Wired magazine founder and technologist Kevin Kelly discusses why technology has agency, why he believes in God but not destiny, and how to be an anti-utopian optimist.

This article by Patrick Mcgraw was originally published on Palladium Magazine on December 10, 2020. It was featured in PALLADIUM 02.

We live in a timeline that oscillates somewhere between strangeness and doom. Much of the blame gets placed on new technologies and society’s digestion of them. And though many of the growing pains we’re experiencing amount to history rhyming, our newfound access to enormous amounts of  information has produced anomalies. Notably, we can create and live in elaborate simulative bubbles. Whether via politics (QAnon) or nostalgic cultural recreations (‘80s Downtown Art Scene), many choose to roleplay a world or previous historical era while increasingly intangible forms of technology become more powerful. It’s world-building that’s become almost a new social contract: let others do what they want politically and economically, so long as we can continue to roleplay without too much interference.

Technologist Kevin Kelly has pinned this simulative aspect on technology’s function as a kind of nascent biological entity with its own agency. The “Technium” as he refers to it, is “the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.” While some would interpret technology to be a driverless, chaotic system made all the more destructive by its attachment to a market economy, Kelly argues that it’s part of a system acting on its own vague accord, interacting with humans as a way to further itself.

Kelly is also a boomer, and after dropping out of college and tramping around the world for a few years, he was invited by Stewart Brand to work on the Whole Earth Catalog, the phonebook-like compendium that published guides on subjects such as how to build a buckyball, along with ads for chemistry sets and saw mills. In a pre-Unabomber world, the catalog influenced people to seek civilizational exit from an America in turmoil by escaping to the countryside to experiment with off-the-grid living. But as other figures of that generation, like Timothy Leary and Jerry Rubin, started donning suits and publicly espousing the benefits of capitalism, Kelly would make a professional pivot by helping found Wired in 1993, where he continues to be an editor.

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