. When he showed me the Forbes headline, it was on his Blackberry pager. It wasn't until 2006 that Twitter was founded. If you got your news electronically at that time, most likely it was on a pager. "Sharing" was something you did at a Chinese restaurant.
Kelly recently successfully published an over-sized book based on his blog Cool Tools. He is one of the few actually making a living from a blog, while he is also reinstating print as a great publishing medium (Carr’s point). He doesn’t just pontificate; he innovates himself. He was one of the founders, for example, of the “quantified self” movement.
Kelly is well aware that his complete embrace of what he calls "The Technium", is a lightning rod for criticism. But, he points out that "we are still at the beginning of the beginning. We have just started to make a technological society. The technological changes in the next 20 years will dwarf those of the last 20 years. It will almost be like nothing at all has happened yet."
In the meantime Kelly is doing what he's been up to for decades, acting as a sensing and ruddering mechanism for the rest of us, finding his way through this new landscape.
How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?
The question that I'm asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we're going to stop sharing, and how far are we're going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there's no end to how much we can track each other—how far we're going to self-track, how much we're going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there's going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.
How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can't stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there's no tracking in a temporary basis. I don't know, but this is the question I'm asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?
by John Brockman, Edge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
