‘What Technology Wants’: a look at the world of Kevin Kelly | by Peter Manthos | CodeX | Feb, 2022
Kevin Kelly is not what you would call a typical technocrat. Dropping out of college in his 20s, he wandered for eight years all over Asia with a backpack and a sleeping bag, traveling on foot and sleeping anywhere, in close contact with nature. Returning to the United States, he bought a cheap bicycle and crossed the American Continent from West to East, ending up in a remote area of New York state where he began building a log house with a friend.
In the process of constructing the house, he became fascinated with the importance of picking the right tools and in 1980 he began freelancing for the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication that encouraged its readers to review and recommend tools, a sort of website before the existence of personal computers and the Internet.
As Kelly got involved with the Whole Earth Catalog, he began obsessing with the use of technology in general, getting acquainted with computers. In 1993 he co-founded Wired magazine continuing his quest to understand the role of technology.
In 1999 in his book ‘New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World’ Kelly described how new technologies were affecting the economy. Kelly pointed out that as soon as computers were connected through the telephone line, they began to offer unlimited access to other users through networks. For Kelly, networks are the essence of the new economy, creating new rules. In classical economics, the supply of products increases if their price goes up — in the new economics supply increases as the price goes down, as networks create their own demand. Supply and demand no longer depend on resource scarcity, but on one single force: technology.
In his book ‘What Technology Wants (2010)’, Kelly introduced the term ‘Technium’ to describe “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us”. According to Kelly, society is as dependent on the Technium as it is on nature, and our response to it should be similar to our response to nature. The Technium has its own laws of evolution, based on technology.
For Kelly, there is no bad or good technology. Technology is irreversibly incorporated in modern societies and cannot be distinguished, it is embedded in our lives and in the economy. However, there can be a bad or good use of technology. Kelly is very interested in the way the Amish approach technology (during his trip through America, in Pennsylvania he came across the farms of the Amish, which was the closest thing to the minimal technology he had experienced in Asia). The Amish have a very deliberate process for determining the appropriate use of tools and technology — each community is free to decide the use of technology according to its needs and experiment with it.
Does Technology have anything to teach humans? According to Kelly, the technology of law makes men better. In his own words: “The elaborate system of law that undergirds Western societies is not very different from software. It’s a complex set of code that runs on paper instead of in a computer, and it slowly calculates fairness and order (ideally).”
Kelly has a personal website (https://kk.org/) where he talks about the Technium, Cool Tools among others. He continues to be an editor for Wired Magazine.
Gloss