Kevin Kelly Quotes

When buying a garden hose, an extension cord, or a ladder, get one substantially longer than you think you need. It’ll be the right size.

The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.

All guns are loaded.

The first thing the network economy reforms is our identity.

What is clearly happening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born — all that is nature — and the realm of the made — all that is humanly constructed — are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered. That’s banking on some ancient

robust intelligence may be a liability — especially if by “intelligence” we mean our peculiar self-awareness, all our frantic loops of introspection and messy currents of self-consciousness. We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.

neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.

Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers.

Our existence here, he says, is a case of “not we the accidental but we the expected.” Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, “The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.

Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of — stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper — won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

the total amount of material we use per GDP dollar is going down, which means we use less material for greater value. The ratio of mass needed to generate a unit of GDP has been falling for 150 years, declining even faster in the last two decades. In 1870 it took 4 kilograms of stuff to generate one unit of the U.S.’s GDP. In 1930 it took only one kilogram. Recently the value of GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000 — a doubling of dematerialization in 23 years.

Movement plus variety equals health.

Editorship and expertise are like vitamins for the food. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body. Too much will be toxic, or just flushed away.

Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.

When you keep people waiting, they begin to think of all your flaws.