kevin kelly’s complexity theory - the politics and ideology of self-organizing systems

ORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENT / June 1999Best,Kellner / KELLY’S COMPLEXITY THEORY

Articles

KEVIN KELLY’S COMPLEXITY THEORY

The Politics and Ideology of Self-Organizing Systems

STEVEN BESTUniversity of Texas, El Paso

DOUGLAS KELLNERUCLA Graduate School of Education

Regarded as a contemporary prophet of the new technology and economy, Kevin Kellyargues that the realms of nature and human construction are becoming one. Human-madethings are becoming more lifelike, and life is becoming more engineered. In this future world,control is dispersed in highly pluralistic, open, and decentralized systems. Natural, techno-logical, economic, and social elements of the system coevolve toward a superior, neobiologi-cal civilization that will foster bottom-up control, coordinated change, and cooperationamong all elements. The authors contest Kelly’s metaphysics of the new economy and tech-nologies, arguing that he illicitly collapses technology and the economy into nature, usingnature metaphors to legitimate the new forms of economy and organization. The authorsargue that Kelly fails to factor in the logic of capital into his scenario and fails to explore theconsequences of the new organization of economy and new technology for the environmentand society.

As technology becomes more animated and autonomous, I think we should be askingourselves where it wants to go, what its biases are and how far it can govern itself. Weneed to know this at the very least in order to push back expertly and with appropriateforce— otherwise we push in blindness.

—Kevin Kelly (1998a)

Every major intellectual field and academic discipline has taken a postmodern turnin recent years, challenging or overthrowing modern paradigms and establishingnew ones.1 In fields ranging from the life sciences to business organization to war,provocative arguments are being developed that we are emerging into a new globaleconomy, an innovative high-tech society and culture, and a novel postmodern wayof life and identity. Kevin Kelly, former editor ofThe Whole Earth Review,cofounder of the Well, promoter of various cyberevents like the Hackers Conven-tion, and now the executive editor ofWired, is being presented as a prophet of thenew economy with the publication of his bookNew Rules for the New Economy(1998b).2 This text builds on his earlier workOut of Control(1994) which estab-lishes the theoretical framework in which he celebrates the new economy and newtechnologies as forces of inestimable progress and worth that should not be tam-pered with or regulated by the state.

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Kelly argues we need new paradigms, new ideas, and new practices to makesense of and deal with the tumultuous changes that we are undergoing due to theglobal restructuring of the economy; the proliferation of new technologies; rapidsocial, political, and cultural change; and the emergence of new modes of thought.We agree that momentous changes are occurring and that we need new thinking andpractices to deal with the fallout of the technological revolution and the globalrestructuring of capitalism that we see as the motor of the “great transformation”that we are now undergoing (Best & Kellner, in press). Yet, although we appreciatethe importance of appropriating ideas from new sciences to help understand thetechnological revolution and advent of a new economy, we believe that we alsoneed critical social theory to make sense of the current transformations. Accord-ingly, in this article, we will sort out Kelly’s key ideas, provide a critical evaluationof his work, and indicate the extent to which we believe his writings do or do notilluminate the novel and emergent conditions, phenomena, and challenges that weare currently confronting.

GETTING OVER HUMANISM:TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMICS OUT OF CONTROL

In an age of smartness and superintelligence, the most intelligent control methodswill appear as uncontrol methods. Investing machines with the ability to adapt ontheir own, to evolve in their own direction, and grow without human oversight isthe next great advance in technology. Giving machines freedom is the only way wecan have intelligent control.

—Kevin Kelly (1998a)

Kelly’s Out of Control(1994) contains an impressive synthesis of current per-spectives on science, technology, nature, and human beings that provides a lucidintroduction to new paradigms in thinking about these topics. SubtitledThe NewBiology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Kelly providesstriking examples of the ways that human-made things are becoming more lifelike,while life is becoming more manufactured and engineered. Drawing on cybernet-ics, chaos and complexity theory, evolutionary theory, information theory, and dis-cussions of new technologies, Kelly claims that we need fresh models of thoughtthat articulate the parallels between the organization of nature, the novel environ-ments of technology, and the dynamic human and social milieux. Offering a con-cept of vivisystems to describe these domains, Kelly argues that “the realm of theborn—all that is nature—and the realm of themade—all that is humanly con-structed—are becoming one” (p. 1).

For Kelly, the biological is becoming technological as technology intervenes inthe very processes of life with the emergence of bionic bodies; the genetic engineer-ing of plants, animals, and human beings; and cloning. Yet, he also insists that tech-nology is taking on the forms of natural, living systems as it creates new ecologicalenvironments like the Internet or the global economy, and as it models naturalprocesses, generates new evolving forms of digital art and digital DNA on the com-puter, and unfolds in self-organizing modes. A partisan of holistic systems theoryand cybernetics, Kelly advocates big picture thinking, seeing the emergence ofinnovative biological-technological-social systems and their unity, as well as theneed for creative and flexible paradigms and thoughts to comprehend and adapt tothe brave new world of complex, coevolving systems.

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Although cybernetics emerged after World War II as a science of control, Kelly(1994) advocates a countercybernetics, a renunciation of attempts at systems-steering and control, urging us to allow the systems—natural, technological, eco-nomic, and social—to engender their own forms of self-development and self-organizing evolutionary dynamics. His vision is driven by the conception that “Theworld of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable,and creative but, consequently, out of our control” (p. 4). The common denominatorof these vivisystems is an absence of imposed centralized control, the autonomousnature of subunits, high connectivity between parts, and a “webby” nonlinear cau-sality interacting among subsections (pp. 3-4).

Such vivisystems can be observed, he claims, by examining the restoration of aprairie system, the construction of an artificial ecosystem such as Biosphere 2, thedevelopment of computer networks, artificial life experiments, and the emergenceof the Internet and global economy. Kelly is fascinated with networked sys-tems—whether they are biological, mechanical, or social—which he initiallydescribes with the perhaps infelicitous metaphor of “swarm systems” and the “hivemind” (pp. 5-28).3 His project is to show that concepts and metaphors derived fromnatural processes illuminate our technological and social worlds and that thesemodels and paradigms can be used to clarify a wide range of phenomena andprocesses ranging from biology to the global economy.

The concept ofbiologicimplies that future societies will have very complex andlifelike technological systems that will involve intricate interactions betweenhumans and machines. On this view, the only way to the future is not through the oldmechanistic paradigm where we model our thinking on machines but rather on anecological paradigm that emulates the complexity of nature. This process is alsocalled biomimicry (Benyus, 1997), whereby technological systems are constructedby imitating nature. For Kelly, the goal is “to extract the logic of Bios” (p. 2), tostudy the systems of nature to make our technology more complex, to solve moredifficult tasks, and thus to allow our machines to self-replicate, self-govern, learn,evolve, and do things on their own. Examples of biomimicry include trying tomodel computer chips on the complexity of DNA and its greater information pro-cessing ability, analyzing how spiders manufacture their webs to make materialsstronger than steel, or studying the organization or bird flocks to create better cartraffic flows. Kelly’s own favorite example of biologic is the construction of Bio-sphere 2, which replicates ecological dynamics within a new technoenvironmentmodeled on careful study of natural ecosystems (pp. 138-165).

Kelly’s Out of Controlopens with 9 chapters outlining some of the new para-digms of thinking about life and technology, followed by 5 chapters on the neweconomy and social system, and 10 concluding chapters sketching parts of his ownsynthetic vision. His method is to begin with personal experiences and observationsor interviews with cutting-edge scientists and technotheorists and then to sketch outmore general theoretical positions which he illustrates with a set of examples. Kellyexcels as a journalist, and his credentials withWhole Earth Reviewand Wiredenabled him to gain access to major figures in the most advanced sciences, newtechnologies, and high-tech economy. As a consequence, his portraits of the majorplayers and gurus within the New Age science, technological, and economic com-munities are frequently interesting and informative. Despite the rapid changes inthe technological and economic environment since the publication of the book, it isstill well worth reading (although the section on “e-money,” for example, and refer-ences to debit cards now register as economic history rather than as futuristic pro-jections of a new economy). Overall, Kelly provides a substantive introduction

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to fresh thinking about nature, technology, economics, and our emerging postmod-ern world, and his own synthesis and analyses provide many stimulating ideas andperspectives.

