bike Press

11

 

April 1996
in oe

  
  

Kevin
Kelly
Goes
Deep

Interview by Trent Ernst

“Part of what post-modernism says to
me is that you can hold contradictory
. views in your head at the same time,”
says Kelly. In this, at least, Kelly is a
true post-modernist. He tells me that he
is poor speller, and I ask him how an
| editor of a major magazine can be a poor
- speller. “There are two things. There are
spell checkers and there are copy
editors.” His approach to
editing emphasizes content
over form. “Editing—the kind
of editing I do—has less to do
with spelling and more to do with
structuring a story. Placing ideas. Being
clear. My style of editing is simple. I
' represent the reader. I see myself as a
typical reader of Wired. I strive for
clarity and heightened awareness and
story flow, narrative, character
 development...whatever is required in
y the piece. So I’m reading it as a reader...
I won’t notice grammar unless it is
obviously wrong, and I don’t really care
about it that much. I think it is over-
emphasized.”
Kelly points to the Internet
for an example where people
are communicating despite
errors in spelling and grammar. “On

| teleconferencing systems where people
are typing madly at each other, no one
cares about spelling and punctuation. It’s
still communication.” Concern about
spelling, says Kelly, is entirely
misplaced.

Kelly is convinced that too much
| energy is put into the form of
r communication. “That’s all just

superficial and surface. It doesn’t really
have much to do with what is being
said.”

How much form is necessary
wad. for communication?
“Very little, I think. Again, I’m
pointing to the communication
- on-line where there is spelling mistakes
all over the place and no
one punctuates correctly.
People purposely don’t
“capitalize, and it is
amazing how much is
communicated there,
/and how strong the
writing is.
“T think the writing
on-line is a lot better than
most printed material, because people
are trying very hard to connect, and
they are less concerned with literary
form. What happens with most
people when they sit down to write a
_ term paper or they try to write a book
.[is that] they try and write things that
sound like writing. They adhere to the
orm,, and are less concerned with
F-actually trying to communicate
| something. I think that is much to its
| detriment, that forms of the printed word
- have become more important than the
-actual communication inside it.”
-- Kelly’s emphasis on- content over
‘?form is an editorial trait he has come by
honestly. He started his career editing his
own magazine and newsletters that were
| put out “by the seat of the pants.” He

   
  
 
 
  
   
 
 
  
 
 
 

 

 

moved on to the scientific journal The
Whole Earth Review where he interned
at the feet of Stewart Brand. Kelly
picked up many of his literary and
scientific ideas from watching Brand. “
I learned a lot by watching other people
do it.”

After a few years at The Whole Earth
Review, Kelly joined Louis Rossetto and
Jane Metcalfe in starting Wired, an edgy,
glossy magazine that maps the evolution
of cyber-techo-sub-culture, and made it
popular. Wildly popular.

Kelly took the designation of
‘executive editor,’ a title that was “made
up” for him. “If you look at all the
different magazines,” says Kelly,
“executive editors appear in different
rankings. There is no uniform definition.
Sometime executive editors are people
who run the budget.... Other times they
are below the managing editors and
basically attend meetings... At Wired it
means that’ I have no. deadline
responsibilities. I attend a lot of
meetings, I look at editorial directions, I
do story idea and editorial development;
I work on the other magazines that we’re
thinking of starting up. It means that
basically, I don’t have any
responsibilities.”

It also means he gets a lot of perks.
As a part owner of Wired, Kelly has the
authority to do as he wishes. “There is
no ‘them’ there. We’re just a bunch of
people who don’t want to work for
corporations.... 1 do what I want to do.
If I want to talk to somebody, I can talk
to them. If I want to talk to them and put
it in the magazine, I can put it in the
magazine.”

Years of work as an editor means that
Kelly can edit “almost in my sleep.” As
executive editor, Kelly is able to take “all
these great ideas” he has and let other
people write the actual story. “Then I can
shape it and work with it. I find that
much easier to do.”

 

But what about the pleasure of writing
the story?

