Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly was born in 1952 in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Westfield High School in Westfield N.J. in 1970. He attended the University of Rhode Island but dropped out after one year. He became a freelance photo journalist. In 1981, Kelly founded Walking Journal. He is a former editor of Whole Earth Review , Signal, and some of the later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. With Whole Earth's founder, Stewart Brand, Kelly helped to found the WELL, a highly regarded online community. He has been a director of the Point Foundation, which sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984 (before the word "hacker" had its current common, negative connotation). In 1994, Wired Magazine, for which Kelly was executive director, won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Kelly is now editor at large for the magazine. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant and observer of "cyber culture". His writing has appeared in many other national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harper's Magazine, Science, Veneer Magazine, GQ, and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in Life and other American national magazines. Kevin Kelly's most notable book-length publication, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1994), presents a view on the mechanisms of complex organization. The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. He applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain. His book What Technology Wants made the New York Times Bestseller list for October 2010.