KEVIN: 

Most of the problems we have today have been brought about by the technology solutions of the past. And I would say, most of the problems in the future are going to be made by our current technological solutions. And the more powerful a technology is, the more powerful problems it will make. And we’re now unleashing AI and we will create incredible new problems. But we also are creating solutions at an even faster rate. So, it’s not that our problems are smaller than we thought, it’s just that our capacities to solve them are greater than we thought. 

STUART: 

Do you remember when the future used to be shiny, sexy, a place you’d actually want to live that might be better than the way you live today? Or did you grow up in a world where the future looks pretty bleak, more like a place where nobody wants to live, or maybe nobody does live because we’re all dead?

Well, it depends a lot on when you were born and, frankly, on what kind of a media diet you’ve been feeding yourself — and not just the news, but pop culture. Because from The Jetsons and Star Trek to The Handmaid’s Tale and The Last of Us, pop culture tells us a lot about our collective imagining of the future. And without doubt, it has been getting progressively darker and darker.

This year’s Burning Man art theme “Tomorrow Today,” lemmie me read you a little passage. 

“If we think of the future as a story we tell ourselves, two plot lines have come to dominate the popular imagination. On the one hand, a happy modernist fable of tech-fueled utopia, and on the other, a postmodern myth of dystopian collapse. It’s increasingly hard to believe in the first, because we know it’s built on a lie, and we don’t even want to think about the second, because it’s a tragedy where no one gets out alive.”

It’s a sad fact that despair is epidemic in the world right now. According to one study by Harmony Health, an incredible 61% of Gen Z humans in the US have been diagnosed with an anxiety condition. And a leading cause of that anxiety is — you got it — the future. And it’s not hard at all to understand. All it takes is just a little bit of doom scrolling to see violence and war, resurgent fascism, climate change, species collapse. It’s a lot. It sure looks like a dystopia through that lens. Is there an alternative?

Somewhere between the pie-in-the-sky utopia that no one believes in and the terrifying dystopia that no one wants to believe in, is there another way of imagining the future? And to be clear, the future is an imaginary thing, it is a construct of the mind or of the collective imagination. I struggled with this for a while, but my good friend Christopher Breedlove brought me a very interesting alternative term. He introduced me to the word protopia. And here’s how I wrote about that in the theme. 

“Somewhere between the extremes of a perfect but impossible utopia and a terrifying dystopia that nobody wants is a third possible path for the future: protopia; a future based on steady progress; better than today, but not perfect and not without setbacks, predicated not on avarice or despair, but on slowly, gradually working to make the world better for everyone, one step at a time.”

Definitely not as shiny or sexy as those other media constructs, but to me, that offers a little bit of hope that we can still have some hope for the future, ah, if we just disregard the extremes of possibility and just keep plodding a steady course through the middle, an iterative approach, very much like, well, very much like what Burning Man has been about since the very beginning. We just take it forward one step at a time, try to make it a little bit better every time and not a little bit worse. And there is some… there’s some grace in that. 

The guy who coined the term protopia is one of the leading thinkers of the digital age. He is a journalist, a futurist, an artist, also a long time member of the Burning Man community, and he’s somebody I’m absolutely thrilled to bring onto the program and talk about this stuff. He’s the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine. He was part of the crew that put together the Whole Earth Catalog, and “the WELL.” I’ve been a fan for a very long time: Kevin Kelly.

KEVIN: 

It’s my pleasure. I’m delighted to be here.

STUART: 

Why don’t you start by telling our audience a little bit about who you are, what you do. How do you describe yourself in your work in the world?

KEVIN: 

I think of myself as a packager of ideas, and someone who is a radical optimist, and becoming more optimistic as the years go on. I’m a lifelong artist and photographer, as well as a science nerd, and I’ve become increasingly interested in trying to describe a desirable long-term future for us which is my current project.

STUART: 

Well, all right. I’m so glad you mentioned optimism because I’ve always fancied myself a bit of an optimist, too, but, it’s lean times for optimists lately.

KEVIN: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

The reason that I’m psyched about bringing you in, is that, as I was writing this year’s Burning Man theme — Tomorrow Today — I did a lot of thinking, which I think parallels some of the things you’ve done about the huge gap between impossible utopias and unbelievable, unlivable dystopias, and charting some course in between with a term that you coined, that I love, and actually used in the theme: protopias. 

