Kevin Kelly — “senior maverick” at Wired — is living the dream:
I spend most of my day reading. I read magazines, and books, and then I try and write a little about what I learned. Of course, I also write emails. Then I take a hike or a bike, and I also try to take one photograph a day. So I mostly spend my time reading.
Kelly dropped out of college after studying geology for one year and instead “awarded [him]self a graduate degree in Asian studies”:
I spent almost a decade traveling in Asia with very little money, and that transformed my life and it gave me insights into how things are actually done. And I also caught a really bad case of optimism there because I saw with my own eyes nations bootstrapping themselves from poverty into prosperity.
His own kids went to college:
I think you don’t need college if you have a project that you want to throw yourself into, if you have the gumption and the discipline, if you have a really good alternative. And I’ve told my kids if you don’t have that, then you’ve got to go to college.
Kelly and his circle of digital revolutionaries were hippies, which many people today don’t realize:
They don’t, and that is actually one of the untold stories. Actually, it was told by the New York Times technology writer, John Markoff, who wrote a kind of overlooked book called What the Dormouse Said, which was telling the hippie origins of the personal computer and how basically from Doug Engelbart and Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand, they were all dropping acid; they were trying to augment human cognition, not trying to make a new industry. And a lot of the earliest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in the computer world were former hippies who were living on communes and learned some small business skills making candles or macramé, or whatever it was, and transferred that into this ethic of the entrepreneur, which is now kind of all fancy and hip. And that is definitely a thread of Silicon Valley that’s not widely appreciated.
Kelly was one of the “weird” hippies who didn’t drop acid — until his 50th birthday. “There’s nothing more boring than hearing someone’s acid trip,” he notes:
It was a positive experience. And I did a lot of research on trying to find out how you do this well, and it turns out that that was actually kind of hard to find, but you do it with a guide and in the right setting. So I did it outdoors. I had a very experienced person who was sitting by me, and taking care of me and leading me through. And I also had a source for the drug that was very pure. However, I have to say that I was given four tabs and I threw the last one into the ocean when I was done saying, you know, I don’t need to do that again.
His father sounds interesting, too:
My father actually worked for Time-Life. He was not in the editorial side. He was in something that was called operations research at the time, that we would now call, like, I.T. He was one of the people who brought computers to the magazine world. And then later on he was involved in this really kind of weird startup that you might have heard of, called HBO. And so he was involved with the guys who were taking cable TV and trying to put it on a satellite.
What has he spent “too much” on, but does not regret?
My library. I have a two-story library filled with lots of books. You know, I’ve read, maybe two-thirds of them. So there’s lots of books that I haven’t read. They take up a lot of space, but I just love it. I just would not give it up for anything.
Amen.
His favorite book is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by the way. I may have to check that out.
Absolutely on Dillard. She’s not what you might think.