Kevin Kelly - Daddy Issues
Propos recueillis par Yana Sosnovskaya et Aaron Gonsher, 19 juillet 2023 #article
À propos de Kelly :
à propos de Zora :
I decided to write about it as if it was a new world, because I was a travel writer at the time, and I decided that I would cover this as if it was a new continent, a new nation, a new country.
It was very nerdy. Most people dismissed it in the way that you might dismiss people who are interested in crypto today.
I think Web3 sees themselves as counterculture. Whole Earth was counterculture and it preached a kind of Walden “march to your own drum.” There is some aspect of that in Web3—really feeling that they are outside the orthodoxy, which they are. But I will say that the Whole Earth Catalog was not a huge fan of communes, and that’s probably because Stewart (Brand) had tried to live on a commune and became very disgruntled with it. I didn’t have any real direct contact but I was always kind of suspicious of them, but I think the Catalog in itself was not; it was sold and made a huge amount of money from communes buying it. So it wasn’t anti-commune, but it really wasn’t in favor, either.
We now have a duty to be optimistic as we imagine a future. It’s difficult to imagine a high-tech world full of AI and genetic engineering and surveillance that we want to live in, but if we can imagine a way in which it works for the better, then we can aim towards that. I think we should strive to imagine a future full of all this technology that works.
It feels to me as if it’s [les blockchains] a technology looking for the right job. It reminds me of a high school graduate who’s very talented and odd, and they are trying to figure out where their place is. My feeling is that blockchain is going to be most useful when you have no idea that it’s there. It’s like plumbing. It’s not going to be sexy when it works. It’s going to be very, very boring.
I think it’s to everybody’s benefit to have a stable ID. It just doesn’t make any sense for most people. There are the libertarian types, anarchists are concerned about opting out, and that’s a legitimate concern. How do you opt out? Everywhere, until now, we’ve had a frontier where people who wanted to opt out could go opt out. And so, we probably want to retain some way for people to opt out of the system. It’s probably healthy to have that mechanism. If we have a world government, which I think we should, that becomes even more important. The one advantage we have of having multiple national governments is that there’s competition. If you have a world government, that’s a monopoly; you can imagine it getting stagnant. I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe there’s two world governments.
But I don’t think Web2 was a step backward. I think it was a step forward. (...) Social media has been fantastic in terms of allowing people to express themselves and have an audience.
I know that the Web3 people talk about getting a more decentralized state away from the big monopoly players, but we had a monopoly. We had Microsoft Windows, and I actually argued that that was good. You don’t want to have a monopoly, you want to have an oligopoly. You want to have two or three to choose from. (...) And Google, Amazon: I go to Amazon every day because they are so good. (...) I would say the same thing with Facebook. Yes, there are some issues, but compared to what? Let’s make it better, but let’s not get rid of it.