But before we get into that, before we get into the future, Kevin, let’s step back into this slightly into the past because, it’s not often that I have someone on the program who has the kind of history with Burning Man that you do. What was your first year? How did you find out about it? How did you get out there to the desert?

KEVIN: 

I was alerted to it by Howard Reingold, who took over for me as editor of the Whole Earth Review, which was an ongoing periodical of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Bible for the hippies in the 70s. I was editing that for a while, and left to edit Wired and Howard took over. And he heard about it through the, I think, Cacophony group. Fairly early on he said, “You gotta get there.” And, when Howard tells me that, his instincts are pretty good. So I went pretty early, and I remember that I took my two daughters with me for the very first time. It was probably maybe around ‘96, I think. Okay. And they were the first kids at Burning Man, as far as I can tell. We went back on a regular basis after that.

It was pretty, um, it was a pretty crazy scene at the time. You know, there was no streets. There was no… The Man was on the ground the whole time. I mean, he was standing on the ground, and everybody present pulled him up. It was a very participatory event from that time, but I felt that there was something there. So after going for maybe one or two other times, as it started to grow very rapidly, I pitched this idea of writing about it. And then eventually Wired did a book on it.

STUART: 

Right. The Brad Wieners book.

KEVIN: 

And I wrote a story, a little thing for there talking about Burning Man as “the new American holiday” with this idea that it sort of like was a new kind of a holiday, that was really fitting to the times. And, um, I still believe it!

STUART: 

Yeah, I believe that was a Wired cover story in ‘96, something like that?

KEVIN:

There was a cover story, but I think Bruce Sterling might have written it. I think we had Bruce writing, but the piece I wrote was for the book. I don’t think it appeared anywhere else.

STUART: 

“The New American Holiday.”

KEVIN: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

…one of many taglines that’s been associated with Burning Man. Yeah, I remember those days – a bit. You know, it was a long time ago and maybe I did more drugs then than I do now. But I do remember one conversation which you might have actually been in. I know Stuart Brand was there. I think maybe Barlow was there, maybe you, I don’t know. But Stuart was pitching Larry Harvey really hard on the idea of incorporating Burning Man as a religion. Ring any bells?

KEVIN: 

Yeah, I don’t think that was… It sounds more like Barlow, because Stuart was always trying to prevent things from becoming religions. Like, one of the concerns was we didn’t want Long Now to be a religion. So I think it sounds more like Barlow to me. 

The thing that Stuart and I were trying to do and never succeeded, we were trying to offer an experience at Burning Man to the GBN Network, the corporate CEOs. We wanted to take a bus of corporate CEOs to Burning Man and have them experience that. And we just never had any takers.

STUART: 

Oh, yeah.

KEVIN: 

We pitched it to the clientele of the Global Business Network, but none of them… It just did not compute. And the hardship factor was not to their liking. And so we never really got that to happen, but it would have been fantastic. And this was, of course, long before it became kind of a practice for the Silicon Valley CEOs to go there. We were kind of anticipating that in the 90s, but it just never happened.

STUART: 

Yeah. Before Eric Schmidt famously had his job interview for Google at Burning Man.

KEVIN: 

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it switched over, but we couldn’t get it to work that early.

STUART: 

Yeah. And I’m really glad the religion thing didn’t pan out. I don’t think we took it seriously, because Larry and I had actually just read a book together, a history of, a biography of Joseph Smith by Fawn Brodie 

KEVIN: 

Yeah!

STUART: 

“No Man Knows My History,” and we never spoke of the religion thing again. 

Although Larry, at one point, he did coin, I think, a really great soundbite version of it. He said, “Burning Man is exactly like a religion with no higher power.” And I still use that one a lot.

KEVIN: 

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

STUART: 

But the whole idea of this intersection of emergent Silicon Valley culture or emergent Burning Man culture, there are a lot of tropes in there that still seem to have legs. Somebody referred to Black Rock City as a physical manifestation of the internet.

KEVIN: 

That was actually me.

STUART: 

That was you? Okay. Explain that, because I never really understood that, Kevin.

