The Inevitable Kevin Kelly
A packager of ideas
A non-insignificant reason I love Sunday mornings is that I get the Recomendo newsletter, a weekly mail “that gives you six brief personal recommendations of cool stuff”, and one of the very few I don’t apply my strict to-read-later law to.
As the sun peeks from behind the clouds, I voraciously inspect this week’s tips in search of anything that could spark the adrenaline rush of a new discovery: a super cool screenwriting resource, a yet-unknown iphone battery saving hack, some precious advice on how to unblock your creativity when writing. All new and good stuff. And I realize that this simple and mood-lifting practice has been going on, religiously, for more than six years.
I also realize that Kevin Kelly, co-author of the newsletter, has been one of my favorite thinkers for at least as many years without the slightest hint of intellectual fatigue (I get cyclically tired of things, people or ideas).
Kevin Kelly is many things at once. People know him as a technology visionary, a trend predictor, a scholar of the intersection between humans and technology. He calls himself a packager of ideas. Someone who likes to “edit his and other people’s ideas to communicate and share with others”. So, what’s that? A communicator? A curator?
I simply see him as a clear thinker. It might sound like a diminishing attribute vis-à-vis his many titles (like co-Founder and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, or Founding Board Member and co-Chair of the Long Now foundation, or Author of several bestsellers including “What Technology Wants” and “The Inevitable”, among others), but to me that’s the most valuable and hard-to-develop trait of them all -- thinking clearly is a point of arrival.
Self-taught, he belongs to the rare breed of people who listen and, when asked a question, respond with a real, thought-out, never banal, never dogmatic-sounding answer.
When Neil Pasricha, host of the 3 Books podcast, asks him for one last piece of advice to leave their listeners, for example, he answers “I think, every really important person that I admire reads more than I do”. See? This is not like saying “You should do this or that”; it’s a personal statement, a thought, a clear, simple thought. You can infer what you choose from it, but he knows that people who care about learning and personal growth will get the right message.
Or when Stephen Dubner, host of the Freakonomics podcast, asks him for advice on how we could be more open to changing our preferences and be more “fluid” with our tastes as we get older, he says that, when he doesn’t like something, he is always tempted to dismiss it quickly; but he tries his best to keep returning to it with as much grace and open mindedness as possible -- “When I have a chance and it's not too difficult, I'll give things a second or third or fourth chance, and occasionally I do change my mind and I'm glad I pursued that as I didn't see it in the beginning.” Again, he’s asked for advice but he replies with what he does or how he feels in or about a particular situation. That, to me, is a hundred times better than advice per se (as I wrote in last week’s essay).
Speaking of advice, upon turning 70 Kevin Kelly published a piece that went viral immediately, called “103 bits of advice I wish I had known”, as a sequel to the equally popular “68 bits of unsolicited advice for my adult children” published on his 68th birthday. When asked to comment on this, he says “I have no idea whether these are right for others [...]. All I’m saying is that these worked for me. So it may be that we need a new word. Maybe advice is not really the right word. Maybe it should be, ‘Stuff that worked for me. It might work for you.’”
He then gathered the 103 bits and the 68 bits and some more bits and put them all in a book titled “Excellent advice for living: wisdom I wish I’d known earlier”. They don’t really sound like advice; they are more like insights (“Stuff that worked for me”, that is), a window onto someone else’s experience.
Someone who dropped out of college to spend ten years backpacking around Asia, who was the first person ever to be hired online in 1983, who’s been called “philosopher technologist” by Krista Tippett and “the world’s most interesting man” by Tim Ferriss. Someone who spends time with the Amish just as easily as he chats with Google’s founders. Someone who has seen it all.
All of “the bits” are extremely good. Some of them I can relate to because I found myself in similar situations or had similar realizations.
Like “Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have”, when I understood that being vulnerable isn’t a sign of weakness but a critical ingredient of inner development. Or “When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves”, when putting pride aside and making the first move towards the recovery of a relationship has always given me a profound sense of liberation and soul-cleansing.
Most of them resonated with me as things that I never really considered but that I could easily embrace as precious, well thought-out pieces of wisdom.
Like “Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson, you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive, that means you still have lessons to learn”, or “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others”, or “Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.” This last one made me laugh out loud and lose sleep at the same time.
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I am fascinated by Kevin Kelly’s way of looking at the future of humanity and technology. Some of his ideas profoundly shaped my thinking, and I warmly recommend that you go read his vast body of work (essays, books and interviews). He always makes an impact.
Kevin Kelly is an optimist. He defines himself as “The most optimistic person in the world”, or rather “The most optimistic person I know”. Not only that, he goes as far as saying that being optimistic is a moral duty: optimism is not a matter of temperament; whatever temperament we may have, we can choose to be optimistic.
“In the past, every great and difficult thing that has been accomplished, every breakthrough, has required a very strong sense of optimism”. And so, “if we want to shape the future, we need to be optimistic”. This doesn’t mean that by being optimistic we will shape a perfect world, with no problems or bad things. It’s not utopia, but what he calls “protopia”: a world in which things are a little bit better, where we have a few more reasons to hope than to fear, where incremental net positive change compounds in the long run and creates progress. And if we look at data in a scientific, rational way, we see that, on average and on a global scale, there has been incremental improvement over the last 500-600 years.
