80 Inspirational Kevin Kelly Quotes [2024]

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Updated: January 20th, 2022

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003.

His new book for Viking/Penguin is The Inevitable, is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

We've put together an incredible collection of Kevin Kelly quotes to read.

Here they are:

80 Inspirational Kevin Kelly Quotes [2024]

List of Inspiring Kevin Kelly Quotes

"Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.“

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

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

"In network economics, more brings more.“

"Any highly evolved form is beautiful.“

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

"The value of a network explodes as its membership increases, and then the value explosion sucks in yet more members, compounding the result.“

"The future of machines is biology.“

"Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.“

"The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.“

"Telling the future is what organisms are for.“

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

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

"In the past, an innovationÕs momentum indicated significance. Now, in the network environment, where biological behaviour reigns, significance precedes momentum.“

"In the network economy, producing and consuming fuse into a single verb: prosuming. Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment.“

"Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything.“

"To achieve sustainable innovation you need to seek persistent disequilibrium. To seek persistent disequilibrium means that one must chase after disruption without succumbing to it, or retreating from it.“

"In the network economy a firm's primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm«s value to maximizing the network's value.“

"To prosper, feed the web first.“

"Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralyzed with choices.“

"It is not money the Great Asymmetry accrues, nor energy, nor stuff. The origin of economic wealth begins in opportunities.“

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

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

"Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.“

"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.“

"The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control.“

"If goods and services become more valuable as they become more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free.“

"There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.“

"In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice.“

"Every opportunity seized launches at least two new opportunities.“

"One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.“

"It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.“

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

"To maximise innovation, maximise the fringes.“

"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.“

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

"A network is a possibility factory.“

"A system is anything that talks to itself.“

"Individual allegiance moves away from firms and toward networks and network platforms.“

"What humans can't engineer, evolution can.“

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

"In turbulence is the preservation of the world.“

"The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.“

"Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.“

"Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing.“

"Expertise now resides in fanatical customers. The world's best experts on your product or service, don't work for your company. They are your customers, or a hobby tribe.“

"We can only get smart things from stupid things.“

"The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.“

"When information is plentiful, peers take over.“

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

"In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy.“

"The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.“

"In the marketspace of networks, value flows in webs.“

"The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships.“

"No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.“

"In the network economy the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become.“

"Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life.“

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

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

"The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.“

"The net shifts from mass media to mess media.“

"Urbanization is the advent of edge species.“

"One of the chief chores in the next economy is to restore the symmetry of knowledge.“

"The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network.“

"Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly largemouth, birthing an ever-larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.“

"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.“

"The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated.“

"The migration from ad hoc use to commercialization cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you have to pass through sharing.“

"Technology has become our culture, our culture technology.“

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

"In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organization of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile email culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.“

"We want a machine that is constantly remaking itself.“

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

"Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems.“

"The genes harbor their own wisdom and their own inertia.“

"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.“

"The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.“

"It's a "hits" economy where resources flow to those that show some life. If a new novel, new product, or new service begins to succeed it is fed more; if it falters its left to wither.“

"We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution.“

"We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control.“

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Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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