165 - Kevin Kelly on Time, Memory, Change, and Vanishing Asia

FUTURE FOSSILS

“The most expensive part of making this book was time. I spent my time, which is my scarcest resource. For every one of the nearly 9,000 images in this book, I was standing directly behind the camera. I had to get there. It’s not just a long way from the US to Asia, it was usually a long way from the airport to the local town in the countryside. And then it took time to reach the right village. And then it took time to find the ceremony. And then I would have to wait. Then wait some more. More than money, or photons, this book is made from time.”

“Our religion, which is the religion of quantification and measurement” has transformed the world. This week on Future Fossils, we talk to Kevin Kelly about his three-volume photojournal Vanishing Asia, a style archive collected over 50 years and countless miles, winnowed down from 200,000 pictures.

We talk about what it is to remember, to preserve, to capture, to restore, to reimagine…

Preservation bias in the archaeological history of technology,

Cosmology and religion, the evolution of culture and faith in modernity,

What kinds of value the economy is capable of capturing or even seeing, and what kinds it’s not capable of capturing,

Ecosystem services and other invisible labor,

When externalities are people,

How long memories can make systems stubborn,

How to optimize forgetting so as to be a good ancestor leaving more degrees of freedom,

What makes an explanation good enough,

The future of Asia and thus the world…

Yeah, we squeeze a lot into 45 minutes.

Pairs Well With:

Future Fossils 128 - Kevin Kelly on Evolving with Technology

Complexity 55 - James Evans on Social Computing and Diversity By Design

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Music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.

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