"Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex"
About this Quote
Complexity is the one addiction modern culture refuses to name, and Kevin Kelly catches it in mid-escalation. “Everything that we are making” sounds totalizing on purpose: not just gadgets, but institutions, platforms, supply chains, even the social rituals that ride on top of them. The repetition of “making” is a quiet tell. This isn’t complexity as an accident of fate; it’s complexity as a chosen output, something we keep manufacturing because it flatters our sense of progress and unlocks new markets.
Kelly’s editor brain is doing two things at once here. First, he’s describing a trend-line: technology stacks pile up, features accrete, and systems interlock until no single person can fully see the whole. Second, he’s smuggling in a value judgment without sounding moralistic. “More and more complex” reads like an observation, but the subtext is a warning about dependency: when everything becomes a networked machine, breakdown stops being local. It cascades.
The context is Kelly’s long-running techno-optimism tempered by systems thinking. Coming out of Wired-era futurism, he’s less interested in individual inventions than in what he’s called the “technium,” a self-propelling ecosystem of tools and behaviors. In that worldview, complexity isn’t just bloat; it’s the price of capability. The line works because it sits on that knife edge: complexity as empowerment and complexity as fragility, a future that’s simultaneously richer and harder to manage, and a society increasingly staffed by specialists explaining the black boxes we demanded.
Kelly’s editor brain is doing two things at once here. First, he’s describing a trend-line: technology stacks pile up, features accrete, and systems interlock until no single person can fully see the whole. Second, he’s smuggling in a value judgment without sounding moralistic. “More and more complex” reads like an observation, but the subtext is a warning about dependency: when everything becomes a networked machine, breakdown stops being local. It cascades.
The context is Kelly’s long-running techno-optimism tempered by systems thinking. Coming out of Wired-era futurism, he’s less interested in individual inventions than in what he’s called the “technium,” a self-propelling ecosystem of tools and behaviors. In that worldview, complexity isn’t just bloat; it’s the price of capability. The line works because it sits on that knife edge: complexity as empowerment and complexity as fragility, a future that’s simultaneously richer and harder to manage, and a society increasingly staffed by specialists explaining the black boxes we demanded.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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