Kevin Kelly

Using nature as a model for the internet, the economy, or other large systems is not new. Much of the science and (more importantly?) mathematics of explaining both is similar. Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) is a great explainer of these ideas. He has lot of interesting writing on his website. http://www.kk.org/ I think Biz Stone is one of the most advanced thinkers of social media. I hope he keeps writing about this.

The Whole Earth Catalog was like a preview of the World Wide Web, before the WWW existed. It was the best thing going back then, as far as ways to discover interesting things and, along with its companion publication Coevolution Quarterly (and later Whole Earth Review), ideas. Also as an aside, Kevin Kelly, who is still producing interesting material today (http://kk.org), ran the magazine for a while, during which time he was developing the vision for what became Wired magazine. This was around the time of the software catalogs and in the early days of the Well. There's an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog called "Signal" which was essentially a preview of Wired, before some people with money came in and claimed credit for founding it... I think he is still given credit as a co-founder but he was the visionary and instigator who made it happen. [Edit: I see in his own bio he says: "In 1992 I joined a small team which launched Wired magazine in January 1993." LOL! That's insanely modest. In around Spring of 1987 I sat with him in an office at Whole Earth Review while he described this magazine he wanted to do, a larger format magazine, breaking some size rules, with bright colors, bold, creative layout, and lots of experimentation with creative or just plain abusive typography, focused on tech and the culture around it... Signal had to rely on the older printing technology so it didn't have the color aspects as I recall but the vision he described in that meeting was 100%…

Following up with actual numbers for the project, from Lulu, in Euros: List Price 43 Print cost 11 Distribution fees (read: Amazon, 50% of selling price): 21.5 Lulu share of profit : 2 Rest to author: 8,5 Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live). For books sold directly on Lulu List price 43 Print cost 11 Lulu share of profit: 6.5 Rest to author: 25.5 The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publishing/

The "original affluent society" theory is based on several false premises and is fundamentally outdated, but people keep it alive because it fits certain Rousseauean assumptions we have. I recommend reading this: https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf There are so many things wrong with those time estimates.

No equivalent as far as I know but would love to see one. The function it served has been scattered across Youtube, X, Substack, Hacker News, etc. but scale makes it hard to curate exclusively for such a specific audience with such a specific aesthetic. Kevin Kelly is still writing through The Technium [0], which might scratch some of the itch but is more an island than a colony like Whole Earth was. Time for a hippie futurist revival? [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/

Another good resource for learning how to draw realistically is the book: "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". The premise is that your brain wants to take shortcuts and group/chunk things together on what they should look like, instead of what things actually look like. But even a rectangle in real life has non-right-angles because of perspective, etc.. And if you draw what you actually see, then the drawings come out correct. Some of the exercises are copying other drawings placed upside-down, so that you brain doesn't try to over-interpret things. I can't recommend this enough if you want to go from a beginner to something respectable in drawing abilities. https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/15854292… https://kk.org/cooltools/drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain/

People depend on Apple products and spurious results are not acceptable, whereas on social media sites, and Google search results, you can expect the worst, and get it regularly. Enshittification is the norm, IMO. This makes the point: > If it’s 100% accurate, it’s a fantastic time saver. If it is anything less than 100% accurate, it’s useless. Because even if there’s a 2% chance it’s wrong, there’s a 2% chance you’re stranding mom at the airport, and mom will be, rightly, very disappointed. Our moms deserve better! Introducing errors is not "what technology wants" [0] The upside of this is that people are realizing that unreliable technology is not for everyone. All it takes is one gaffe to break trust, and there are too many gaffes. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/what-technology/

> "But where I'm at now, in my mind," Flegel said, "you just need some regulars. Some people who've got your back, are into what you're doing." This reminds me of "1,000 true fans" [0]. A concept I've always liked and been drawn to. The internet has made that more possible than ever with things like Patreon. There are a couple podcasts in way behind on that I still pay for simply because I like the hosts and want to support them, I'd love to see more of that. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

This KK (Kevin Kelley) guy seems super cool. I just browsed the rest of the site. Turns out he wrote that "New Rules For The New Economy" book back in the 90s. Pretty much every post on The Technium that I've read has been insightful. He's even got a section of the site just dedicated to showcasing how people "reappropriate" i.e. actually use technology: https://kk.org/streetuse/

Kevin Kelly has a great essay on this called 'thinkism' : https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-thinkism-fallacy/

Fair enough. I agree that $500 is a big ask for public domain content, however there is still a service provided by Getty in surfacing this content. It seems fair to charge a fee for that convenience- after all, the consumer has an option to do that work and find it themselves if they value their time less than the cost and have the necessary knowledge. Kevin Kelly identifies this in his excellent article “better than free“ (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/) Getty asserts a related point in the claim- that the work done to build extensive metadata for the content (which Stability apparently used for training their models) is a valuable service in and of itself.