So why do many people find it so hard to be optimistic? Not a trivial question to ask in a world where daily headlines are about wars, natural catastrophes, poverty, deadly diseases or economic crises.
Kevin Kelly believes there are three reasons for this: (a) most of progress is about what does not happen (for example, two-year-old children not dying of smallpox), (b) bad things happen faster than good things -- good things take time (if we could write one headline every 100 years, instead of daily, we would read that good things happened), and (c) the small net positive that compounds over time is only visible in retrospect.
Is it possible that, after so many centuries, progress will stop and no more good things happen? Yes, but it’s highly unlikely. And this is the first reason for being optimistic: based on what we’ve seen so far, there’s a high probability that progress will continue.
The second reason for being optimistic has to do with trust. As a mechanism to create progress via small incremental improvements that compound over time, civilization relies on trusting total strangers to collaborate with and make things beyond our individual capabilities. And trust is a type of optimism. In addition to the eight billion people who live now on this planet, we can also trust future generations. Today we are benefiting from the work of past generations, because they acted as good ancestors for us. We also want to be good ancestors for future generations, and moving to the future the benefits of what we do today is an act of optimism, because future generations will be able to solve problems that we cannot solve ourselves. “We should be optimistic not because we believe that our problems are smaller than we thought, but because we believe that our capacity to solve problems is greater than we thought.”
The third reason for being optimistic has to do with problems. Optimists don't shun problems: they embrace them because problems make solutions, and solutions, in turn, make problems. Most of the problems we have today have been generated by the solutions of the past -- we solved an energy problem with the discovery and availability of artificial power (as opposed to human power, i.e. muscles and strength); but now that we have it, problems like pollution, carbon emissions and ultimately climate change have been created. So problems don't impede progress, they are the conduit of progress. No problems, no progress. “That is why I reject utopia, because there are no problems there. Even bad things that happen are basically possibilities that yield new solutions and better opportunities. In that way, problems are unlimited, there is no limit for improvement.”
His 2016 book “The Inevitable: understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future” fleshes out his view of the future of technology over the next thirty years and should be read over and over again. Not only did it help me understand these key trends, but it also helped me feel more positive about them.
Two super interesting ideas left a mark.
One is that "The printed book is by far the most durable and reliable long-term storage technology that we have". A statement that I didn’t expect in a book on the future of technology (but that I loved to read in the printed version of the book). In a subsequent interview, Kevin Kelly elaborates “I am the co-chair of the Long Now foundation, where we've been encouraging and fostering long-term thinking for 25 years, and one of the projects we looked at was the concern of moving information into the future. As we looked at this general trend in our society of going digital, the realization was that a lot of this digital information is not very permanent at all: it is very susceptible to being obsoleted by the next generation of things. Then when we turned to look at books we realized that, comparatively, books on paper are amazingly durable: if you keep them dry they will last for thousands of years, unlike your floppy disc, which nobody can read right now”.
Another one is his view of Virtual Reality (VR). By using VR and making it better over time, we are going to discover things about ourselves that we don’t know. “The thing that I like to emphasize about VR, the reason why I think it's so important, is that what you get is an experience. When you take off the goggles and you come back out and you recollect what happened, you don't remember seeing things, you remember feeling them, experiencing them”. He says that VR is the biggest brain tool that we have. It will transform the Internet of Information (the one we currently have) into the Internet of Experiences, “and experiences are by the way one of the few things that we can’t manufacture and that we’re going to be paying more and more for. We’re going to turn our economy into an Experience Economy, and this is where the jobs will be: if you want something that needs to be manufactured, give it to the robots as a commodity. Experiences are very, very human”.
He believes the biggest companies in twenty years are going to be VR companies “because they have this data about every aspect of your life: what you're afraid of, what you're interested in, what you find fascinating and so on. Just from looking at your eyes, they'll know you so well and they'll gather petabytes of information about you individually and that's where the value is going to be. They're not going to make money selling you goggles”.
Amazing. Fascinating. A little scary.
Neil Pasricha has written that “Kevin Kelly is a kind, wise, and optimistic finger-pointer. And, unlike most mystics, fortune tellers, and futurists, he’s got a long track record of being right”. I totally agree.
Kevin Kelly is one of my favorite human beings. What I have included in this profile is only a miniscule portion of what can be said about him and his work. A few, scattered highlights of things that made an impact on me. By following him over the years, I understood that every time I read something he wrote or heard him talk, I had to pay attention.
Sources:
Freakonomics: Episode 507 - “103 Pieces of Advice That May or May Not Work”
The Jordan Harbinger Show: 537 - Kevin Kelly | 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
“The Inevitable: understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future”
“Excellent advice for living: wisdom I wish I’d known earlier”
This is a tremendously well written introduction to someone I admired even with a much smaller idea of who he was. After reading this I am interested in learning more about him and perhaps buying the book.
One of my north stars! Creating messages of optimism and hope is part of inspiring a long-term bet on humanity. What a beautifully curated read of Kevin Kelly. Thank you Silvio.