In the opening chapters, Kelly is especially interested in how natural processescan be modeled in computer simulations, and conversely, how technoenvironmentssuch as Biosphere 2 can be constructed. By the same token, he believes that con-cepts of industrial ecology and network economics can illuminate the changesgoing on in the socioeconomic world (chap. 10 and 11, pp. 166-202). These reflec-tions are obviously given credibility by the tremendous explosion of the Internetand the global networked economy best described by Manuel Castells (1989, 1996,1997, and 1998). Castells vividly demonstrates that we are living in a world ofunparalleled change and that we need new theories and perspectives to help usmake sense of globalization, the information revolution, the rise of a networkedsociety, and the new world economy.

One of Kelly’s key arguments involves discussion of the coevolution of humans,technology, and nature (pp. 69-90). Here it is important to cite the influence ofStewart Brand who was publisher of both theWhole Earth Cataloguethat Kellyonce edited as well as the founder and publisher ofCoEvolutionary Quarterlyandcofounder of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) in which Kelly also partici-pated. Brand moved from countercultural ecological perspectives to affirm the newcomputer technology, helping push the New Age intelligentsia (including Kelly),into affirmation of new technologies (Brand, 1968, 1987). These and other hip,1960s intellectuals mutated into thedigerati, promoting the emergent cybercultureand its new technologies. Kelly follows Brand (1987) in this trek and returns to hismentor’s conception of coevolution to push the notion that humans and technologyare evolving together in a relationship of codependency.

Kelly argues that we are symbiotic with our technologies; that there is coevolu-tion of humans, nature and technology; and that as our technological environmentdevelops we ourselves evolve and mutate. This provides a stronger naturalisticmetaphysics of the new technologies than, for example, Jean Baudrillard who hasno nature or biology in his theory and who, like Fredric Jameson at times (1991,pp. 34-38), tends to posit postmodernity as the replacement of nature by technology(see the critique of Baudrillard in Kellner 1989a). Rather, for many postmoderntheorists, technology becomes more and more a second nature, a new environment,in which technology and nature implode into each other in the creation of synthetictechnoenvironments and smart machines.

Although we believe it is extremely important to see the coevolution of nature,technology, and human beings, we would argue the points differently and wouldmake distinctions that Kelly implodes. On one hand, Kelly is too eager to collapsetechnology into nature, seeing technologies as life-forms, possessing more andmore qualities of natural and human life. The drama of his book concerns howhumans will relate to the new technologies and whether humans or technology willprevail, with Kelly eventually proposing a copartnership as we note below. As ouropening epigram from a 1998 interview indicates (see www.salonmagazine. com,“An interview with Kevin Kelly”), Kelly both subscribes to and affirms a form oftechnological determinism. His optic collapses nature and social systems into oneprocess of coevolution, all of which follow similar laws and dynamics. In this total-izing tour de force, however, Kelly does not adequately distinguish betweenhumans, nature, technology, and societies, and he also fails to trace appropriatelythe relations between new technologies and social systems, the ways that a neweconomy is helping to shape and construct new technologies, and the sort of econ-




omy and society that new technologies are creating. In short, as we argue below,Kelly leaves capitalism and its logic and dynamics out of this coevolutionary pic-ture, collapsing the economy into technology and both into nature.

In our view, it is today’s theoretical challenge to see how science, technology,nature, human beings, and social systems interact and coevolve, to grasp howchanges in one dimension effect the others, to trace and chart the dialectical inter-action among these spheres, and to analyze how capitalism shapes all these dynam-ics. The most advanced contemporary philosophies of science and technologyconvincingly argue against the autonomy of technology, science, and society, dem-onstrating that human artifacts, techniques, practices, and conceptual schemes aresocially constructed within specific socioeconomic systems, while tracing the waysthat disparate societies fabricate different sciences and technology (see Harding,1998). Kelly, however, is more interested to demonstrate the coevolution of natureand technology and is generally unconcerned to theorize the defining features of thehuman and social. He also privileges natural metaphors (hive, swarm, biologic,etc.) when he discusses human and social systems. Thus, Kelly fails to adequatelytheorize the role of the economy in the construction of the allegedly new worlds thatwe are entering and how this process in turn is shaped by power and resistance.

Kelly posits a continuum, ranging from an extreme form of control (“total domi-nation”) contrasted to a situation “out of control.” Only toward the end of the bookdoes Kelly concede that his hyped conception of “out of control” is an exaggera-tion, that in fact he is seeking something like co-control, whereby we guide systemswhile they retain their own autonomy (pp. 329-331). Words likeshepherdor man-agecome close to describing the degree of control that Kelly seeks, but “partner-ship, co-control, Cyborgian control”—hence a sharing of control and our destinywith our creations—is what Kelly purports to seek (p. 331). But, this notion of co-control arises in the context of our relationship to technology, and its relevance tothe economic or social system as a whole is not clear. Obviously, in the economicand political domain, there is a competitive quest for control of markets, votes, andpower. Surely, the current titanic battles between software corporations like Micro-soft, Netscape, and other high-tech firms—not to mention the war in the UnitedStates between the Republicans and supporters of Bill Clinton—suggest that mod-els that abstract from power and struggle miss key dynamics of the contemporaryworld.

Thus, Kelly obscures the virulence of agonistic competition in the contemporaryworld and makes the problematic suggestion that more profit is to be gainedthrough alliances than competition, pointing to a tendency to overgeneralize and toa naivete concerning economics that we will highlight in the succeeding sections.Hence, although his analysis puts in question determinist schemes and humanistfantasies about absolute control over the object world and contains the reasonableinsight that to control (guide) the behavior of objects in some domains we mustrelinquish absolute control, this dialectic of guidance/letting go only has specificrelevance in describing our relationship to natural and technical objects. However,when applied to the social world, this view suggests that government and citizensshould not fundamentally tamper with such things as socioeconomic systems ordomains like the Internet. Such a notion renounces the project of refunctioningtechnology and our social systems to serve human needs rather than profit as well asdownplays the need to promote social justice and preserve the environment.

Yet, Kelly seems on the whole to think that our socioeconomic system and tech-nologies are just fine and do not need much tinkering or co-control. His crypto-libertarian political philosophy advances a Reaganesque government-off-your-




back standpoint that translates into corporate hegemony and the capitulation ofgovernment responsibility to protect the health, safety, and rights of citizens.Moreover, Kelly (1994) is extremely technophilic, uncritical of the new economy,and lacks any sense of social or political consciousness or moral concern about thedirections of the global economy and the explosion of new technologies. A free-marketeer, Kelly posits capitalism as a complex system that will steer itself intoorder, providing a replay of Adam Smith’s laissez-faire. Indeed, he sees Smith’s“invisible hand” not only in the market but in the Internet and the net of life itself(p. 26). Hence, where Smith limited the invisible hand to the market and the myste-rious laws of supply and demand, for Kelly the “invisible hand was coevolutionarylife” (p. 78) itself, thus promoting the hand to the very principle of life and, in effect,God. Like Social Darwinists and their principle of ruthless competition, Kelly readssocial metaphors into nature and then back into society, thereby eternalizing contin-gent relations and ideas and legitimating the current organization of society througha cosmic metaphysics.4

In addition, Kelly suggests that systems with free flows of information and com-munication inevitably lead to democracy “as an unavoidable self-organizing strongattractor” (p. 396). Kelly thus posits democracy and implicitly capitalism as theonly viable forms for self-organizing systems. This is a variant of Francis Fukuya-ma’s (1992) conception of “the end of history” that capitalism and democracy (ascurrently constituted) are the highest, ultimate, and final forms of history that can-not be surpassed—or are at least the “strong attractors,” “evolutionary peaks,” and“sweet spots” that our social organizations have generated.

