“Connecting Community, Place and Spirit” the Wired Way
Kelly’s article, “We are the Web,” (Wired, August 2005) outlines the history and possible future of the Internet in a few crisp pages. According to Kelly (founding editor of Wired Magazine), the Internet, taken as a whole, is the most complex and longest continuously running machine ever invented. That sounds like a 4R - robust, resilient, responsible, and renewing – entity to me.
Gradually we’re connecting everyone to everyone and everyone to everything. It’s not being done by a great centralized integration agency or dot.com, it is being accomplished one bit at a time by the millions of individual Internet users as they post, email, name, and link during time online.
There are many useful lessons that can be drawn from the evolution of the Internet, and the emerging culture of mass collaboration it engenders. Kelly’s books, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), and New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999) are early attempts at articulating some of the lessons. Though the Internet has grown and developed beyond what it was when these books were written, Kelly did a fine job of giving us some direction in which to look.
Improving corporate and municipal sustainability are two of the most important priorities where modeling the sustainability of the Internet’s would be most valuable. The Connecting Community Place and Spirit effort as it is spoken of in Carlsbad, CA, is demonstrating similar dynamics. Though not conceived from Internet lessons, many of the lessons network effects are in action. Likewise in Alpine, CA the Revitalization effort underway there is emerging in a similarly wonderful way.
I invite you to read Kelly’s article and books then compare what you learn there with these two local improvement efforts. In the process you may just find a new kind of community spirit that improves life locally and inspires improvement globally.
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