“T don’t enjoy writing. I find writing
torturous. I’ma very slow writer. I avoid
it. I’m not one of these people who writes
to feel good. I do it almost as a last
resort.”

Strange words, coming from a man
who just published his first book. But
he quickly qualifies himself. “I enjoy
having written.” He also enjoys the
“sense of self satisfaction and
accomplishment from actually doing the
dirty work,” but he maintains that
writing is neither “easy” or “enjoyable”
for him.

It was the nature of the Internet that
turned Kelly into a writer. A pioneer of
virtual communications, Kelly was

“[Interviewing] is the socially polite way to steal.” {If anyone understands the dynamics
of an interview, it is Kevin Kelly. Kelly is the author of the weighty (472 pages) tome, Out
of Control, an exploration of current thinking on the nature of nature and technology.
Kelly spent three years doing the research for the book, taking time off from his usual
job as executive editor of Wired magazine, a phenomenally successful rag that charts
the cutting edge of cyber-culture - that strange, constantly redefined space where humanity
and technology interact. [During the course of those three years Kelly talked to nearly
two hundred scientists, computer hacks, roboticists, biologists, engineers, evolutionists...
if they are on the cutting edge, Kelly probably chatted with them as he criss-crossed
America researching his book.{|Kelly graciously took time out of an extremely busy schedule

to chat with me, and though we talked for well over an hour, the conversation could have
easily gone on. Maybe very few ideas are his (as he claims in the acknowledgements for
Out of Control). But Kelly has become a repository of popular scientific thought, and he
has synthesised the ideas that he has stolen from talking to people like musician Brian

Eno and rebel robotocist Mark Pauline and made them truly his own.

involved with the WELL, a telecomputer
hangout, where the necessity of e-mail
and teleconferencing “made” him a
writer. “When I first came on-line, I did
not think of myself as a writer. I came
on as an editor of other people’s work. I
did not view myself as a writer, I did not
have much ambition to be a writer. I
never wanted to be a writer. But I found
that by having to communicate often on-
line on a lot of subjects and having that
direct feedback of whether I was
understood or not taught me how to
write.”

The other key in
launching his career as a
writer was reading how-to-
write books. “They’re
great!” Kelly exclaims with
the same enthusiasm and
optimism that permeates his
writing. “I learned how to
write by reading books and
trying it out on the WELL.
The first couple stories I wrote, I sold
by paying attention to what those books
said.”

Still, Kelly maintains that the only
reason he wrote Out of Control was
because he couldn’t find anyone else to
write it. “I avoided [writing Out of
Control{ for years, and in the end I was
compelled to [write]. I just felt that I had
this thing in my head, and I couldn’t get
anyone else to see it or write it, and it
was just too big to let go, and there was
no other way other than to [write it
myself].”

The “year off ” that Kelly planned
to write the book in very quickly
expanded to three. “If I had known it
would take that long I would never have
started it.” Still, the idea was too big,
too pervasive for him not to write. Kelly
is content with just working at Wired for
the time being. “I’m avoiding [writing
another book] like the plague. I don’t
want to think about it. I’ll write another
book only when the
same sense comes
over me, which is
basically that I have
an idea which no
one else can write,
or no one else will,
then I'll sort of
suffer through it.”

Kelly is willing to publish a book at a
time many people fear new technology
will bring about the end of the book. As
a futurist, and as someone who is
involved in the technological revolution,
Kelly isn’t worried. “I don’t think that
books are going to go away.” In fact, he
is optimistic that print will still play a
big role in the future. “I don’t think
magazines are going to go away no
matter how big the Internet gets. they
are not going away. Secondly I think the
role of what books do and what
magazines do will shift. The book has
done many things, and some of those
things will now be done by the new
media, leaving books with the things that
cannot be done by this new media.”

However, he believes that the future

will bring about changes to the printed
word. “I don’t think...that books are the
height of human achievement. I think
books have their own problems. I think
reading has it’s own disadvantages, just
like the ‘net does. A sense of authority
that is misplaced, perhaps. At this late
age of the media, after thousands of
years, there is a fixation on the form. I
think that people have to understand that
reading and books have their cost.
“When novels first became popular
in the Victorian age there was a great
hue and cry about the dangers of novels.