Kelly’s mysticism of life and the Net thus leads to simultaneous celebration ofthe Internet and the capitalist market: “The only organization capable of unpreju-diced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit whatcan happen” (p. 26). Presumably, networks are natural phenomena replicating theorganization of nature and are thus capable of growth and development, whereasartificial organizational forms presumably degenerate and die (e.g., bureaucraciesand large static organizations like the socialist state or giant modern corporation).Socially constructed systems and organizations are thus judged by the extent towhich they conform to the laws and contours of nature, and those systems that aredeemed best are those which are in accordance with nature’s supposed self-organizing and self-evolving logic. Thus, nature seeks and realizes itself in the cur-rent capitalist system and its global, networked economy.

Kelly’s celebration of new technology and the new economy are bolstered in hismystical conception of life that he lyrically posits as an evolutionary force towarddiversity, growth, and development. It is one that is “unstoppable,” “irreversible,”and even “immortal” (p. 102). An inveterate optimistic evolutionist, Kelly also pos-its a “rising flow” of life that seeks increasing complexity, diversity, numbers ofindividuals, specialization, codependency, and evolvability (pp. 412-419). Kelly istaken by notions of systems that are “poised on the edge between chaos and rigidorder” (p. 402). Such systems are also capable of “self-tuning” which “may be themysterious key to evolution that doesn’t stop, the holy grail of open-ended evolu-tion” (p. 403). Thus, Kelly posits an inherent order throughout nature and a net-worked market economy, as if the socioeconomic system itself were capable ofself-organization, fine-tuning, and unstoppable growth and development, withoutthe mediation and domination of distinct social and political forces.

Hence, not only does Kelly posit homologies between nature, technology, andsocial life throughout the book, he reads the logic and dynamics of natural systemsinto social systems, and he believes that both can be simulated and replicated in




computer networks. On the whole, although we find chaos and complexity theoryuseful for understanding natural processes (Best & Kellner, 1997, chap. 5pp. 195-252, in press), we are suspicious that conceptions derived from the study ofnature can be unqualifiably imported into social systems. The degree of complexityseems much greater in social organization that is, after all, the product of highlyflawed humans and groups who seek their own interests and are capable ofextremely destructive and irrational behavior (as the media make clear everyday).Such agonistic complexity makes social modeling and prediction extremely diffi-cult and of questionable validity.

In the final analysis, the title of Kelly’s first book is not a warning that technol-ogy will escape our control; he admits it will, but does not think through the conse-quences. He naively believes that “No one is in control” (p. 449), a total mystifica-tion of our economic and political system in which quite specific corporations,groups, and individuals have significant amounts of power. In the face of the actu-ally existing constellation of power and control, Kelly’s normative urging that weshould allow complex systems to take on their own emergent chaos and allowmachines to take over many human functions and swallow our human pride, obfus-cates the power of ruling sociopolitical forces and is in effect an injunction to sur-render to the current societal organization and go with the flow it creates.

Interestingly,out of controlwas a negative metaphor used to critique capitalismand technology and to point to the dangers of an unregulated market system, un-planned technological development, or a chaotic polity.5 Although one might thinkfrom its title that Kelly’s book might be a warning about technology out of control—a humanist admonition to take control of our economy and technology— in fact, itis quite the opposite. Thus, Kelly inverts a dominant metaphor (out of control) thatonce was used to critique both capitalism and technology, turning a negative into apositive conception, urging us to let go “with dignity” (p. 127). With Kelly, the con-cept becomes a positive feature of a self-organizing economic and technologicalhive that models nature and that benefits precisely from lack of control.

However, we wonder how far contemporary economies would go without eco-nomic regulation and management, without the intervention of the state in times ofcrisis, and without state expenditures for military and welfare to generate economicgrowth and provide a safety net for those who fall through or suffer disadvantage.For Kelly, however, the emergent network system is more creative, productive, andexciting precisely because it is out of control. Likewise, Kelly sees no danger inreleasing potentially harmful pollutants or transgenic species into the environment.He seems to assume that with the end of the industrial era, pollution by large-scalemanufacturing will no longer be a problem, and he does not consider the dangers ofgenetic engineering that Rifkin (1998) and others have documented. Hence, hisnotion of out of control is undialectical, failing to note the situations and phenom-ena that require more control and management than he imagines. Thus, althoughthere is a positive notion to recognizing self-management and not interfering withcertain natural or technical processes that is interesting and useful, there is also ahighly regressive and problematic conception of laissez-faire that fails to recognizethe lesson of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein(1992), that our human creations can getout of control, wreak havoc, and ultimately destroy us.

Although Kelly’s book is valuable in documenting implosions between humansand technology and some fascinating parallels between natural and technologicalprocesses, he is not worried about undoing these boundaries, and he finds no need tomaintain distinctions between humans and technology, or natural, technological,and social processes. This urges us, in effect, to accept a totally imploded posthu-




manist universe.6 Thus, whereas Kelly is correct to see unity in all complex systems,there are also differences that he collapses. For example, capitalism is something ofa self-organizing system, but its dynamics are also shaped by class struggle, compe-tition between major economic units, and complex interaction between economicand political institutions, unlike any natural system. Kelly’s (1994) chapters on theeconomy are wholly uncritical and say nothing about such things as exploitation ormonopoly control, and they do not say much about ecological problems. He haslittle sense of how power operates and of how big organizations manipulate theeconomy and polity for their own ends. It is indeed not clear to us how an economicsystem can be self-organizing when it is shaped by giant corporations, quasi-monopoly control of key technologies, and the state. In Kelly, old market ideologiesthus return in new hip pseudoscientific clothing, recycling old concepts for the newmillennium. Hence, despite Kelly’s exuviation toward new views of science andtechnology, he has not shed his old mystical, new-age cocoon.

Thus, although we can applaud Kelly’s potentially populist emphasis on “con-trol from the bottom up” and appeal to complexity theory to argue that complex sys-tems incorporate evolution from below—from the simple to the complex—gener-ating distributive networks and growth and innovation from the margins, much ofhis wisdom is commonsensical (“cultivate increasing returns,” “honor your errors,”and cultivate change) and banal. Moreover, his admonitions to “seek disequilib-rium” and free technology from all control could have disastrous social and eco-logical implications. Yet, on the whole,Out of Controlwill probably be disappoint-ing to those searching for new models of economy, business organization, andstrategy. Much of what Kelly writes on the market and business organization issomewhat abstract and now outdated, and there are few concrete examples or casestudies. Economics is overwhelmed in his first major book by his relentless desireto assimilate technological and biological systems and his quest to erase fundamen-tal differences between humans, technology, and nature. His more recent book,however, focuses on the new global high-tech economy and provides more sub-stance concerning his economic thinking—a topic that we critically engage in thefollowing sections.

THE NEW RULES OF ACQUISITIVE INDIVIDUALISM

In the coming order, there will be winners and there will be losers. The losers will out-number the winners by an unimaginable factor.

