Here are some of his quotes and statements I have collected while reading his books and thought that it might be interesting for you too.

Kevin Kelly Quotes

Summarizing the memetics and some other similar ideas:

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

On emergence and evolution:

A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.

On what technology wants:

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability

On how the technology has helped us to know ourselves more than before:

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.

On the emergence of a global brain (or machine):

All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers – what we’re getting out of all these connections is we’re getting one machine. … We’re constructing a single, global machine.

A mechanical/evolutionary view of the world:

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

Future is not so far from now:

The very long tail of the future is already here.

Life is just a complicated technology; technology is just a simplified form of life:

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

Noting the attention economy:

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

Describing the mission of every system (restatement of survival goal):

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

A simple definition of singularity:

Singularity is the point at which “all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes.”

Evolution as a dynamic – constrained process: 

When you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

One of his few motivational statements:

In the context of your dreams, knowledge will always give you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute exceptionally.

On the distributed intelligence:

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs.

On evolution and the meaning:

Evolution doesn’t care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Further quotes and excerpts

Here you can find a list of some other quotes and excerpts from his works:

• Everything is a remix
• Digital socialism
• Immediacy is something people are willing to pay for

The post Selected quotes from Kevin Kelly appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 8

Chapter Title: Remixing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Remixing: Everything is a remix appeared first on webmindset.

Kevin Kelly has titled this chapter as ‘Sharing,’ one of the twelve forces that he believes are shaping our future. Others are accessing, immediacy, screening, and flowing to name a few.

Although he used the word ‘Sharing‘ as title, soon we learn that he prefers to use the word socialism.

Sure he knows that the word ‘socialism’ has a negative connotation for most of his readers, as he notes:

I recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal”, “communitarian”, and “collective”.

I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power.

We call social media “social” for this sames reason: it is a species of social action.

But going through the chapter, you feel that “socialism” was the best name for the trend he is trying to describe.

If previous chapters, he already called The Internet a large copying machine. Here, he emphasizes again that sharing and sampling content is the new default.

He describes Tor, as an example, a place “where one can find a copy of almost anything that can be copied”.

Bottom-up socialism is not bitter as its old top-down version

This free access to resources helped people to move toward a bottom-up socialism.

This is one of the critical differences Kelly highlights between new digital socialism and its old classic not-so-loved top-down counterpart:

The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptations, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered.

But still, there’s no reason to call the new paradigm something other than digital socialism:

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds.

Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops.

Instead of sharing picks and shovels, we share scripts and APIs.

Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritrocracies where the only thing that matters is getting things done.

Instead of national production, we have peer production.

Instead of free government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free commercial goods and services.

Kelly notices many changes in the market and ownership structure. We are not eager for product ownership anymore. We are happy with access to products and services. Netflix and Spotify are the best samples of the new value system.

The main differentiating aspect of the digital socialism

Besides all similarities that Kelly describes, there’s a critical differentiating factor we have to consider, to have a more balanced view of this digital socialism:

It’s not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.

It’s a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

The post Digital Socialism: Towards a New Socialism appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 5

Chapter Title: Accessing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Accessing: The substitute for ownership appeared first on webmindset.

Kelly calls these values “better than free.”

Among all factors, Kelly puts the immediacy on the top of his list.

Here’s his definition of the term:

Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released – or even better, produced – by its creators is a generative asset.

Therefore, Kelly believes that still, you can charge the customer for a product that could be available in free. It’s just possible if the customer receives it before the late majority.

Here are some of the examples of the early delivery premium paid by the customers:

• Many people pay a relatively high price to watch a film in the cinema, although it’s possible to download it later for free or almost free.
• Many readers pay a higher price for the hardcover version of a recently published book, although they know that it would be possible to buy the cheaper paperback version just a few weeks later.
• Despite expected bugs and problems, many people are willing to install the beta-version of software products, just to experience them before the others.

The same idea can be applied to the content-based products. However, in some cases, it’s not as easy as it seems.

For a business that delivers news or digital magazines, it’s not so hard to charge the customers for early delivery. But for the evergreen content creators, it’s a bit harder to define and deploy a model.

Although I have found and implemented various ideas for immediate delivery of the evergreen content, willingly leave the case open to the reader, to find creative solutions for it.

The post Immediacy is something people are willing to pay for appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Number: 4

Chapter Title: Screening

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Screening: The substitute for reading appeared first on webmindset.

As Kaplan and Norton say in their now classic book Strategy Maps, the strategy is based on a differentiated customer value proposition.

To put it another way, unless you find something unique and valuable to your customers, there’s no way to guarantee your business success.

Customer Value Proposition (CVP) in digital domain (6Cs Model)

6Cs of customer motivation, initially suggested by Dave Chaffey is still one of the most online popular customer value proposition models.

6Cs model, as the name implies, consists of 6 dimensions of possible value propositions in the digital world:

Despite the fact that the 6Cs model is widely cited in digital marketing books and articles, it’s assumptions are still very similar to the physical market assumptions. It seems that the author, have considered the digital market just as the old physical one, except the fact that the new market in enabled by digital distribution and delivery services.

The product ownership rights are still considered as granted, to make an example. However, we are all aware of the copyright infringements and violations in the digital era.

As Kevin Kelly notes, the Internet is a large copying machine waiting for new content to copy it freely as much as possible.

Therefore, despite the fact that the digital communication technologies provided creators with convenient ways to deliver their product,  they made product piracy even more convenient.

Considering the above fact and many other ignored characteristics of the current digital era, it seems that we have to find a new model to survive in the digital age. The age in which stealing a product is much easier and faster and straight forward than purchasing it.

Kevin Kelly in his book titled The Inevitable coins the term “generative values” to describe values which people are still ready to pay for them even in the digital flowing era.

I just leave this diagram here to describe every single component of it in the future articles:

8 Value Proposition Ideas in the digital age

Related Article: Immediacy is something people are willing to pay for.

Note: I have used the term ideas instead of Model as Kelly doesn’t claim that he has suggested a model. Instead, he just calls the above factors as value generation ideas to convince the customer to pay in the post-copyright era.

The post Online Value Proposition Models and Ideas appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Flowing

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Flowing – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (3) appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Cognifying

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Quotes and excerpts from other parts of the book

• Remixing: Everything is a remix
• Digital Socialism: Towards a new socialism
• Accessing: The substitute for ownership
• Immediacy is something people are willing to pay for
• Screeing: The substitute for reading
• Flowing: A new characteristic of the current era
• The becoming era (excerpts from the first chapter of the book)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Cognifying – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (2) appeared first on webmindset.

Written by: Kevin Kelly

Chapter Title: Becoming

Order Information:

The Inevitable (Amazon.com)
The Inevitable (Barnes & Noble)

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post The Becoming Era – Excerpts from “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (1) appeared first on webmindset.