Thursday, February 14, 2008

Kevin Kelly says Creation needed as well as Evolution

Really? Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine, author of "Out of Control" which popularized the power of the "hive mind" to the general public says you need God, too? Well, no, not really.

But those contemplating the merits of theistic evolution will find his recent blog entry The Bottom is Not Enough quite thought provoking. I'm going to ponder it further myself before writing more.

But I will say I think he brilliantly elucidates one of the core drivers of the Web 2.0 business craze:
What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much 'hive' in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
...ad infinitum.

The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control.

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