CONNECT THE DOTS

Last summer I met Kevin Kelly at his house in Pacifica, California. I have always been a Wired fan and I think it is the most forward-looking or futuristic magazine in the world, always on time – or even ahead of time – with the right tech topics.

To meet one of the founding fathers of this stunning magazine, Kevin Kelly himself, was fascinating. In 1994, even before launching Wired magazine, KK wrote his very forward-looking book Out of Control, praised by Fortune magazine as “A book that should be required reading for all executives…. as entertaining as it is insightful.” I had a couple of questions about writing this book in 1994. Out of Control is a trending topic right now and fits completely with this era. How did he come up with this topic back in 1994? ‘Yes’, he said, ‘that was very early and even now not everyone really understands what Out of Control is about.’ ‘The field of Artificial Life, often called ALife, or Theoretical Biology is about many things, like how the mind works, how computers work, and how computers might be made to act more like the mind. ALife embraces studies of the origin of natural life, of chaos and self-catalysing systems. There’s no central control. We can see it on the web right now.’

One of Kelly’s central themes is that he strongly believes there will be one internet in the future. The Technium. ‘It’s not about which one, it’s about the main system there is. And we – people, human beings – can use this internet and sometimes we do control the internet, sometimes the internet controls us. It’s full of paradoxes. So we are master and slave at the same time. We are living in an information era right now. And we can use it.’ Kelly believes in evolution in which the process itself evolving evolves. The nature of change itself is changing at the same time. And the awareness of self-regulation and the self-sustaining system is growing.’

He explains, ‘we are a component of the entire Technium, no inventions stand alone. Some people call it the internet of things. It’s about the holistic thing, about the increasing choices we have, the freedom of possibilities, new options, new choices, more differences, and as human beings we want that. It will bring us into self-organising systems and it is all to achieve better lifes. Web technologies allow us to do.’ His first book Out of Control is already about these self-sustaining systems in their nascent forms, so I think it’s worth reading now to understand the web, internet and network culture. The book is from 1994, but very good to read it now. Also beacuse we can understand the web better now. Think about the Apple inventions, the iPhone or about Facebook and Spotify. Now it is 2012 and we entered the acces-economy and this is all about the acces-economy. Now we are able to make the next step.

The next step is about ‘connecting the dots’. In the chapter “Hive Mind” (Out of Control) he explains ‘…The Atom is past. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamic Net. The Net icon has no center – it is a bunch of dots connected to other dots – a cobweb of arrows pouring into each other, squirming together like a nest of snakes, the restless image fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is the archetype…’. Then he goes on and writes about birds, bees and swarms and he also lifts some examples from Darwin’s Origins of Species, showing the logic of both Computers and Nature. Also worth reading New Rules for the New Economy and What Technology Wants . In February 2012 the Dutch version of What Technology Wants will be published too.

by Andrea Wiegman, founder and chief editor Second Sight