—Jacques Attali (as cited in Athanasiou, 1996)

In contrast to the epic verbosity ofOut of Control,New Rules for the New Econ-omy (Kelly, 1998b) is rather short—indeed, too slight—for it is exceedinglysketchy and superficial, having the feel of an instant book written at warp speed tocatch the fleeting (third) wave of the moment, as it flashes unwarranted promo-tional hype on its jacket.7 In New Rules, Kelly applies the basic scientific and tech-nological concepts ofOut of Control(1994) toward an analysis of the emergentglobal and networked economic organization. In contrast to the philosophicalbravado ofOut of Control,New Rules(1998b) is more a pragmatic than a theoreti-cal work—another how-to manual that suggests ways to exploit the new economy.Indeed, as George Gilder’s blurb on the back cover hails,New Rulesis a “handbookfor happening entrepreneurs,” although we are skeptical as to whether Kelly’s rulesare going to produce new fortunes or that there is all that much new or original aboutthem.8




As a pragmatic text geared for the average J.R. Capitalist, the metaphysical bag-gage ofOut of Controlis conspicuously missing (Kelly no doubt realized thatcapitalist positivism is interested primarily in profit and not in his Hericlitean-cum-Teilhard de Chardin ontology), save for scarce references to the economy as adynamic, complex system in constant flux and disequilibrium. So, in place ofspeculative metaphysics and their corollary laws, the reader finds utilitarian rules,although ultimately one may find these as fuzzy as the Bergsonian-Nietzcheanvitalism informingOut of Control. Kelly has an incorrigible penchant for distillingmessy complexity into simplicity, into nine laws, and then, into 10 rules. PerhapsEleven Blends of Chicken Soup for the Self-Organizing Soulis next? OrTwelveWays to Prepare Tofu for the New-Age Entrepreneur?

Readers ofOut of Controlwho had suspicions of the conservative implicationsof Kelly’s (1994) asocial metaphysics and theory of technology will find these dra-matically confirmed inNew Rules(1998b). Kelly comes out of hisWiredcloset as afull-blown, prodevelopment, growth-oriented, laissez-faire economic thinker; he isa neoliberal blithely indifferent to the major social and ecological problems of ourtime. The title ofNew Rulesimplies two major claims. First, a generic argumentthat we are now in a new stage in capitalist development, which Kelly vaguely linksto postindustrial discourse. Second, if one wants to circumnavigate the new scene,Kelly argues that we need new maps and compasses. Thus, any would-be capitalistwho wants to gain/maintain their fleet of yachts and BMW’s is in luck, for Kellypromises to provide the 10 basic rules they need for wealth and happiness—a 10-step program for an addictive desire to money. According to Kelly, opportunitieshave never been better for amassing wealth, but the booty will not always be ripe forthe picking because the turbulent winds of change can shake the trees of fortunebare at any time.

Trumpeting yesterday’s news, Kelly proclaims that a new economic order hasemerged that “represents a tectonic upheaval in our commonwealth,” occurring as“our world shifts to a highly technical planetary economy” (1998b, p. 1). Kelly seesboth continuities and discontinuities between the old (industrial) and new (postin-dustrial) capitalism. For Kelly, both forms are based on fast-paced, frenetic change,but he says nothing about the continued hegemony of accumulation, exploitation,alienation, and the like in the new utopian soft capitalism. On Kelly’s view, classi-cal capitalism is built on a hard design of steel, industry, automobile manufactur-ing, and other tangible commodities, whereas the new economy is organizedaround soft and intangible goods, such as information, knowledge, services, andentertainment.

Although we find that there are indeed qualitatively new phenomena in therecent reorganization of capitalism, driven by such international organizations astransnational corporations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT), and the International Mone-tary Fund (IMF) as well as by the explosion of consumerism, computers, and infor-mation on a global scale, Kelly has no concrete analysis of when and how thesechanges occurred, and he exaggerates the novelty of what he claims is the cardinalcharacteristic of the new economy—a dense interconnection of networks. As Marxand Engels described vividly in theCommunist Manifesto,classical capitalism dis-mantled premodern cultures and traditions, ran roughshod over national barriers,and “nestle[d] everywhere” (1978, p. 476). The colonialist and imperialisticdynamics of capitalism forced it to create a complex maze of economic, political,and cultural networks that have indeed intensified in the last few decades, butarguably, a network economy is rather shaky ground for positing a rupture in his-




tory, as Kelly (1994, 1998b) does because transportation and communication sys-tems have been essential to capitalism from the beginning.9

Kelly (1998b, p. 1) is most apt in his description of the novelties of a postindus-trial capitalism or what he terms asoft capitalism. Hard-style industrial capitalismstill exists, of course, but Kelly claims that soft capitalism is quickly devouring it assteel, iron, and lumber irrevocably are being sucked into the black hole of informa-tion, circuitry, and software. Thus, “the hard world is irreversibly softening” (p. 3).Bit by byte, information and the net are ensnaring the entire world, and conse-quently “the logic of the network will overtake every atom we deal with” (p. 75).Except for one statistic (p. 11), Kelly provides no evidence for his core claim thatthe erection of a hard capitalism is deflating to a soft capitalism. His concern, rather,is to encourage the Oedipal patricide of the hard capitalist father and to rejoice in themessy complexity of its offspring, the network economy, following the siren songof beckoning profit and new forms of capital realization.

For Kelly, therefore, we are at a key crossroads between the old and the new,“between a resource-based economy and a connected-knowledge one” (114). Infact, Kelly does not theorize the new economy; he fails to adequately analyze thecontinuities and discontinuities between the industrial and postindustrial economicsystems. Lost in 1960s pseudolibertarian nostalgia, intoxicated with neoliberal fan-tasies, he does not grasp—among other things— that the new network economy isstill dominated by a competitive and predatory capitalist logic (as so many recentmergers and takeovers demonstrate) and that government intervention is still neces-sary to regulate this terrain to protect the public interest—a fact Bill Gates and othersupporters of the information economy also like to ignore—and the environment.

Kelly naively believes that the parts of the disintegrating old industrial economyare being magically sewn together in a complex new tapestry: “What industrializa-tion began by shattering, the network economy completes by weaving together andserving with great attention. The web of broken shards is now the big picture”(p. 132). Kelly seems to believe, therefore, that the differentiating logic of classicalcapitalism is being superseded by the de-differentiating, implosive, and ultracon-nective dynamics of the network economy. Thus, whereas the atom was the coremetaphor of early capitalism—a trope for a society of fragmented individuals,intense class divisions, and competing corporate powers—the network is themetaphor appropriate for the present age in which all people, businesses, andnations are interlocked into a massive hive-like system of technology, economics,and communication.

For Kelly (1998b), many shards of modernity are now being rewoven into newwholes as nation states, for example, are becoming units within a single capitalistsystem. With the globalization of a network economy, Kelly believes that the iden-tity divisions between us and them become obsolete, at least in the corporate worldbecause everyone is plugged into the same network, thus “individual allegiancemoves away from firms and toward networks and network platforms” (p. 65). But,Kelly misses how, overall, old divisions persist as competition between major eco-nomic units intensifies, as the gap between the world’s rich and poor grows widerevery year (see Athanasiou, 1996), as new conflicts between ethnic and religiousgroups explode (Barber, 1996), and as new fragmentations are being created in theturbulence of economic and cultural change, providing a welter of competing ide-ologies, identities, and social groups (see Best & Kellner, in press).

Yet, the networks are being assembled, and the happening entrepreneur sip-ping cappuccino at Starbucks in Seattle or Austin needs to grasp this phenomenonfirst and foremost: “Unless we understand the distinctive logic of networks, we




can’t profit from the economic transformation underway” (Kelly, 1998b, p. 2). OnKelly’s vision, the network economy realizes the postmodern cultural logic of capi-talism (the causal connections, of course, are never theorized by this asocialthinker). “Network principles renounce rigidity, closed structure, universalschemes, central authority, and fixed values. Instead networks offer up plurality,differences, ambiguity, incompleteness, contingency, and multiplicity” (Kelly,p. 159)—features we identified with the emerging new postmodern paradigm (seeBest & Kellner, 1997, as cited by Kelly on p. 159).

