Kevin Kelly Quotes

Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases — although

It’s possible that a not-so-smart person who can communicate well can do much better than a super-smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.

The law of plentitude is most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise.

Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia — highlights, notes, questions, musings.

To clean up your city, sweep your doorstep first.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

The web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about a hundred billion neurons. Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links — but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is.

"Correct" is a property of small systems.

The more interconnected a technology is, the more opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse.

Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.

The most effective remedy for anger is delay.

Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.

If the system settles into harmony and equilibrium it will eventually stagnate and die.

Interview your parents while they are still alive. Keep asking questions while you record. You’ll learn amazing things. Or hire someone to make their story into an oral history, or documentary, or book. This will be a tremendous gift to them and to your family.