KEVIN: 

Well, it was this idea that you had this sort of blank canvas, and then each little camp, or each little installation, was like a little node that you put up yourself. You put up your own little server; and that you were making this sort of mycelium of connections into a brand new empty disk, an empty server, empty chip. And you were kind of filling it with all these things. And then you would turn it off at the end of the year, and then you would have to repopulate it. But it was this idea of the decentralized nature of it; that there was all this art and an emergent city that emerged, in the same way as the internet emerges without a central control. And that was the analog.

STUART: 

And of course, today that physical internet is a lot more interconnected, right, now that we have cell phone towers out there, people can get service and the rise of social media.

KEVIN: 

Sure.

STUART: 

How do you think that has affected the experience of Burning Man and the culture?

KEVIN: 

That’s a fair question. I would say that it had less effect on it than I would have imagined. You know, I kind of liked the early days when there wasn’t there. And I thought, hm, I’m not sure whether this is going to actually help. But I think it was actually useful, and I think generally it’s a plus in terms of, you know, facilitating communication, connecting with people, finding people, all those kinds of things.

I don’t have social media on my phone so it didn’t make much difference to me in that respect. But, I think generally it’s been a plus, and maybe more than I would have guessed originally.

STUART: 

Yeah. That’s interesting. You know, that networking, that connecting ability, is certainly a huge factor in the growth of our community.

KEVIN: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

The WELL, which you were a founder of was kind of a — which I’ll explain to the kids: this was the web before there was a web —  was where the original off-playa community grew up. So, by the time that the first browsers came out and there was a visual web, there was already some pretty well established discussion groups for all of that, of people who were into Burning Man. It’s kind of how we talked about it the year-round. Right? 

KEVIN: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

It was like the mycelium that pops up the mushroom once a year out in the desert was digital.

KEVIN: 

Yeah. And, you know, the camp I was in last year there was, there was a communal satellite uplink of some sort, and it was, I mean, you know, in the evenings or whatever, just checking in, coordinating for meeting people the next day and whatnot. And we had some issues with the art that we needed to communicate. And that was all a positive for me, the fact the ability to go in and log on. That was really, very, really useful.

STUART: 

Hey, let’s talk about your art and your experience last year. I saw the piece, The Speed of the Earth. Tell people a little bit about that. It was pretty, pretty amazing.

KEVIN: 

Yeah, it was awesome, and I think very, very appropriate. 

So the history of the piece: I pitched this idea to Larry in 2008 or something. 

And the premise of the piece is to take a mile long string, or mile long sequence of strobe lights, and have them flash at the speed of the Earth’s rotation, so they make a little streak across the playa at the speed of the Earth’s rotation. And so you can actually feel the Earth rotating. You could also imagine the light as being stationary in space, and the Earth rotating beneath it. The light is stationary and you’re rushing towards it at the speed of the Earth’s rotation. Both of those illusions work, but you can actually feel the Earth’s rotation, which is really, really cool.

I pitched the idea back then, but it was… to do it required digging a mile long trench, with all the wires to power and to coordinate the lights. And it was just becoming infeasible. Just the complexities and everything that even with funding it was just not going to be possible. So, I dropped it.

And then I told my friend David Rumsey about this years ago, and he’d love the idea. He was an artist who worked with strobes and stuff in the 60s and 70s, became a developer, had some money. He thought that the LEDs were now at the point where you could do this in a different way. He found a inventor who had just developed a solar powered LED flash — high speed flash — very very high speed, and very, very high powered. And he commissioned him to make some prototypes. And then they worked. And so, um, David was willing to fund the development of 30 of these lights. 

And the way the lights works is that they’re not wired together. They’re standalone units. They’re solar powered. And then they have a GPS unit in them that knows where they are, and it offsets their flash so that they will create this streak, this timed sequence of flashes across the desert.

So we suddenly had something that was not very invasive, all very, very portable. And we strung 30 of them in a mile long east-to-west direction across the playa, in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation. And they worked! 

They’re bright enough to render in the day. The duration of the flash is so short that there’s no danger of harm from them. And at the right angles, you could just see this, this four and a half second flash come zipping toward you with the speed of the Earth’s rotation. It was really, really cool.

STUART: 

You know, it’s, it’s funny, the intersection of art and technology is something that I’ll put a whole chapter in my book of things we never would have anticipated. I remember when we first started going out there, the only light on the playa was fire or car headlights.

