Kevin Kelly

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

This page is about the magazine editor. For the wrestling announcer, go to Kevin Kelly (announcer), and for the wrestling performer known as "Mr. Magnificent" Kevin Kelly, see Kevin Wacholz.

Kevin Kelly
Enlarge
Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly (b. 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has also been a writer, photographer and conservationist. Kelly is a student of cultures (Asian ones in particular) and is considered by some an expert in digital culture.

Contents

[edit] Life and Literary Career

Kevin Kelly was born in 1952. He has no college or university degrees, however his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, The Economist and other periodicals — as well as in books he has authored and in magazines he has either edited, founded, or helped to found.

In 1981, Kelly founded Walking Journal. He is a former editor of Whole Earth Review (see also CoEvolution Quarterly), Signal, and some of the later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. With Whole Earth's founder, Stewart Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL, a highly regarded online community. He has been a director of the Point Foundation, which sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984 (before the word "hacker" had its current common, negative connotation).

In 1994, Wired Magazine, for which Kelly was executive director, won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Kelly is now editor at large for the magazine. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant and observer of "cyberculture".

Kelly's writing has appeared in many other national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harper's Magazine, Science, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines.

Kelly's most notable book-length publication, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World 1994, presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization. The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain.

Among Kelly's personal involvements is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth, an effort also known as the Linnaean enterprise. The All Species Inventory received a million dollars in funding, which is currently endorsed by many quarters in biology as "an idea whose time has come." The goal is to make an attempt at an "all species" web-based catalog in one generation (25 years).

Kelly lives in Pacifica, California, a small coastal town just south of San Francisco. He is married and has three children.

[edit] Books

  • Bicycle Haiku (book)|Bicycle Haiku (1995)
  • Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (Perseus Books, 1995)

(online complete text and reviews)

  • New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (Penguin, 1999)
  • Asia Grace (2002)
  • Cool Tools (2003)
  • Bad Dreams (2003)
  • “Photographers section: Kevin Kelly,” pp. 106-111, in Lloyd Kahn, editor 2004 Home Work (Shelter Publications, 2004)

[edit] Lectures

[edit] Blog

[edit] The Matrix (1999 film)

Andy and Larry Wachowski, writers/directors of the film The Matrix, required the principal actors of the film to read three books prior to the start of filming, including Kelly’s 1995 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. The other two were Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard and Introducing Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans, Oscar Zarate (Illustrator), Richard Appignanesi (Editor).

Kelly can be seen in a series of interviews on The Roots of the Matrix disk in the 10-disk DVD The Ultimate Matrix Collection set.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../k/e/v/Kevin_Kelly_f127.html"
In other languages