Kevin Kelly's decade-old but still seminal book Out of Control explained why it is so tricky to artificially assemble organic complexity. Describing how scientists sought to re-establish a lost prairie, the co-founder of Wired outlined why the web of relationships between all the different plant and animal species was so difficult to re-construct without knowing the precise sequence of their arrival and integration naturally.

The makers of Coca-Cola's Zero Movement website had a good idea what a natural online grassroots campaign would look like, they just didn't want to have to go to the actual trouble of fostering one. So they knocked up an ersatz version and optimistically hoped that their target demographic wouldn't notice the absence of the Real Thing!

Kevn Kelly is currently researching his new book in which he hopes to answer the question: what does technology want?  Unsurprisingly he is already "writing aloud" on Technium, which he describes as "a semi-blog".