KEVIN: 

Right.

STUART: 

Or maybe that one guy with the annoying gas lantern that kept hissing, and we kept telling him to turn it off. But now I mean, all the advances in Arduino programming, it’s crazy, right?

KEVIN: 

Yeah, yeah. I remember when the first LEDs were showing up, it was like, oh my gosh, this is an art form. For me, one of the magical moments of the LEDs — this was way back — was someone had made a galloping horse trailer. So there was a bicycle and they had a little trailer and there was the horse, like the famous Muybridge photographs of the horse galloping, like maybe there’s four different patterns. And they were all LED. And the flash of the horse’s legs were timed to the speed of the bike. And so there was suddenly a neon horse galloping across the playa. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is the beginning of something amazing. It was LED wire, EL wire, at the time. 

Yes, I think Burning Man has been innovating in what a city could be, in terms of its light. And I think we’re just again, we’re at the beginning of this. We haven’t seen anywhere near can go.

STUART: 

Right. It does seem like there are new things every year. I don’t know if you saw the Tree of Ténéré a few years ago; amazing programed tree with every leaf, you know, being its own little light show.

KEVIN: 

Yeah, yeah. No, I think we’re just beginning of it. There’ll be whole walls of entire… Yeah. It’s. I’ve seen in China some of the flexible screens that can be molded into different shapes. And literally not just little lights, but like pixels, it’s a screen, a moving, a moving images on things that are not even flat. We’re going to see incredible art in that direction.

STUART: 

So I’m going to say that your thinking has definitely had some influence on Burning Man. What about Burning Man and your path on the rest of your life? Is there anything you’ve taken away from your Burning Man experience that you think has influenced what you do, and the rest of your life?

KEVIN: 

Yeah, I think it’s a fair question. Some of the principles that kind of were articulated over time with the Burning Man, like No Spectators, trying to participate. I think that shapes when I’m involved in trying to make a gathering of some sort. That principle of really trying to focus on and optimize No Spectators makes a huge difference in the quality of the gathering.

And so I really don’t like being involved in things where, you know, you have the audience sitting and watching somebody talk. You want to maximize some kind of engagement as much as possible.  

That’s one thing, and I think the other innovation of Burning Man for me was the No Commerce. You have this workable alternative as an existence-proof of a possibility space. Just the fact that is there and it’s good and it seems to work can offer… it doesn’t mean we have to do that alternative. It just says there are alternatives. The fact that there’s one alternative, that it’s a special case, and it can work in this thing, suggests that there should be other alternatives as well. I come back to that all the time. The kind of gift economy, not just barter, but the kind of gift economy, the idea that that proves that the other version is not the only option. And therefore we should keep trying to make alternatives and variations in other forms which are possible because we know Burning Man is possible.

STUART: 

Yeah, for me it’s very much, it’s a wake up, even if it is just a bubble. It’s a wake up from the sleepwalk that we all do, right? 

KEVIN: 

Right. 

STUART: 

I liken it to fish in water. I grew up swimming in the sea of commerce, and everything is impacted by our roles as economic actors. And if you can put your head out of the water for even a short period of time and realize that maybe there aren’t dependencies there.

KEVIN: 

Yeah. And then the other thing that I often come back to a lot is: just as like a photograph of the Grand Canyon is not anything like the experience of the Grand Canyon, or The Pyramids, everybody’s seen all the video from Burning Man, but it’s still a different thing where the in-person, in-place — your atomic being — there is still lots of things that are not encapsulated by the virtual version of things. And so it’s a constant reminder of the value of the kind of face to face, reality-based experience that is different, and worth experiencing and not encapsulated by the virtual version. That’s a reminder and an inspiration.

STUART: 

Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the future. So you spent a lot of your career thinking about the intersection of technology and society, and tracking the trends. You’ve been called a Futurist. I don’t know how you feel about that word. It sounds a little too close to prophet, doesn’t it? And nobody wants to be the prophet on the day after the world did not end on the day you said it was going to end, I know. But…

KEVIN: 

Yeah, speaking of that, I had been involved in hundreds of future scenarios that were run by the GBN for corporate America, and not one single of those scenarios ever included anything remotely like what’s going on right now. Right? I mean, so the problem with prophesying is that you’re going to be wrong.

