I am still writing my next book which is about what technology wants. I’m posting my thoughts in-progress on The Technium, a semi-blog.
Most of what I write these days is born digital. In addition to the Technium I run or post to 9 other blogs. They are:
Cool Tools – One new tool recommendation per day
Current Trends – One new cultural and technological trend per day
Street Use – Visual glimpses of how people actually use technology
True Films – Rave reviews of great documentaries and non-fiction films
The Quantified Self – Self-monitoring methods for self-knowledge
Asia Grace – My on-going love affair with Asia
Geek Dad – Summaries of projects completed by nerdy dads
Long Views – Reports on efforts to encourage long-term thinking
Kevin Kelly – Personal doings that only my mom cares about
All these bits are consolidated into one uber-blog I call my Lifestream. Anything that I write on any blog will be posted in this stream. (Anything written by other authors on my blogs will not be posted here.) This is an easy way to keep up with what I am working on, thinking about, messing with.
My passion for documentaries goes beyond my True Films website. I’ve seen thousands of non-fiction films in the last 5 years, and have reviewed 200 of the very best ones available on DVD (at consumer prices). I took these “must see” titles and created a book version called True Films 3.0. In an experiment in new media publishing I’ve released this book as a free PDF, which I hope you will download and enjoy. You have the option of seeing contextual ads alongside the book’s pages if you have the most recent version of Acrobat Reader.
The Long Now Foundation (I am a board member) hosts a public seminar each month feature a talk on long-term thinking. Past speakers include Brian Eno, Paul Hawken, Jared Diamond, Danny Hillis, among the better known, and many other equally talented original thinkers. I co-host the evening with Stewart Brand. They happen approximately every second Friday of the month at a venue in San Francisco, often Fort Mason. If you are in the neighborhood, please join us. The talks are free.
One of our Long Now projects is Long Bets, a forum for making long-term bets about the future. The intent is to foster accountability in our predictions; when you are wrong it should hurt. Recently a few high-profile bets have been won and made.
Six years ago I began a non-profit foundation to help catalog all the living species on Earth. Part of that project was to make a unique web page for every one of the 1.8 million species Science knows about. As we discover and name additional species of the 50-100 million others probably living on this planet, we’ll give them a page too. We raised $1 million to start the All Species Inventory, but did not get very far. The foundation is currently moribund, but thankfully others have taken on the vision and are making it happen. Recently the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations, together with the Smithsonian Institution, began funding the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) — a web page for every species. E.O. Wilson, who was on our board and who has been talking about similar goals, is the visible spokesperson for the EOL and articulates this essential vision very well. It’s a relief to have such capable professional biologists working on this collective grand mission — to discover, name and describe all the life on Earth in the next 25 years.
I am still an incurable magazine junkie. I remain the Senior Maverick for Wired, a magazine I helped co-found a decade ago. My most recent published writings are listed here, in chronological order.
A couple of years ago I was granted my 15 seconds of second-hand Hollywood fame. This short edited video clip from The Matrix Revisited (the making of the Matrix) has Keanu Reeves recounting how each actor had to read my book Out of Control (and 2 other books) before they could open the original script. There is a series of interviews with me on the “The Roots of the Matrix: Hard Science” disk in the 10-disk DVD Ultimate Matrix Collection series.
My further doings are outlined comprehensively in this narrative. My history is covered in this chronology. Details are summarized in this biography.
All my books and their translations can be found on this catalog. Official portraits of me are downloadable from here.
I work in a sunny studio in Pacifica, California, along the coast in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I can be contacted by emailing kk at kk dot org.
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