• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

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Kevin Kelly helped to launch Wired magazine back in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. His blog gets a million visitors a month. The guy is super smart.

I’ve had the opportunity to be with him a couple times. This past May he and I served on a planning team for a nonprofit we’re both very fond of. In addition to talking about an article he had just submitted to Wired (see below), Kevin spent an hour talking to me about his forthcoming book. He says the book will make a moral case for why we need to create and use more technology, not less. That should be interesting!

His latest article in Wired makes another bold argument, this time about a “new socialism” of sorts. The rise of open source, crowd sourced social networks, “suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.”

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

Kelly continues…

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

“We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds,” he says. “Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?”

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