Stuart Brand has a great quote, which is “The present moment was once of the unimaginable future.” And we’re in the unimagined future right now.

STUART: 

We seem to be pretty far from the long now. We seem to be in the endless present.

KEVIN: 

Yeah, people, yeah, they think about the next five minutes, and the last five minutes, which is all… The next five minutes is going to be bad news, I can tell you that, so you have to take a longer view. If you take a longer horizon, you’re able to kind of get off and look at the actual longer term trends that are still operating, even though they’re invisible and buried by the bad news of the last five minutes.

STUART: 

Well, maybe you could call some of those out so I can feel a little less overwhelmed by the bad news of the minute.

KEVIN: 

The longer term is that:

You know, the price of solar is plummeting to the point where we’re going to erect it everywhere and you don’t even have to orient it to the sun, you can just make fences out of it. 

We’re having new vaccines, or even working on a pan-virus vaccine, vaccines for cancer. We continue to increase the longevity of the average citizen on the planet. 

There’s hundreds of millions of people that will be lifted out of poverty even this year, despite all the other bad stuff happening. 

That’s all over the long horizon, and it’s hard to see when 49% of the stuff that we make is harmful. But if we can make 51% good, we could create slightly more than we destroy, even that 1 or 2%. It’s not really visible, that 1 or 2% is important, because that’s what accumulates over time.

You know, it’s like even if 49% of Burning Man didn’t work, if 51% worked, you can learn from that 2%, and keep that 2% difference, over time you can make a civilization.

STUART: 

So somewhere between the impossible utopia and the unthinkable dystopia, there is this idea of protopian change. Can you explain a little bit about that? I tried to introduce people to it in the theme, but I’d really rather hear it from you, what you think of when you say that word.

KEVIN: 

Yeah. So most of the problems we have today have been brought about by the technology solutions of the past. And I would say, most of the problems in the future are going to be made by our current technological solutions. And the more powerful a technology is, the more powerful problems it’ll make. And we’re now unleashing AI and we will create incredible new problems. But we also are creating solutions at an even faster rate. So, it’s not that our problems are smaller than we thought, it’s just that our capacities to solve them are greater than we thought. 

And so the idea of protopia is that we are headed towards a future without problems, we’re headed towards a future that is slightly better than last year, the year before, the past. And that slight betterment, I call protopia because it’s like progress; it’s like pro is in pro versus con, pro as in prototyping where you’re trying things out; pro as in proceed. The idea is that we have a slightly betterment rather than a perfection, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than the dystopia that is what we get in stories.

And the challenge for us is that most of the images that we have of the future are made by Hollywood and science fiction stories, which by nature are going to be based on a dystopia because they make a much, much, much better story.

STUART: 

Drama.

KEVIN: 

A world that was wonderful and friendly is not going to make an interesting story,  kind of boring. 

So there’s a fundamental dilemma that storytellers need to have dystopian setting for maximum drama. So those settings become our image of what’s possible. Name me a single movie where the AI is all around good, beneficial. There isn’t any. And so we, people, we’ve trained ourselves, we educated ourselves to think that AI is just going to bite us really bad. And all the images we have of a really working AI are very, very negative. And it’s hard to get over that because we can’t really make a future that’s friendly unless we can imagine it in our heads first, unless we can see it first. And so without that vision of something good, we’re not going to make it. And we can’t make it inadvertently. You can’t arrive at something complicated like a friendly AI without deliberately aiming for it.

STUART: 

Yeah, definitely Skynet is much more capturing of the public imagination.

KEVIN: 

Yeah, right. Terminator.

STUART: 

You know, at the other end of the spectrum, AIs in medical applications are literally saving lives and extending lives every day. Right? 

KEVIN: 

Sure. 

STUART: 

So, like most if not all technologies, AI seems to have the capacity to do both.

But getting back to that idea of the cultural memes that come out of that, because we’ve been so saturated with dystopian fiction and film, you know, it’s getting to the point where, honestly, where there are people who believe that the zombies are real. 

KEVIN: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

How do we turn that around?

