Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Kevin Kelly

American Digital Visionary, Publisher of the Whole Earth Review, Founding Executive Editor of WIRED, Founder of Visionary Nonprofits, Writer

""It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy."

""Correct" is a property of small systems."

"All imaginable futures are not equally possible."

"A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel."

"A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often."

"All items that can be copied, both tangible and intangible, adhere to the law of inverted pricing and become cheaper as they improve."

"A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness."

"A network is a possibility factory."

"A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company."

"A good definition of a network is organic behavior in a technological matrix."

"An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux."

"A system is anything that talks to itself."

"An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time."

"An organization?s intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous."

"An organization?s reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment."

"And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs."

"An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment."

"An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide."

"Animals are robots that work. Toons are simply robots without hard bodies."

"Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge."

"Any highly evolved form is beautiful."

"An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous."

"Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going."

"As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world."

"As more of the economy migrates to intangibles, more of the economy will require standards."

"As in other technological evolutions, relationship tech will begin its innovation in the avant garde, then work back to the familiar."

"As tremendous as the influence of financial inventions have been, in the influence of network inventions will be as great, or greater."

"As Stewart Brand says, the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the proto-commercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyper-drive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business."

"As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic."

"Basins of attraction, of self-organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas."

"At present there is far more to be gained by pushing the boundaries of what can be done by the bottom than by focusing on what can be done at the top."

"Because information trumps mass, all commerce migrates to the network economy."

"Because prices move inexorably towards the free, the best move in the network economy is to anticipate this cheapness."

"Bit by bit the logic of the network will overtake every atom we deal with."

"Because skill guilds constrain (and defend) an organization, it is often far easier to start a new organization than to change a successful old one."

"Biology always wins in any blending of organic and machine."

"Communication ? which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about ? is not just a sector of the economy. Communication IS the economy."

"Changing things from the top down works when things are stable."

"But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths."

"But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down."

"But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions."

"Complete surrender to the bottom is not what embracing swarm power is about."

"Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed."

"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work."

"Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other."

"Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems."

"Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results."

"Each organism?s environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms."

"Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities."

"Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment."