Poetry has become as important to me as any reading and contemplating I do, which is why I'm always eager to remind you about our ongoing initiative, the Poetry Radial Project.

It's a place where you can discover the poetry that so many of our guests fold into their lives, and you can also delve deep into reading and listening to the many wonderful poets we've had on the show.

Check out one of my favorites, Nikki Giovanni Red for us, The Life I Lead.

You'll also find Naomi Shehab-Nai, John O'Donohue, Lely Long Soldier, and many, many more. All that at onbearing.org slash poetry.

Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the Spiritual Foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives, a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

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Across the years, I've heard Kevin Kelly described as one of the most fascinating people on the planet, and now that I've spoken with him, I understand why.

He was the founding editor of the whole Earth Catalog and of Wired magazine. He's really a philosopher of our lives with technology.

He doesn't think we should be surprised by the power of technology companies right now, or unduly alarmed for the long run.

He's fascinated by what we might learn from the omniscience and how they collectively discern which technologies to use or not, and why.

In writing and in life, Kevin Kelly has an original eye on the character and the spiritual meaning of technology that will unfold over time.

We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology and the amount of possibilities, and that's sort of what technology is doing over time, and that's sort of his role, is to increase the variety, the diversity, the options, and the possibilities that we have,

so that anybody who is born would be able to surprise God.

And so I think that's what it is. It's a way of generating surprises, and that's the spiritual dimension of technology. It makes it much more likely.

I'm Christa Tiffett, and this is on being.

Kevin Kelly's current title at Wired Magazine is Senior Maverick. His books include The Inevitable, and What Technology Wants.

He likes to note that the year in which he was born, 1952, was the first year that the word technology appeared in the state of the Union address.

So, you know, a question I often as at the beginning of my interviews, whoever I'm speaking with is about wondering about the spiritual or religious background of someone's childhood, however they would describe that.

I think with you, I think I want to ask about the technological background of your childhood, like your earliest memories of what this meant as part of life in that time in which you were growing up.

And perhaps it's connected to a way you might talk about what is spiritual or religious.

Sure. So, when I was growing up, which was in the suburbs of New Jersey, which is really basically the suburbs of New York City, technology was really not something that we thought about, or certainly did not talk about very much.

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