Out of Control (Kelly book)
# Out of Control (Kelly book)

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (ISBN 978-0201483406) is a 1992 book by Kevin Kelly. Major themes in Out of Control are cybernetics, emergence, self-organization, complex systems, negentropy and chaos theory and it can be seen as a work of techno-utopianism.

## Summary

The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organizations, intelligent computers as well as to the human brain.

## Reception

The book was not widely reviewed when first released in 1992, but got visibly reviewed and extensively cited during the next several years. Reviews often discussed Kelly's hive-mind analogy as a metaphor for the New Economy.

Reviewers have called this book a "mind-expanding exploration" (Publishers Weekly) and "the best of an important new genre" (Forbes ASAP).

Critics of the book have contended that its position leaves us without a critical approach to politics and social power.

