Kelly, Kevin (1943– )

US technology writer and editor. Kelly was the founding executive editor of Wired magazine in 1993, described as ‘the voice of the digital revolution’, and featuring coverage of the economic, political, and social impact of technology on society. It won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in 1994. From 1984 to 1990 he was the publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a quarterly journal of unorthodox technical and cultural news. He also edited Signal, a sourcebook for new technology (1988), established the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog on CD-ROM, and launched Cyberthon in 1989, a 24-hour event which first brought virtual reality technology to public attention.

In his book New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1998), Kelly describes how businesses can succeed in an age of rapidly advancing technology, in which the old rules of business are inappropriate and inadequate. He is also author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1994), which claims that the best way to understand the technological future is to understand the biological past. He is a member of the consulting group Global Business Network, which creates scenarios of the future for global businesses, and was an early board member of the Well, a pioneering online conferencing system. He was one of the founders of the Hackers Conference in 1984, an annual gathering of creative technologists.