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Kevin Kelly talks about his "New Rules for the New Economy" -- and why managing technology is like raising kids. BY R.U. SIRIUS | Harking at least back to his days as editor of the Whole Earth Review, Kevin Kelly has had a fascination with how human technologies and organizations function in a biological manner. His seminal 1995 book, "Out Of Control," was a fascinating exploration of this terrain. Since Kelly is also the founding and ongoing executive editor of Wired, response to "Out of Control" quickly turned political: Critics, connecting the book with the libertarian tendencies they found in the magazine, read it as advocating a kind of mercilessly Darwinian free enterprise. Kelly's latest book, "New Rules for the New Economy" (Viking Penguin, 164 pages), will only serve to bolster that perception. Formatted as a business advice manual along the lines of Tom Peters' "Thriving on Chaos," "New Rules" doesn't stop to shed a tear for those left behind as it excitedly delineates the shift from old industrial rules to a dangerous world of "constant flux" and networked, process-oriented business activity -- a marketplace that is truly out of control. The book, which developed out of a Wired article, propounds a kind of businessperson's anarchism, with rules like "Follow The Free," "Let Go at the Top" and "No Harmony, All Flux" -- and recommendations like intentionally disrupting smooth operations to get innovation, giving away free product and decentralizing control. But while the reader of "New Rules" has to presume that Kelly is advocating this "new economy" as a sort of ideal, his stance emerges a little differently in this interview with Salon. While I wouldn't take issue with most of your points in "New Rules" about the ways network capitalism functions, I question whether this is a new economy, or simply a mutation of the same old one. The same technologies in a different political, historic and economic situation would have some similar impacts, but some different ones. You imply that a certain biological inevitability has taken us to this point. Aren't these "rules" largely an accident of history and the psychology of consumer capitalism that's been passed down to us from the Industrial Age? I certainly agree that our heavily "businessized" society is a product of contingency. And yes, if history had played out differently, our culture would be different. Technology and values are in a push-pull dance, one shaping the other. Where I diverge from the obvious is my assertion that at this moment in time, our values worldwide are so fragmented, pluralistic and shriveled that they're overwhelmed by global technology -- and that technology, therefore, is the most powerful force of change in our culture. It certainly doesn't have to be this way; indeed I would rather it not. But I don't see any evidence to the contrary -- other than some decent folk wishing it were otherwise. So I feel very safe in saying that for the horizon of my book -- 30 years or so into the future -- technology will shape our economy. You're taking a surprisingly critical view of the "shriveled" culture you're pitching to. You did include a critique at the very end of the book, giving it basically three paragraphs. It's like 140 pages of exhilaration, and then a little pin-prick of deflation. Would you agree with Arthur Kroker that digital culture is bipolar, constantly mood-swinging between exhilaration and exhaustion, "wired" and "tired"? Yes, I think it does oscillate wildly. My own observation is that we have a love-hate relationship with technology, just as we have with nature. In one breath we bow down before the natural world for its beauty, power and sustenance, for without an untainted natural world we're dead. But in the next breath we erect walls, sterile barriers, vaccines, and hack living things back so they won't conquer us. It's clear life would overrun us quickly if we didn't push back. As technology accrues some of the power and complexity of life, we are beginning to treat it with the same two minds: We're intoxicated by technology's emerging beauty, power and ability to feed our creativity, but in the next moment, it's obvious that unless we hack technology back it will overtake us. I actually share these two minds. But of the two perspectives, I find the latter more fascinating because of our ignorance. We already know what pushing technology back is like because we'd done little else for hundreds of years. But we have no serious inkling of what technology wants. As technology becomes more animated and autonomous, I think we should be asking ourselves where it wants to go, what its biases are and how far it can govern itself. We need to know this at the very least in order to push back expertly and with appropriate force -- otherwise we push in blindness. Both "Out of Control" and "New Rules" are explorations of the internal dynamics of technological systems to see what kind of worlds they create on their own. I am inclined to give them some room and see what it is that they can do, even with the knowledge that we can't easily undo them. It's sort of like raising kids. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Did Wired magazine use the rules for the new economy? |
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