KEVIN KELLY Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. n 1994 and 1997, during Kelly's tenure, Wired won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (the industry's equivalent of two Oscars).
From 1984 to 1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. The non-profit Whole Earth Review (formerly called Co-Evolution Quarterly) is a small, yet influential, journal that consistently published trend-making topics years before other publications noticed them. Under Kelly's direction and editorship, Whole Earth was the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, Internet culture and artificial life (to name just a few early trends).
In the late 80s, Kelly conceived and oversaw the publication of four versions of the Whole Earth Catalogs. Whole Earth Catalogs are award-winning compendiums evaluating all the best "tools" available for self-education. (Over a million Whole Earth Catalogs have been sold.) The kind of tools reviewed include hardware, power tools, books, and software—anything that leverages power to individuals. In 1988 Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a Whole Earth Catalog of personal communication tools, which evaluated the technologies of faxes, satellite TV, cellular, digital retouching, online systems and the whole emerging world of digital technology.
Kelly was also co-founder of the annual Hackers' Conference, a weekend rendezvous which in 1984 brought together three generations of legendary computer programmers for the first time. He was also involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
Kelly is a member of the board of The Long Now Foundation. which is a group of concerned individuals building a clock and library that will last 10,000 years. A working prototype of the unique mechanical-digital clock has been built and demonstrated, and a mountain top in eastern Nevada purchased as a site to build the monumental clock. The purpose of the project is to foster long term responsibility.
He is the author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World; New Rules for the New Economy; Asia Grace; What Technology Wants; Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilitites; and, most recently, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. His writing has appeared in many national and international publications such as the New York Times, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, Wall Street Journal and Esquire. His photographs have appeared in LIFE and other national magazines.