KEVIN:

The whole conspiracy stuff that’s a very tough nut to crack. The disinformation and the unraveling of experts is a real consequence of us moving from being people of the book to becoming people of the screen. In the book you had fixed monumental expertise, black and white. You had authors and authorship and authority. It’s all derived from a very similar thing. And we’re on the screen where everything is liquid and flexible and ephemeral and fleeting, and you kind of have to assemble truth yourself. And I think it’s easy to kind of mix… reach for the lazy versions of things. And I think there is a bias in the screen world that works against experts and authorities. And I think we need some technological help. 

We have a problem made by technology. I generally think the solution is also going to be better technology. And part of that is in helping us discern, helping us to figure out what to believe. And one way that that might happen is where every statement has embedded in it in some way its provenance. Who’s making the assertion? That’s really the only way. You can’t really evaluate anything, whether it be a video or photograph or text on whether it’s true or not; it could be AI-generated. And so you have to rely on “Where is it coming from?” That’s the only way to tell. Are they reliable? Is it a reliable thing? Have they proven in the past that they’re reliable?

I think we need some kind of a system like that to help us ascertain whether we should believe this video, this photograph, this account. We have a technologically-generated problem, and I think we need a better technological solution for it.

STUART: 

So kind of a blockchain for veracity?

KEVIN: 

Yes, I mean, it might not even have to be blockchain, but something like that. Yeah. There’s an embedded assertion in the thing that’s…So it might be blockchain.

STUART: 

I’ve been rereading your book, The Inevitable, which by the way, still seems pretty fresh ten years later. There’s a line in there I just had to call out here. “These protopian visions won’t be as thrilling as either dystopias or utopias, but they might be thrilling enough to aim towards.” You wrote that ten years ago. Do you see anything thrilling on the horizon that we can hang our stars on?

KEVIN: 

Well, he has to be thrilled by AI. I’ve been using this generative stuff, and I’ve been saying that generating single images is cool and fine, but the real power of this is going to be, as it’s starting to do, to generate moving images and moving images in 3D, because that’s where our attention is. That’s the center of the gravity for the culture is, not in static images, but in moving images. 

And we seem to be headed into the thing where just as a lone person in the bedroom can write a novel, this entire world, and people will read it, I think we’re going to have one person in the bedroom making a full length movie. That’s really going to shift things around, because that is the center of our attention. And if you can generate these movies of imagined worlds, and imagined plot, and everything, without needing a whole Hollywood infrastructure and grippers and lighters and everything to do it, oh my gosh, that’s going to be very, very disruptive. It’s pretty thrilling. The most thrilling thing I’ve seen in years.

STUART: 

So 30 years in, Burning Man just keeps plodding along.

KEVIN: 

30 years. Yeah, I was trying to, in that original… when I was trying to imagine the future of Burning Man… I mean, one thing our LED lamps showed was, I think the idea of… as batteries become cheaper and cheaper, you should outlaw gasoline generated engines and you should just have solar powered batteries for everybody who wants to light the night, which you should. And I think, again, I think, having moldable screens, having really, really cheap video screens at any scale and size. So leaning into this idea that it’s a night experience, predominantly,I think is a great one. 

30 years from now, I hope the entry and exit problems are solved by some magic. I don’t know what it is. We were really…

STUART: 

Battery powered aircraft!

KEVIN: 

Okay. That would be fine.

STUART: 

Or a good old fashioned choo-choo train because there’s train tracks all around there. I don’t know.

KEVIN: 

Like the one in Wallace & Gromit where you lay the track in front of you as you’re building, and then you take it up at the end.

STUART: 

Yeah. Perfect.

KEVIN: 

There. Yeah. I’m not sure what the solution is, but that would be one hope in 30 years that you innovate a way of moving a lot of people in and out at the same time. 

Again, trying to encourage people to make art. 

I understood Larry, from the very beginning, always believing that there was no limit to how big it could get. And I tend to agree with him. I think in 30 years you’d like to have it twice the size. For me, cities are one of the things that get better the bigger they get. It’s a challenge. Your challenges go up exponentially, but I think the beauty of it would be in pulling it off and allowing it to continue to grow, because I think we’re nowhere near the limit of what is possible.

STUART: 

Well, here’s a fun fact for you, Kevin. 2023 was the first year the total attendance at other Burning Man events around the world exceeded Black Rock City. 

