It's amazing to me how prescient Kevin Kelly was in the late 90s. So much of his writing from then holds up incredibly well today. This essay is packed with gems and insights, but the gist is to embrace the net and complexity. He also explores two other ideas that I'm particularly drawn to:
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Technology beginning to mimic biology: "Indeed, if the web feels like a frontier, it’s because for the first time in history we are witnessing biological growth in technological systems.”
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The importance of sharing first as the best strategy for distribution or catching attention (which along with bitcoin is becoming the only scarce commodity): "[W]ealth feeds off ubiquity, and ubiquity usually mandates some level of sharing.”
One interesting open question for me is how long the network economy will reign supreme....and what comes next. "The Network Economy is not the end of history. Given the rate of change, this economic arrangement may not endure more than a generation or two. Once networks have saturated every space in our lives, an entirely new set of rules will take hold."
What do you think comes next?