257 Quotes by Kevin Kelly

These forces are trajectories, not destinies.

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.

As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke. A couple of high-profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living selling instruction and paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free. The lines of free code become valuable to you only through support and guidance. A lot of medical and genetic information will go this route in the coming decades. Right now getting a full copy of all your DNA is.

Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one’s investment.

Communities saturated with anonymity will either self-destruct or shift from the purely anonymous to the pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind a persistent invented nickname.

Shutting down civilization is actually hard. The fiercer the disaster, the faster the chaos burns out.

Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.