Kevin Kelly rereads his big weird book from 1994 and mostly stands by it

Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control in 1994, a sprawling study of emergence, hive minds, and bottom-up systems that arrived before the web and got mostly ignored in the US.

Thirty-two years later he reread it, and in a new essay he argues it holds up — partly because its ideas went mainstream, partly because the science barely moved. “Weirdly, there have be…