In fact, Kelly is asking us to believe that the new capitalism is also generating apluralist, open, and decentralized system. In comparison to the old Soviet Union orto Iran, this may be true, but in relation to radical libertarian visions of society—asadvanced by anarchist thinkers such as Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, PaulGoodman, and Murray Bookchin—Kelly’s claim is laughable. A small handful ofcorporations such as Disney, General Electric, Westinghouse, Microsoft, and IBMown and control the means of communication and information, while the very logicof the market censors alternative culture that is not as profitable as the standardizedpablum fed to the public. Kelly’s parade of questionable claims continues as heinsists that “This new global economic culture is characterized by . . . pools ofknowledge instead of pools of capital” (p. 156), as if knowledge were not a primarycommodity in a scientific and technologically dominated capitalism. Curiously,Kelly decenters the importance of computers and constructs a false dualismbetween computers and communication: “Computers are over. . . . Communicationis the economy” (p. 5). Does Kelly perhaps have a huge group of town squares inmind? How does global networked communication take place without computers?

Kelly probably means that individual computers in the home or office are nolonger as significant as the network—a claim no one would deny—but this aboveexample is emblematic of Kelly’s propensity to cloak the obvious in the forms ofaphoristic gnomicisms. Moreover, Kelly’s description of a new decentralized capi-talism suggests that the capitalist system can co-opt just about anything, and thisincludes the rhizomatic logic championed by Deleuze and Guatarri (1983, 1987).As Kelly showed convincingly inOut of Control, capitalism has indeed adopted adecentralized, networking approach through innovative strategies such as subcon-tracting or outsourcing, whereby one corporation delegates various productiontasks to other corporations in the interests of speed and efficiency. Indeed, DavidHarvey (1989) has demonstrated that capitalism has shifted from a rigid Fordism toa more “flexible mode of accumulation” in its relation to the labor market, products,consumption patterns, and so on.10

But, to argue without qualification—as Kelly does—that the world system ofcapitalism is now more open, decentralized, and pluralist, that it renounces “closedstructure, universal schemes, [and] central authority” is mystification of the highestorder. May we remind Kelly that the 1990s saw the greatest megamergers in his-tory; that in the era of NAFTA, GATT, and the Euro, ever-fewer corporations andorganizations are gaining control over markets and people; that along with the newworld order of homogenized markets comes an increasingly homogenized globalculture and simplified natural world; that the World Bank enforces unspeakablyvicious austerity policies on developing nations; and that sweatshops and childexploitation are on the rise?

Hence, Kelly fails to grasp the dialectic of contemporary capitalism that is bothmore organized and disorganized than previously, that is generating at once newforms of centralization and decentralization, and that is thus promoting both new




forms of homogenization and standardization as it proliferates difference, frag-mentation, and variety (see Best & Kellner, in press). Because Kelly is well awarethat capitalism is a protean beast, the 10 rules he offers are not hard and fast laws butrather “rules of thumb designed to illuminate deep-rooted forces that will persistinto the first half of the next century” (p. 2). Given his premise that the hard isdevolving into the soft, Kelly’s rules are designed to apply to all businesses, indus-trial or postindustrial, in Detroit or in Silicon Valley, and he expects industrialiststoo to take notice.

The problem is that Kelly’s rules—like those in the endless genre of how-to-be-happy books—are by and large common-sense injunctions that are obvious to mostinformed participants. To be sure, some may find Kelly’s emphasis on networks andthe new soft economy incisive, some of his rules helpful and his ideas fruitful (e.g.,that complexity must be grown not installed, whether for a technological or eco-nomic system). One of his rules (“no harmony, all flux”), which enjoins the entre-preneur to seek constant innovation, mixes an obvious platitude with a novelinjunction that disharmony, flux, and disequilibrium may be more advantageous tothe budding entrepreneur than the harmony and stability sought in Keynesian andneoclassical models. Other of his rules, such as “increasing returns,” enlightens thewould-be Bill Gates with the bromide that connections spawn more connectionsand success breeds success. Many of Kelly’s rules are simply advice to cyberizeone’s business. Most rules advance his philosophies of decentralization, rhizomaticmultiplication, and yielding rigid control as the best modes of management andprofit making. The reader is thus urged to “embrace the swarm” (“the competitiveadvantage belongs to those who learn how to embrace decentralized points of con-trol” [p. 161]) and to “let go at the top” (“what we are discovering is that peer-basednetworks with millions of parts, minimal oversight, and maximal connectionamong them can do far more than anyone ever expected. We don’t yet know whatthe limits of decentralization are” [p. 18]). So, if cybercapitalism is your cup of tea,just “skate to the edge of chaos,” “explore flux instead of outlawing it” (p. 116), andyou are on your way.

Behind the celebration of flux, disequilibrium, and innovation is an embrace ofJoseph Schumpeter (1962) and both his conception of creative destruction and hisnotion of the entrepreneur as the key innovative/progressive force of capitalism.Schumpeter is becoming the new dominant ideologue of capital, revered by Kelly,Gilder, and other apologists for the new capitalism. Celebration of the market, theentrepreneur, and the need to destroy passé economic and governmental forms hasbecome the new religion—the ideological force behind Reaganism/Thatcherism/Clintonism, articulated in a neo-Schumperian discourse that is replacing Keynesianas the dominant ideology. This ideology is now a dominant force behind the neweconomy hype, as is evident when Kelly states:

Economist Joseph Schumpeter calls the progressive act of destroying success“creative destruction.” It’s an apt term. Letting go of perfection requires a brute actof will. And it can be done badly. Management guru Tom Peters claims that corpo-rate leaders are now being asked to do two tasks—building up and then nimblytearing down—and that these two tasks require such diametrically opposed tem-peraments that the same person cannot do both. He impishly suggests that a com-pany in the fast-moving terrain of the network economy ordain a Chief Destruc-tion Officer. (p. 86)




Certainly economic success requires constant innovation that involves tearingdown and destroying as well as creating.11 But, Kelly seems oblivious that capitalismdoes not merely entail the destruction of past successes in the drive to always createsomething new, but it also involves the destruction of firms, competitors, communi-ties, workers’ lives and families, and the environment in the constant lust to accu-mulate profit and revolutionize production. Chapter 8 (Kelly, 1998b) (“no har-mony, all flux”) also celebrates, in neo-Schumperian fashion, change, future shock(Toffler is also a major influence), flux, and disequilibrium— a form of perpetualdisruption and turbulence that Kelly, as in his earlier writings, associates withnature itself.

But, Kelly never considers the social effects of skating economic systems to theedge of chaos toward endless innovation and disequilibrium nor does he imaginealternative conceptions of economics that would involve planning and democraticinput. Although a prolonged period of harmony might indeed spell death for a natu-ral system, this depends on what we mean by (social and/or economic) “harmony,”and Kelly rules out in advance stability as a desideratum for a social order. Surely agenuinely democratic and ecological economy would have to be dynamic, but Kel-ly’s values fall on the side of disequilibrium and disruption rather than equilibriumand stability.

THEORY, METAPHORS, ANDIDEOLOGY IN NEW AGE ECONOMICS

In New Rules, Kelly extends the complexity theory that underpinnedOut of Con-trol, but it is decentered in relation to another discourse he emphasized earlier—thatof evolution and biology. For Kelly, the economy is like an ecological system bybeing richly interconnected, rife with coevolving relations, in constant flux anddisequilibrium, and self-organizing with intricate feedback loops. Like other com-plex structures such as evolution and life itself, the economy thrives on the edge ofchaos, at the point where it is neither too rigid and static nor unbalanced and amor-phous. Taking a page out of Stuart Kauffman, Kelly (1998b) writes: “If the systemsettles into harmony and equilibrium, it will eventually stagnate and die” (p. 11).Thus, the goal of the new network economy is perpetual innovation, dynamic dise-quilibrium, and cycles of social stability and disruption.