 

Of people escaping into them, reading
for hours at a time. People didn’t read
for hours at a time before. This whole
idea that people were putting down
actually talking to people and instead
spending time reading the book and
escaping into the new medium and being
anti-social and entering into these
fantasy worlds. This was a big big
concern.”

Plato was really concerned about the
rise of the book. He said that the written
word detracted from the spoken word.

“Right. They were concerned about
the loss of memory, and. it was true.
People’s working memory did atrophy
as print came along. They wrote things
down because they couldn’t remember
things. Their memory weakened. It was
true. But memory hasn’t gone away
completely. And books, while they do
have a cost, are good. And the same thing
about the new media. The new media
will have a cost, but they will do things
that the old media cannot. “

Kelly does predict that there will be a
major paradigm shift. “I think that we
will shift from a culture of the book to a
culture of the screen. From a people of

the book to a people of the screen.” He

predicts that society will move away
from a_ traditional sense of
communication, or “letteracy,” as he
calls it. “Letters and those kind of
symbols will shift to more of a visual
literacy or ‘Visualacy.’ This is alarming
to a lot of people who think that
civilization is built on letters. And I think
that, while letters may be necessary to

_ build a civilization, it is not at all clear

to me that they are necessary to maintain
a civilization.”

Kelly can envision a world where
books exist, but are not central. Where
the primary methods of learning and
transmitting ideas involve “watching”
and hearing. “Once voice input into
computers becomes more flawless and
workable, we might communicate with
our computers entirely by talking and
listening, maybe not entirely, but a large
part. And part of it will be by watching

as well...”

Kelly attributes this shift to a new
sense of causality. “Some of the things
we get from books, that Greek sense of
linear causality and Truth and the Prime
Cause, the causality that A causes B, B
causes C, going back to the Prime Cause
may be one the victims.”

What will take its place?

“We have more an ‘ecological’ sense
emerging now, with Hypertext. Things
come in circles. A is linked to B, B is
linked to C and C is linked to A again.
What causes it? You can’t unravel how
things are caused.
Everything is interdependent
and ecological and messy
and tangled. It is very
relative and post-modern,
and that’s where we are
heading” *

Which brings us back to
Kelly’s philosophy on life.
And back to Out of Control,
an attempt to understand and explain this
‘ecological causality.” The book
incorporates elements of just about
everything to enumerate what Kelly calls
“the Nine Laws of God.” These laws are
a far cry from the earlier ten
commandments and are general
observations on the emergence of
complex systems ...from the frontiers of
computer science, and the edges of
biological research, and the odd corners
of interdisciplinary experimentation.

Part of his purpose in writing Out of
Control was to “speak to the lay-reader
and people who don’t have specialist
knowledge.” However, his purpose was
much more subtle than just popularising
science. “Science writing is actually now
an essential ingredient of science. I
found that in writing my book, I would
go around to all these people and tell
them things that they didn’t know,
because I just talked to someone in
another lab, and they had no idea of what
[the other scientists] were working with.
There is a sense of being this pollinator,
this town herald coming around and
telling the other scientists what was
going on and helping them shape their
own views on things.”

The trick to being a good science
writer is to ask “good” questions.
“Science writers, just by the questions
they ask, will help shape science itself.”

Asking good questions is something
that Kelly is familiar with. Besides
interviewing nearly two hundred
scientists for the book, Kelly is still
conducting interviews for Wired.

“T enjoy doing interviews because I
enjoy asking questions. I was always the
guy in class who sat up in the first row
and asked questions. Pablo Picasso said
that computers are pretty useless because
all they give you are answers. I think that
asking the right question is far more
valuable than even a good answer. It is
much harder to pose the right framework
for something than to answer it.”

One of the dangers of asking the right
questions is asking too specific a
question. Kelly understands that,
continued on page 12