Blog Dissection / Discussion of Kevin Kelly's Lifestream

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Sort of like a book dissection, but cheaper.

1) Remember book clubs? Well, this is a blog club. No need to buy a book. Free ideas, free thoughts.

2) We adopt a blog. We read anything the writer(s) write. (If you're not familiar with blogs, here's an explanation on what RSS means)

3) We get together and talk about it.

Blog we'll start out with is: Kevin Kelly's Lifestream: http://www.kk.org/kk.../

About Kevin Kelly
From 1984 to 1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. The non-profit Whole Earth Review (formerly called Co-Evolution Quarterly) is a small, yet influential, journal that consistently published trend-making topics years before other publications noticed them. Under Kelly's direction and editorship, Whole Earth was the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, Internet culture and artificial life (to name just a few early trends).

Kelly is the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Economic and Social Systems, published by Addison Wesley (1994). This wide-ranging book is about how machines, the economy, and all large human-made inventions are becoming biological. Fortune magazine called it "essential reading for all executives." His most recent book is New Rules for the New Economy published in 1998 by Viking/Penguin in the US and by 4th Estate in the UK.

His current passion is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth. This project, called the All Species Inventory (www.all-species.org), received its first million dollars in funding and is currently endorsed by most taxonomic groups as an idea whose time has come. It hopes to make a web-based catalog of all species on earth in one generation, or the next 25 years.

Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 1970s he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. He wrote a monthly travel column for New Age Journal. In the early 1980s he published and edited the first magazine devoted to walking, and ran a mail order catalog specializing in budget travel around the world.

Each meeting we'll decide whose blog we'll be reading the next time.

http://www.kk.org/kk.../

RECENT BLOG ENTRY
http://www.kk.org/kk.../
Count on more being different.

A handful of sand grains will never form an avalanche no matter how hard one tries to do it. Indeed one could study a single grain of sand for a hundred years and never conclude that sand can avalanche. To form avalanches you need millions of grains. In systems, more is different. A network with a million nodes acts significantly different from one with hundreds. The two networks are like separate species--a whale and an ant, or perhaps more accurately, a hive and an ant. Twenty million steel hammers swinging in unison is still 20 million steel hammers. But 20 million computers in a swarm is much, much more than 20 million individual computers.

Do what you can to make "more." In a network the chicken-and-egg problem can hinder growth at first--there's no audience because there is no content, and there is no content because there is no audience. Thus, the first efforts at connecting everything to everything sometimes yield thin fruit. At first, smart cards look no different from credit cards--just more inconvenient. But more is different; 20 million smart cards is a vastly different beast than 20 million credit cards.

It's the small things that change the most in value as they become "more." A tiny capsule that beeps and displays a number, multiplied by millions: the pager system. What if all the Gameboys or Playstations in the world could talk to one another? What if all the residential electric meters in a city were connected together into a large swarm? If all the outdoor thermometers were connected, we would have a picture of our climate a thousand times better than we have ever had before.

The ants have shown us that there is almost nothing so small in the world that it can't be made larger by embedding a bit of interaction in many copies of it, and then connecting them all together.

The game in the network economy will be to find the overlooked small and figure out the best way to have them embrace the swarm.