The theorization of society and the economy through biological metaphors suchas self-organization is exceedingly risky, for one can easily lose sight of the enor-mous differences between biological and social systems. The new dynamic, holis-tic, and ecological outlook toward the natural and social worlds certainly is a quan-tum leap in understanding nature beyond the static, deterministic, mechanisticparadigms of classical modern thought. It allows one to unravel the false opposi-tions constructed by modern science and Western thought in general, such asbetween subject/object, order/chaos, being/becoming, inorganic/organic, and soon. Concepts such as “complex systems” and “dissipative structures” have interest-ing applications to human beings, culture, and health (see Dossey, 1982). Scientistsare beginning to overcome falsely constructed academic fortresses that compart-mentalize different disciplines; in particular, physics and biology are proving tohave deep lines of unity in the dynamic theory of matter (see Best & Kellner, 1997,in press).

But, as we suggested above, in Kelly (1998b), the lines between different levelsof life are blurred, and the analysis of human culture is mystified and depoliticized,or if politicized at all, they are reduced to the most banal liberal clichés about toler-




ance and diversity. Unlike in the natural world, the application of the termsselfandorganizing to society are highly problematic. To begin, the termorganizingobscures the disorganizing effects of capitalism and suggests capitalist societies area continual march toward ever-greater complexity and order (regarding disorgan-ized capitalism, see Lash & Urry, 1987 and Offe, 1985). To say, moreover, that capi-talism is self-organized obscures the ways in which distinct economic agents andpowers consciously shape the system and its laws to their will (certainly not alwayswith success and exact foresight), the intervention of the state to promote somedegree of economic order, and the manner in which class struggle and the contesta-tions of various social agents influences economic policies. To say a society, like anorganism, is “self-organizing” is to homogenize social diversity, whether in rela-tions of struggle or not, into a unified self.

For Kelly (1998b), the economy is a self-organizing totality that is self-regulatedby feedback mechanisms and the magic of the market. Following neoliberal econo-mist Frederick Hayek (1962), Kelly attacks top down economic management andcentralized attempts to regulate the economy on the grounds that the economy is toocomplex to rationally control, that prices and market mechanisms provide the mostefficacious feedback loops, and that “spontaneous order” emerges from a marketeconomy (pp. 121-122). Hence, the ideological implications of Kelly’s scientific-cum-economic theory are transparent: The anarchic system of capitalism is theonly economy that can bring growth, progress, and prosperity to citizens. InOut ofControl, Kelly (1994) accordingly sought to allow machines and computer pro-grams to run freely and to find their own solutions. InNew Rules(1998b), he appliesthe same idea to economics and politics, but where human beings are involved,there are quite different implications. “We let the network of objects govern itself asmuch as possible,” Kelly says, “we add government when needed” (p. 19).

Similar to this, in the world of business, he advocates decentralization andallowing the “dumb swarm” of workers to operate independently to develop theintelligence that can only come from below, but workers nevertheless need the lead-ership of management. Kelly (1998b) therefore rules out the possibility of bothdirect democracy in society at large and workers’ control in organizations andthereby perpetuates exploitative class hierarchy. Potentially progressive implica-tions of decentralization themes in Kelly are rerouted into a reactionary and elitistframework that gives no more dignity to an individual worker than the queen beedoes to a drone, assigning workers value only as producers for the corporate hive.

Like any scientific theory (such as genetics), complexity theory can be deployedfor different political purposes. We would distinguish between a conservative andideological complexity theory that uses new scientific and technological insights tolegitimate the system of global capitalism and a critical complexity theory thatinterprets bottom-up power and intelligence in terms of direct democracy and not aswarmlike hive. Such a critical theory, which we ourselves support, would empha-size the need for sustainability and the construction of an ecologically viable econ-omy and just society while criticizing destructive aspects of the new technology andsociety.

Kelly, however, fetishizes the existing capitalist system by making socialprocesses look like natural ones, thus naturalizing the odious forms of the currentorganization of society. Even more extravagant than the fetishism of commoditiesthat, for Marx, masked social relations and exploitation, capitalist ideologues todaylike Kelly are fetishizing the entire social system as a self-organizing complex total-ity. As Marx wrote in Section 4 of the first chapter ofCapital (1977), capitalistsattempt to present social relations as relations among things and to endow things




(commodities) with agency. The ontological status between subjects and objects, inother words, is inverted, as subjects become object-like and objects becomesubject-like. Kelly has shown that, in fact, such an inversion—an implosionbetween subject and object, bios and technos—is taking place in substantive ways;yet, following the logic of commodity fetishism, he completely conflates the sub-ject and object worlds—society and biology. In direct contrast to Marx (1977), whoinsisted that we treat capital as a social relation rather than a thing, Kelly (1998b)treats the economy as a natural entity.

Changes from one social system to another are not a result of self-organization,critical thresholds, or evolutionary peaks, but rather they are determined by socio-economic crisis, profound discontent, class struggle, and political upheaval. Meta-phors like “subcritical economics,” “threshold points” of growth, and “phase transi-tions” of the system simply obscure the all-too-real impact of capitalist economicson human beings and the natural world, and they confirm that the Achilles heel ofcomplexity theory is its uncritical approach to political realities and social power.The naturalization of the social world is most blatant in Stuart Kauffman (1995),who boldly declares “our social institutions evolve as expressions of deep naturalprinciples” (p. 304). The laws of capitalism, however, surely include the need forprofit and thus exploitation, accumulation, and endless growth. How these “laws”play out is determined by political struggle and not a self-organizing system, whichincludes social classes, government agencies, giant and small corporations, andindividuals, which often have competing ends and goals that are decided throughstruggle and power—two variables not found in Kelly’s rosy vision.

Kelly thus decenters and occludes the role of capitalism as the major social con-stituent, and he deifies technology as the prime mover. Other complexity theoristsalso try to comprehend technological innovation through an asocial model of emer-gent complexity, but they fail to grasp the social forces behind these dynamics. Forexample, economist Brian Arthur sees technology to be more like an evolving eco-system than a market-driven commodity, thereby naturalizing social dynamics ofcompetition and exploitation (see Waldrop, 1992).

Hence, the totalizing application of systems theory and complexity theory is nota mistake of Kelly’s alone; indeed, it is epidemic in the genre and is blatantly on dis-play in thinkers like Stuart Kauffman (1995) and Fritjof Capra (1996). Scientistslike Alan Sokal, Paul Gross, and Norman Levitt love to criticize social theorists fortheir alleged ignorance of science and nature, but the ignorance runs both ways assoon as scientists attempt reflection on history, society, and culture (see Best &Kellner, 1997, chap. 5, pp. 195-252). For all their learning and interdisciplinaryemphases, Kaufmann, Kelly, and others apparently have never encountered thelikes of Vico, Dilthey, Habermas, and others who advanced powerful critiques ofthe positivist conflation of nature and society, nor have they learned the ABCs ofsocial oppression, injustice, and inequality. Indeed, complexity theorists celebratethe free market system, championing the market as a chaotic system while failing tosee the social and ecological consequences of its inherent logic.

Old ideologies die hard. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like anightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx observed long ago (Marx & Engels,1978, p. 595). Today, in addition to the revival of Lockean theories of property inthe phenomenon of biopiracy—where corporations like Monsanto genetically alterthe crops traditional cultures have cultivated for millennia and then claim the newbiogene as their property—Adam Smith is also being resurrected, consciously ornot, to bolster the new theories of self-organization. Complexity theory is a bizarreblend of Adam Smith and chaos theory, with the market as a homeostatic feedback




loop. Kauffman (1995) also theorizes links between the economy and democracywith complexity theory, but seems to think that “feedback” is a sufficient conditionfor democracy (p. 28). Democracy does indeed involve complex feedback loopsamong appointed representatives or delegates and citizens, but obviously, these areunder constant assault in our current plutocracy.12 Although complexity theoristsmay offer insights into the holistic and dynamic behavior of societies, they lack theneeded context of a critical social theory. Viable forms of knowledge for the presentand future demand critical theories of power as well as normative and utopianvisions of unquantifiable values such as freedom.

