Time & Perspective Quote by Kevin Kelly

Kelly is smuggling a big idea into bureaucratic-sounding language: bodies matter. Not bodies as in flesh, but embodiment as in institutions that occupy real space, employ real people, and inherit real baggage. The line reads like a calm systems memo, yet it carries an almost moral warning to anyone who thinks organizations can pivot on a dime because the slide deck says so.

The intent is diagnostic. Kelly is naming why evolution in the cultural-and-technological sense is never as free as the rhetoric of disruption implies. A "location" and "physical plant" aren’t neutral assets; they are commitments poured into concrete, leases, supply chains, zoning, sunk costs. A "set of people" means skills, incentives, office politics, and informal power networks that don’t reorganize as smoothly as org charts. "Common history" is the quietest constraint and the most coercive: it’s reputation, legacy customers, past promises, internal myths, old grudges. History becomes policy even when nobody votes on it.

Subtext: the friction isn’t accidental, it’s the system doing what systems do-preserving themselves. Kelly, long associated with techno-optimism and the Whole Earth lineage, often celebrates emergent change; here he’s acknowledging the counterforce. Digitization can make products fluid, but institutions remain stubbornly analog, and the more "real" they are-the more embedded in place and people-the narrower their menu of futures.

Contextually, this reads as a corrective to Silicon Valley’s favorite fantasy: that everything is software. Kelly is insisting that evolution has a habitat, and habitat pushes back.