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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Out of Control
  • book by Kevin Kelly about autonomous life machines (his later book What Technology Wants has similar themes). I find these works somewhat irritating and I'm not sure why; probably because they are facile pop treatments of the same themes I'm interested in.
from Weird Studies/Courses/AI
from Anne Herbert
from Whole Earth Catalog
  • Kevin Kelly's Recomendo newsletter and especially the collected book closely replicates the Catalog format and the focus on tools.
from Weird Studies/Unabomber
  • Well this ep was in my wheelhouse. Not so much about the Unabomber as with the various weird countercultural threads tied to cybernetics, the agency of technology (they cite What Technology Wants ) and Kacinzky's reaction.
Twin Pages

Kevin Kelly

30 Oct 2021 - 22 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq
    • A technology writer who covers some of the same themes I do. Kelly was the editor of Wired and before that associated with Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog and sort of incarnates the more libertarian techno-optimist strain of thinking from that quarter.
    • A two-part review of his book What Technology Wants:
      • Omniorthogonal: "A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil"
        • Both [Kelly and Latour] are trying to locate agency somewhere other than in its traditional home of individual humans, but while Latour distributes it throughout the material world, Kelly seems to locate it in some transcendent heavenly omega point. That's why ultimately Latour seems to be more of a humanist -- the desires he talks about are human-scaled, even if they inhabit odd objects.
    • Here he describes the human process of "self-domestication"
      • In my 2010 book, What Technology Wants, I made this argument, which I believe is the first time anyone suggested that humans domesticated themselves:
      • >* We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have coevolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology—every last knife and spear—were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology….We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today.*
      • That is a really interesting agential refactoring. Humanity as not just an agent, but a self-transforming, self-creating agent (need a term for that – autopoetic? Too hard to spell and too technical-obscure).
      • The story about the BAZ1B gene is interesting. Sigh, no references, but I guess who needs explicit links really?