TECHNOLOGY AND CAPITAL IN THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY

Critical Theory today must become more negative and more utopian in its oppositionto the status quo.

—Herbert Marcuse, 1968, p. xii

Although we believe that Kelly’s work contains undeniable insights and pro-vides a wealth of ideas and information that illuminates the new worlds of business,technology, and challenging ideas now emerging, we see him primarily as a synthe-sizer and populizer of both new and old ideas rather than an original thinker, muchless a prophet or guru as he is frequently presented. He obviously encourages suchdesignata by using religious metaphors when he discusses the “common soul”between “the organic communities we know of as organisms and ecologies, andtheir manufactured counterparts of robots, corporations, economics and computercircuits” (Kelly, 1995, p. 4), or when he offers “nine laws of God” as his concludingremarks inOut of Control(468ff), which strikes us as a pretentious and problematicmethod of inflating his own ober dicta with the “laws of God” (to say nothing ofpositioning himself as Moses!).

Kelly also enjoins his readers to play “god games” and become “amateur gods”themselves (1994, p. 230)—a riff on Stewart Brand’s motto, “We are as gods andmight as well get good at it” (1968, p. 22), a rather extravagant deifying of contem-porary human beings in a way that seems to contradict his posthumanism and thatcalls for deference to the logic of technology. Kelly (1994) thus presents us with apeculiar blend of new age metaphysics, technological determinism, and neoliberalmarket ideology that is highly eclectic, derivative, and fragmentary. He is not a par-ticularly original or deep thinker, although he is a hard-working journalist who hasproduced a wealth of illuminating material. He is an excellent popularizer who hasmade a set of complex ideas accessible to a wide audience. But, as noted, he ishighly technophilic, mystifies unpleasant social realities, and is completely uncriti-cal of the developments produced by the new high-tech economy, the new technolo-gies, and new theoretical and scientific paradigms.

As in Out of Control, in New Rules, there is not a critical position anywhere insight;New Rulesis a cynical, amoral description of the new economy and a set ofsuggestions for how to exploit it. The raison d’etre ofNew Rulesis summarized inthis one sentence: “Those who play by the new rules will prosper, while those whoignore them will not” (p. 1). With homage to George Bush’s fatuous “vision thing”of a “thousand points of light,” Kelly’s last chapter is titled “A Thousand Points ofWealth,” in which he rhapsodically summarizes his passion for exploiting thewealth of the network economy. All in all, Kelly is the Dr. Pangloss of the postmod-ern age, never tiring of declaring network capitalism the best of all possible worlds.Kelly takes his place among predecessors like Marshall McLuhan, George Gilder,




and Alvin Toffler who celebrate technology but remain silent on the ills and defectsof capitalism.

In place of the technophilia of Kelly and others, we propose a critical theory oftechnology and society that contextualizes technology within a social, political,and economic framework and that assesses both the positive and negative implica-tions of new technologies in terms of their potential to enhance or restrict freedomand democracy, to promote or undermine environmental sustainability, and to cre-ate or block the creation of a more humane and just society (see Best & Kellner, inpress). Kelly, by contrast, celebrates the new technologies and engages in a form oftechnological determinism that sees technology as the agency of a new economy.He thus fails to theorize the complex relations between the global restructuring ofcapitalism and the rise of new technologies as well as the positive and negativeeffects of this process. Ironically, this complexity theorist is often far too one-sidedand simplistic.

By contrast, we see the construction and implementation of new technologies ascrucial to the global restructuring of capitalism but as a complex process with costsand benefits that need careful differentiation. Because of his biological mystifica-tions and technological determinism, Kelly fails to see how the new economy is stilllike the old capitalism, and he recycles the old ideologies as if they are still relevantin the contemporary era. Kelly (1998b) is so enthralled with capitalist institutionsand values that he actually praises the “widespread reliance of economic values asthe basis for making decisions in all walks of life” (p. 156). But, the logic of com-modification and the market have indeed become the organizing principles for con-temporary capitalism, and they are the primary causes for the deterioration of ourenvironment hospitals and medical care system, the legal system, schools and uni-versities, the political institutions, media culture, and society in general.

To correct Kelly and the current economic order’s one-sidedness, we might turnto old Immanuel Kant who argued that nothing is good unless it is informed by thegood will, enjoining the importance of moral agency in shaping one’s life and envi-ronment. The praise of scientific, technological, or economic advances for theirown sakes, the severing of their development from ethical values and informed pub-lic debate, are two of the cardinal errors and problems of Western society in the lastthree millennia. Kelly perniciously reproduces the capitalist tenet that the only val-ues that matter are monetary values, and therefore, ethical, social, and other valuesare expendable. Money, trade, and economics will be important to any complexsociety; yet, any culture that exclusively emphasizes monetary values, acquisitiveindividualism, and profit-oriented behavior will suffer myriad pathologies, vio-lence, and crises without the resources to adequately deal with them and produce abetter world.

Although Kelly seems to realize that there is a serious moral vacuum in the cul-ture of accumulation, he has nothing to say about it. “Because the nature of the net-work economy seeks disequilibrium, fragmentation, uncertainty, churn, and rela-tivism, the anchors of meaning and value are in short supply” (p. 159). He does notsee how the crisis in human values is a direct result of our society’s embrace of hiseconomic philosophy. Rather than address the urgency of apathy, violence, nihil-ism, and the loss of the sacred in our culture, Kelly ends his book with a call to self-interested survival: “Those who obey the logic of the net, and who understand thatwe are entering into a realm with new rules, will have a keen advantage of the neweconomy” (p. 160).

Kelly concludes by making clear that his new maps and new rules are for thosewho need safe guidance in the jungles of Social Darwinism. Unfortunately, Kelly’s




concern does not extend to the billions of people on this planet who lack the mostrudimentary necessities of life. Nowhere in his world does one find a scintilla ofcompassion for the vast majority who are hung skins in the global safari of profit.Kelly is perpetuating the oldest, most vulgar ethos of capitalism, namelyunre-strained egoism. Even Adam Smith (1965), who naively believed that competingprivate interests would magically advance the greater social good, valued the idealof a commonwealth of benevolent and empathic citizens; even Francis Bacon(1960), whose work is redolent with images and metaphors of the rape of nature,was intensely concerned that science not be severed from ethical values. Kelly’swork, by contrast, is totally devoid of any trace of altruism, concern for the publicgood, or social responsibility.

Kelly ultimately projects a view of the world from high-tech Silicon valley; he isthe embodiment of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described as “theCalifornia ideology” (1995) that celebrates new technology in countercultural andnew age terms as the realization of the utopia dreamed of in the 1960s. Unfortu-nately, for most of the world, the networked economy is more a promise than a real-ity, and the “soft,” “weightless” (Coyle, 1998), digital and wired, “friction-free”(Gates, 1995; Lewis, 1997) postindustrial economy is overshadowed by the hardrealities of low-wage backbreaking labor, gross inequalities, intensified exploita-tion, and growing poverty and suffering on a global scale. Soft metaphors idealizecontemporary capitalism, masking its most vicious and violent features; they beau-tify the ugliness of exploitation, poverty, sickness, and hunger amongst the majorityof the world’s peoples, and they lead writers down the primrose path of fetishizedanalysis that is uninformed and insensitive to the too concrete, tangible, weighty,hard, friction-ridden nature of labor, suffering, and struggle in the belly of theglobal capitalist beast. Although the view from California may be rosy, for the restof the world, everyday life smells like what is needed to make the roses grow andblossom.

