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Comment by bwestergard | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Kelly's views are essentially similar to those of certain followers of Hegel, who read him as putting forward a theology universal incarnation, in which all human beings realized the progressively realized divinity in history, as opposed to the specific incarnation of the divine in Jesus. The working out of technological artifice and political institutions are among the ways humanity was to do this.

Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship. As others have pointed out, this leads to a whiggish view of history and ethical/political fatalism.

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>>Kelly just takes this (dubious, reductive) reading of Hegel, which was spun into apologetics for Prussian absolutism, and spins it into apologetics for contemporary tech entrepreneurship.

There's a lot of bias packed into this one sentence.

Firstly, it's biased toward the presupposition that Kelly's take is dubious/reductive. That is what actually needs to be demonstrated, as opposed to accepted as an axiom for secondary arguments.

Secondly, it focuses on "Prussian absolutism", a term which conjurs a vague association to fascism, to the exclusion of all other less foreboding developments associated with Kelly's line of thinking. This suggests a manipulative, agenda-driven characterization of Kelly's theology.

Thirdly, it presupposes that tech entrepreneurship is a generally objectionable phenomenon, and that defenses of it are merely apologism. Again you need to demonstrate your presupposition to be true, rather than implying it's an irrefutable fact that can be used as an axiom on which to discuss the issue.

This kind of snide counter-culture cynicism - where you take the role of a crusading critic of The Man - seems profound to the naive, but has little substance.

You are correct that I do not make the argument. My intention was to provide some signposts for those familiar with this literature to situate Kelly's relative to it.

I have no problem with tech entrepreneurship per se, as my commenting history shows.

For a discussion on the intersection of Hegel and technology Zizek's recent book, Hegel in a Wired Brain is pretty good.

I think on a higher level most views of societies and technology will converge on a very abstracted “evolutionary” view. Looking at Kellys argument you could say the same thing “it has a will” about evolution ...but evolution certainly has no will, it just has probabilities and fitness of certain variants for certain environments. The same thing is true about technology there is a certain fitness of a solution for the environment and that environment is based on technological, market and societal “fitness”. Speaking about agency like Kevin Kelly does makes no sense in that context.

This feels like an attempt to situate Kelly in the Marxian historical tradition (by placing him in a heretical branch), whereas Kelly's actually heritage seems to be more complicated and alien from that world.

I feel like people like to lean into Kelly's Christian faith as an explanation for his approach to technology, but really it seems to draw much more from the (largely non-Christian, but certainly pretty New Age-y) context around the Whole Earth Catalog. I guess the closest you could pull in Christian religiosity there is the dabbling with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

"Out of Control", Kelly's first book, is still available online, and I think is a clearer idea of the genesis of his thinking that led to the Technium than trying to scry him based on his faith. https://kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php

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