Kevin Kelly Speaker & Booking Information

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.

Kelly began contributing freelance articles to CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, while living in Athens, Georgia. Around this time he was also editing his own start-up magazine calledWalking Journal, and working in an epidemiology laboratory to support himself.

He was hired in 1983 by Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand to edit some of the later editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth Review, and Signal. With Brand, Kelly helped found the WELL, an influential virtual community. As director of the Point Foundation, he co-sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984.

In 1992, Kelly was hired by Louis Rossetto to serve as executive editor of Wired. Kelly brought to the magazine the cybernetic social vision of the Whole Earth publications and their networked style of editorial work, while also recruiting writers and editors from the WELL. Kelly stepped down as executive editor in 1999; his current job title at Wired is Senior Maverick. Partially due to his reputation as Wired's editor, he is noted as a participant and observer of cyberculture.

Kelly's 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.

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. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organisations, intelligent computers, and to the human brain.

Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. One summer he rode a bicycle 5,000 miles across America. For most of the 1970s he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines.

Kelly is a member of the Global Business Network, a consulting group that specializes in creating scenarios of the future for global businesses. He is a Fellow at the Center for Business Innovation, and serves on the Board of Directors at the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Kelly is a member of the board of The Long Now Foundation, a group of concerned individuals building a clock and library that will last 10,000 years. His current passion is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth, called the All Species Inventory.