Clearly, the softening of the capitalist world is not without the hardening of theheart. The amoral/immoral noncontextualism of Kelly’s argument is clear in pas-sages such as the following: “the destiny is clear. We are connecting to all until weencompass the entire human-made world. And in that embrace is a new power”(p. 19). What kind of power is Kelly advocating? What will be the impact on tradi-tional cultures, wildlife, and the wilderness? Who are the “we” doing the connect-ing? What are we doing and seeking, and what will be the consequences?

The concepts that are best used to describe the new economy, our emerging tech-nological society, and our imbrication in the natural world are at stake. Is AdamSmith’s (1965) “invisible hand” really the best metaphor to describe a capitalistmarket economy? Does it, as Kelly (1998b) suggests, also best describe natureitself and our new technological environment? How do Kelly’s metaphors of the“swarm” and “hive” mesh with Adam Smith’s market metaphors and the complex-ity of the capitalist system itself? Is not the neo-Schumpeterian notion of “creativedestruction,” that is central to Kelly’s (1998) imagery, directly antithetical toSmith’s invisible hand that implies harmony and balance whereas the formerstresses disequilibrium, turbulence, and destruction? To the extent that Kellymerges these positions, he is embracing two contradictory and incompatible sys-tems—although it could be argued thatOut of Control(1994) is more Smithian,whereasNew Rules(1998b) is more Schumpeterian.13

But, such issues do not concern Kelly, who is content to concoct a mix of highlyheterodox elements into his postmodern ideological brew. Although Kelly would,




in effect, displace social theory and economic theory for new age metaphysics, bycollapsing the social and economic into the natural privileges biological metaphors,we see the continuing importance of critical social theory to grapple with the novel-ties and crises of the present era. We believe that we are undergoing a “great trans-formation” (Polanyi, 1957) as massive as that of the industrial revolution but thatthis process is to be interpreted in the context of new sciences and technologies anda global restructuring of capitalism. Hence, against the postmodern attack on grandnarratives (Lyotard, 1984), we believe that the same broad, historical theorizingthat Marx, Weber, Polanyi and other classical theorists used to theorize the rise ofcapitalism and that the Frankfurt School used to describe the new stage of state andmonopoly capitalism (Kellner, 1989a) is needed today. Kelly offers broad, novel,and bold theorizing, but he is too caught up in new age metaphysics and neocapital-ist apologetics to provide the sort of theoretical and practical perspectives needed todeal with the challenges of the epochal transformation that we are now undergoing.

NOTES

1. On the postmodern turn in business, marketing, organization theory, and manage-ment, see Boje and Dennehy, 1994; Boje, Gephart, and Thatchenkery, 1996; Brown, 1998.On postmodern theory and culture, see Best and Kellner 1991, 1997, in press.

2. Kelly’s work is part of a burgeoning genre of “new rules” books that advise individu-als of the promises and perils of the postindustrial economy and how to survive and flourishin the information age. In all cases, the basic idea is that the postindustrial economy—organized around knowledge, information, entertainment, services, computers and digitaltechnology, and global networked economy—turns the economic world upside down, suchthat wholly new rules and maps are needed, often based on counter-intuitive principles (suchas “quality goes up as prices go down” and “make money by giving things away for free”).Other examples of this genre include Coyle, 1998; Davis and Meyer, 1999; Gates 1996; Her-zenberg, Alic, and Wiel, 1998; Lewis, 1997; and Shapiro and Varian, 1998.

3. Slouka (1996) attacks Kelly (1994) for his “swarm” and “hive” metaphors. We believethat Kelly would be better off using more sociological conceptions of “networks” and that hisbiological metaphors have problematical implications which we will indicate later.

4. Bolstering his naturalizing of capitalism and the present social order, Kelly (1994)cites Stuart Kauffman (1995) on the remarkable congruence of Adam Smith and Darwin: “Ihad this profound sense then that there’s a deep similarity between natural selection—whatDarwin told us—and the wealth of nations—what Adam Smith told us. Both have an invisi-ble hand” (Kelly, p. 396).

5. Interestingly, Benjamin Barber (1996) notes in his provocativeJihad versus McWorldthat “Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the ‘global tur-moil’of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and ‘the rise ofneo-biological civilization [McWorld]’both carry the titleOut of Control” (p. 310). But, Bar-ber fails to mention that for Brzezinski, and in Barber’s own analysis, “out of control” signi-fies a very negative turmoil, pandemonium, and chaos; for Kelly, it is a positive unleashing ofthe energies of a self-organizing cosmos, thus putting a positive spin on a usually negativeconception.

6. In his more speculative moments, there are curious similarities to Baudrillard’squasi-ironic suggestion that the subject should surrender to the object, that we should engagein technomimicry, that we should imitate machines, be like them, surrender our humanisthubris, not try to control them, take the other side, serve machines, find out what they desire,and enter into a new symbiosis with the products of our creation (see Baudrillard, 1990 andthe critique in Kellner, 1989b, chap. 5, pp. 154-167). Although Kelly (1994) is onto a goodidea with the insistence that the future high-tech world, if it is to be viable and sustainable,




must learn from and mimic natural systems, it is more questionable to advocate a techno-mimicry, an imitation of technology.

7. The book was hastily put together; there is little documentation of Kelly’s (1998b)assertions; the notes on pages 155 to 156 of the last half of the book are several pages off; thebibliography is missing references—including to our ownThe Postmodern Turnwhich iscited in the text—there are typos and other signs of shoddy production, suggesting that themain purpose of the book was to capture quick market share in the booming manuals on suc-cess in the new high-tech economy. But, as Paul Kruger notes inThe New York Timesreview(1998; p. 40) the more academic bookInformation Rulesby Shapiro and Varian (1998) isoutselling Kelly (1998b).

8. Gilder’s (1989) earlier celebration of new technologies and American capitalism withmetaphysical, spiritual, and cryptoreligious underpinnings is extremely important for Kel-ly’s (1998b) work. Both provide valuable journalistic insights into the new sciences, technol-ogy, and capitalism, but they offer elaborate and highly apologetic ideological legitimationsthat are extremely problematic and which rest on dubious metaphysical foundations.

9. This argument is made in aHarvard Business Reviewcritique of Kelly by Peter L.Bernstein (1998, p. 159).

10. For Harvey (1989), “The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has givenway to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic thatcelebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodifications of culturalforms” (p. 156). Postmodern developments are therefore directly related to “the more flexi-ble motion of capital [which] emphasizes the new, the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fugitive,and the contingent in modern life, rather than the more solid values implanted under Ford-ism” (p. 171).

11. Kelly’s mentor Gilder (1989) is an even more aggressive neo-Schumpeterian (seepp. 63, 188, 209, 316). Both celebrate creative destruction without any apparent concernover who or what is being destroyed and what is replacing it. It should be noted, however, thatthis appropriation of Schumpeter is highly ideological, that Schumpeter had a much morecomplex historically and sociologically grounded theory, and that ideologues like Gilder andKelly are reducing his work to slogans; for a fuller appreciation of Schumpeter’s positionsand how his work has been appropriated by left and right alike, see Foster, 1984.

12. Kelly (1998b) does not discuss any concrete issues of democracy, nor does he reflecton the current configurations of power that are undermining democracy. Curiously, he alsodoes not provide an analysis of how the Internet might promote stronger democracy or dis-cuss any examples of democratic Internet technopolitics (on the latter, see Kellner, 1997 andBest and Kellner, in press.

13. Another aporia: Smith’s (1965) notion of the invisible hand is modernist with itsemphasis on stability and harmony; Kelly’s (1998b) postmodern complexity-oriented eco-nomics by contrast seeks an economy on the edge of chaos, which he believes is the only wayit can survive and flourish, through a perilous dance on the abyss of structure/disorder. Yet,he continues to also deploy Smith and the invisible hand, a metaphor that just does not wantto go away.

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kevin kelly’s complexity theory - the politics and ideology of self-organizing systems

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