KEVIN:

You mean all the others together?

STUART: 

Yeah. Personally, I think that’s the future of the movement is in more cities, not necessarily one bigger city.

KEVIN:

Yeah it’s controversial. But yeah I’m a believer in that it’s not at its limit right now. The limits clearly are arbitrary from BLM as far as I can tell. And you can correct me.

STUART: 

It’s true. I mean, it’s the road. You called that the traffic on the road is a huge challenge. It’s a big choke point.

KEVIN: 

So there might be some way… Again, maybe it’s a longer time, you have phase in and out. I don’t know. It’s kind of like the Kumbh Mela. You know, I’ve been to the Kumbh Mela twice, which is in India. They claim 400 million people. I don’t see that’s even possible. But it was over a month. The 400 million weren’t there at the same time. There was a staggered presence, and they all got to experience it. So there might be some way to do some staggering as well. 

And to decentralize, yeah. Having more cities. Why not? I mean, that’s going for it. But, the idea of having as much art as possible, as much creativity. I haven’t really thought about it very much, you guys, I’m sure are thinking about it. What are some of the ideas that you guys have?

STUART: 

That’s why I brought you on the show, Kevin, to tell me what your ideas are!

No, I mean, we’ve been, honestly… I’ll answer you fairly. Ever since the pandemic, we’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern, just trying to hold onto what we’ve got and keep the city going. And we’ve peeled back a lot of our global expansion dreams. 

But I think that those are still where the future is; creating more inroads for more people into the culture, whether it’s in Black Rock City or whether it’s in Japan or wherever it is, right; for more people to have that kind of an experience, to live those values and to take them out into the world. More chances to make art. 

So everything that I want to do for the future of Burning Man involves making more people have more opportunities to make more art, and to learn more from living with each other. I’m in a growth mentality. I think we should not surrender the dream that Larry had of conquering the world, of making this available to everybody who wants to try it and then see what happens. 

KEVIN: 

Could you imagine doing it twice a year?

STUART: 

Like I said, we do it like 100 times a year. If you get all the different events. There’s so many complications to it, you know, to that place. We picked the worst place in the world to do it. But you know why we picked it, right? We picked it because it was a hundred miles from the police. That’s my understanding of it. I wasn’t part of that decision, but…

KEVIN: 

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, there was no adult supervision at the time. Things have changed. Um. 

But there is something about that blank canvas that is very, very appealing. The true blankness of it is inspiring. The sterility is actually an attraction, for me anyway. Yeah. I think technologically the idea of making this blank spot that people can come in and erect an instant community that increasingly can be augmented or facilitated with technology is a great, great thing to keep going and expanding. And as the technology changes, I think that will continue to make that option more available to people.

And the energy, making energy. There could be some innovations in that as well. 

The thing about innovation, in terms of just logistics, is also part of Burning Man, at this point is the whole logistical challenges; that is also another way to be innovative, in that, in terms of people want to return, keeping camps off site, whatever it is. The more innovation in it, the better.

STUART: 

Well, one thing I do love is that it is so temporal. 

KEVIN: 

That’s a huge thing.

Because we start over again every year. That’s a huge, huge plus. We’re always beginning. Actually to go back to The Inevitable again, I think of all the trends that you mentioned there, that was the one that made me sad, and made me excited at the same time because, I mean, come on, we’re both of a generation that grew up believing in mastery, right? You spend your 10,000 hours, you become great at something. Now, I mean, the idea of constantly beginning is that nothing lasts 10,000 hours anymore, right? We’re always starting over again all the time.

KEVIN: 

Well, your learning abilities, that’s going to be a constant. You can become a master at learning. And that was never going to change. You know, you have to keep changing how you learn, but becoming a master of learning is something that will pay off no matter what you do.

STUART: 

That’s a very optimistic outlook. I appreciate that. I could get behind that. 

What about you? What are you beginning right now? What are you learning that’s new?

KEVIN: 

I’m still trying to get really good at CAD programs. You know, because the whole thing about 3D printing and all that kind of stuff: it’s not the printing stuff, it’s that you have to be really a wizard at the CAD.

STUART: 

Yeah, the design.

