Digital prophet Kevin Kelly: I’ve learned a lot from Spielberg

The influential tech thinker and co-founder of Wired on the dangers of online anonymity, advising on the film Minority Report, and what 2050 will look like

Kevin Kelly may not be a household name but he is one of the quietly influential people who have helped shape the modern world, or at least the bit of it at the end of our keyboards and phones: the internet. A college dropout and a hippy, he spent his 20s and early 30s travelling before landing a job editing the Whole Earth Review, the successor to the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture’s “bible” that influenced many computing pioneers. He later became involved in The Well, one of the earliest online forums and virtual communities, and went on co-found Wired magazine. These days, aged 63, he still contributes to Wired (he has the title of “senior maverick”) and also writes books about the future, the latest of which is The Inevitable.

Am I right in thinking that you’re saying the future isn’t as scary as we think, and that it’s coming whether we like it or not so we might as well get used to it?
I think that’s a well-put subtext. The future is going to be a little better than today and we should embrace it so we have a better chance of domesticating it, so to speak. It is only by engaging with technology that we can maximise the benefits and minimise the harms. If we try to prohibit it, outlaw it, stop it, diminish it, we’ll fail. These larger shapes of technology are inevitable.

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