Seems to be a followup blog post soon after https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ , which was on HN the other day (258 points by Tomte 2 days ago 141 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130726)

I greatly enjoyed working through this list a while back: https://kk.org/cooltools/best-magazine-articles-ever/

This would be a great time to reread the classic "Better Than Free" essay. https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ By my count, the average OnlyFans account absolutely nails 5 out of the 8 "generative" qualities that Kelly identifies.

kk isn't really just some random old person, he was Wired for all intents and purposes for a long time, he is an astounding and empathetic travel photographer and is one of Stewart Brand's best friends. I realize you were speaking generally but I hope we can all make an exception for this one random old person. Do yourself a favor and turn the pages of Asia Grace. Ageism is a hell of a drug. https://kk.org/books/asia-grace/ sneaky edit: if I could get life advice from any random old person, he would definitely be on my short list. The guy knows how to live.

Have a couple in random order: Be intentional about who you spend time with, who you work with, who you serve, and who you listen to. (March 2019, Patrick McKenzie, @patio11) Dreams don't work unless you do (April 2019, Sara Dietschy) The failure mode of clever is 'asshole' (John Scalzi, 2010) Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean they love you. (Lou Whittaker, Rainier mountain guide) Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going. (April 2021, https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/) Feedback is nutrition. Everyone goes for the sugar and positive feedback, but you need your greens too. (Oct 2014, Morten Heuing)

Thanks! Fixed now. Our software has been replacing submitted URLs with canonical URLs when it finds them; but this time the canonical URL was https://kk.org/.

"The one where writing books is not really a good idea". Griffin cites 1000 true fans [0], where for $100k target income, you want 1K fans at $10 month. For me the consumer, that's $100/year per author, times I don't know how many subscriptions I'd budget. It's weird to think that the creative marketplace runs on patronage, but I suppose that's true going back at least to the Renaissance. She's opting to serialize her fiction on substack, toward the possibility of greater scale at lower unit cost. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I really miss the old weatherspark. It was extremely performant and also had by far the best/most useful UI visualizations of any weather app to date. http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/09/weatherspark-weather-data-visualizati… https://kk.org/cooltools/weatherspark/ As I understand it, they didn't have the money to migrate from Flash to HTML5 and the current site is a shadow of it's former self.

In a similar vein, "You Are Not Late"[0] by Kevin Kelly is a great read. [0]: https://kk.org/thetechnium/you-are-not-late/

"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free on the web." A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay (https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/), but TL;DR is that traits like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000

The "classic" article describing this concept is Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans": https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

Not only do they not deal with the problem at the core, these types of well meaning but misguided ideas often end up perpetuating the very problem they are meant to address. So much of the policies from the left on race are examples of the shirky principle in action: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky This is a great article from Shelby Steele, an African-American senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute on the issue: http://archive.is/EXl8N#selection-1951.267-1955.491

This conversation has not been very productive. Basically it’s a pedantic discussion about the meaning of marketing. I recommend this [updated] 10-year-old article about finding your first 1000 customers: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ Much has been written about the idea: https://seths.blog/2009/12/first-organize-1000/ https://nowspeed.com/seth-godins-latest-book-tribes/ http://jumpcut.com/blog/kevin-kelly-1000-true-fans/

Your comment about 100 followers immediately made me think of the 1,000 True Fans essay by Kevin Kelly [1]. [1] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I will always recommend the 'Amish Hackers' article by Kevin Kelly [0] which describes the sophisticated relationship the Amish have with technology. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/

Must-read article about the concept of "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!

Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.

Seems like household bulbs are either too yellow or too blue/white. Funny you should mention that. I just wrote this: http://kk.org/cooltools/finally-led-light-bulb/ a few days ago. This bulb has a yellow-pinkish hue and I think it's great.

Yeah, wow. I backed VoxelQuest which is a kinda famously failed project now that was just on HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904287 Projects like this can be great because you have direct contact with the creator. That might also be a huge distraction to the creator... It doesn't take much patronage to support an artist. Dwarf Fortress is fan funded. This is probably the original manifesto that started kickstarter + patreon etc. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/