KEVIN: 

…the design part of it, and just keeping up with that. And so every time I go in, I kind of got to relearn everything. I keep forgetting. That’s the same thing, even with Photoshop at this point, its complexities. So now they have an AI thing they’re trying to bring in, which hopefully works out because I need… These softwares for the creation have become so complex that I just need assistance to, you know, use them because I’m not using them every single day, and so I forget in between. So that’s one thing, just just getting better at the creative software stuff, including even editing videos. 

I’m working on this project called The 100 Year Desirable Future, which is trying to make some scenarios for 100 years of a world full of high tech stuff that I want to live in. Again, with this idea of trying to make something that’s an optimistic version of something to aim for rather than, you know, The Terminator.

STUART: 

Tell me more about that project. Who are you working with on that?

KEVIN: 

Mostly with my researchers like Camille, who’s been helping me with research for previous projects. I’ve been doing some interviews, but mostly it’s a project that I’m trying to bootstrap myself right now. And part of the challenge is I don’t really know how to serve it, what the deliverable is. It’s not a book, it’s more like a database, which is really not that user friendly.

So the hope is that I have a world that I could have writers and other people tell stories in, an alternative to a dystopian world; you have a positive, which is just the background, so they can still tell a dramatic story in that world which will already be built and be kind of plausible. And so, there might be a crime drama or whatever it is that will be written using the world that I’m developing. It’s a protopia.

STUART: 

So do you have any other art projects in ya? You coming to Burning Man this year? You gonna bring something?

KEVIN: 

We’re not going this year. We talked about maybe going back next year with a better version of the same installation. There was a couple things that we learned doing it. The lights need to be higher off the ground to be a little bit more visible. They also have to be hardened against vandalism, which we had not even thought about the first time around.

David is interested in adding colors. You know, The Sonic Runway was doing lots of things that were, I think, really cool. But we wanted to continue this idea of playing with the rotation of the Earth, but make it even more visible to people. It was way, way out; hard to see, even hard to tell it was there because it was so spread apart. So we maybe would like to try to do it again closer to the camp where it’s a bit more visible to people, and play with other ways to emphasize the experience of the rotation of the Earth.

STUART: 

Sounds like fun, which is how fast?

KEVIN: 

At that latitude where Burning Man is, the rotation is 780 miles per hour.

STUART: 

Okay, well, I look forward to seeing that again. 

Anything you want to leave our audience with, Kevin? It’s been really great to have you, but what else would you like to add as a coda to this conversation?

KEVIN: 

Yeah, you want to try to be as optimistic as you possibly can; be one of the people who are shaping the future, because this, our world is made by the optimists of the past who believed in something that was possible when everyone else didn’t believe. And, if you want to shape the future, you need to be an optimist, in some ways. 

And if people want more of me, they can come to my initials kk.org. And I have a little newsletter that comes out every Sunday morning that’s free, called recommendo, recommendo.com, and it’s six little tiny, altogether it’s only one page of six recommendations: people to follow, books to read, movies to watch, 

STUART: 

Oh, cool.

KEVIN: 

…devices to use, apps to have, etc. recommendo.

Otherwise, I’ll see you on the playa.

STUART: 

All right. Thanks very much Kevin Kelly.

KEVIN: 

Thank you, Stuart. Best to you.

STUART: 

What do you think, Vav?

VAV:

This is one to listen to again, and get more from it each time.

STUART: 

Alright. Thanks, Vav.

 

VAV: 

Burning Man LIVE is a production of the Philosophical Center, one of the focus areas of the non-profit Burning Man Project. 

We run on your good vibes and, well, your donations. Every story, every conversation, every deep dive into this weirderful world… it all takes resources. Please fund the mission to bring the spirit of Black Rock City to your ears, year-round. Slip a dollar, a euro, a shekel, into the digital tip jar at donate.burningman.org

Think of your donation as a tiny art grant for an interesting audio experience that made you go “Hmmm.”

Thank you, Kevin Kelly.

Thanks to the team here at Burning Man LIVE’S lab circumventing the globe in low orbit: 

Allie (Lotus), Andie (Action), Molly (DJ Toil), kbot (Kirstin), Mockingbird (Stuart), Vav, Michael-Vav (that’s me), and there are others, but for now, thanks, Larry.

 

MONOLINK: 

Thank you so much, guys. I hope you have a wonderful Burn.

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