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Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.

— Kevin Kelly Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

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Work: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World, 1995
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Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems.

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The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

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The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.

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One of the chief chores in the next economy is to restore the symmetry of knowledge.

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The technium expands life’s fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands life’s fundamental goodness.

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The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness.

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And whether we like it or not, we stand at the fulcrum of the future. We are in part responsible for the evolution of this planet proceeding onward.

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Urbanization is the advent of edge species.

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Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kevin Kelly (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.