Kevin Kelly and the duty to share your art

David Perell interviews legendary Kevin Kelly in his podcast How I Write. The whole interview is worth listening to. I found it so inspiring that I've kept coming back to it for several days to replay some passages.

For example, here is a short transcript where Kevin Kelly explains why he thinks it's our duty to share our work.

I feel you have a duty to share your art. Otherwise, you're kind of cheating us with your life. (…) You have a duty to write, to do art for yourself because that's only how you're going to express your genius.

(…) My goal is to increase learning and to increase the options and opportunities so that everybody on the planet, born and yet born, would have the opportunity to share their particular genius. And I think we often need technology to do that.

So, the little story that I tell is imagine if Mozart had been born before there was a piano invented or the symphony. Maybe he could make some kind of music in, you know, thousands of years ago… but what a loss to us and to him if he wasn't born after this was invented. Or Hitchcock born before there was cinema. Or Van Gogh before there were oil paints. What a loss!

And so, there is a Shakespeare somewhere today, who was born, and she's waiting for us to make the technology to allow her genius to be expressed and shared. So we have the moral obligation to keep increasing those choices and those possibilities, and that's what I'm on. I feel a moral obligation to enable everybody.

Here's the full interview: