It’s Thanksgiving morning, and I’m doing what I love most: thinking about thinking. There’s coffee in my hand, darkness still pressing against the windows of my Oregon home, and my mind is sliding freely along its familiar timeline—backward through seven decades of memory, forward into speculation, and somehow occupying both directions at once.

This morning I realized that “thinking about thinking” might be a kind of cognitive palindrome—a phrase that folds back on itself, where the act becomes both subject and object, process and content. It’s the sort of recursive pleasure that has animated my entire intellectual life, and I find myself profoundly grateful for it. Grateful for this curious brain between my ears. Grateful to have arrived at a point where I can move through my own history with the ease of a virtual slider, replaying the best moments, previewing what might come next.

And I’m grateful, this morning, for the thinkers who have sharpened my mettle over the years—those whose ideas I’ve carried like stones in my pocket, worn smooth by constant handling. Theodore Hullar, my mentor, whose influence I’ve written about elsewhere. Robert Whittaker, who taught me to see ecological gradients as nature’s experiments. And you, Kevin—whose books and blogs have been steady companions through decades of my own parallel journey.

Parallel Tracks

We’re the same age, you and I. Born in the early 1950s, shaped by the same cultural currents, watching the same technological transformations unfold across our lifetimes. We both spent significant years in California—you building the Whole Earth network and then WIRED, me directing biological field stations in the San Jacinto Mountains and later the Bay Area. We were both present at the birth of networked thinking, both captivated by emergence and complexity, both convinced that technology and nature were more entangled than most people wanted to admit.

Yet we’ve never met. Our tracks ran parallel but never intersected. You were photographing vanishing Asian cultures while I was establishing sensor networks in wilderness reserves. You were writing Out of Control while I was co-founding CENS, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA. Different vocabularies for overlapping intuitions about how complex systems behave, how information flows, how the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve thought about this a lot—how two people can orbit such similar ideas without ever sharing a conversation. Natural selection offers one frame: the environment imposes constraints that independently shape organisms toward convergent solutions. But I prefer to think of it as something more like ecological succession. We each planted certain seeds early—curiosity, systems thinking, a refusal to separate technology from biology—and those pioneer species established conditions that made certain later developments possible. Different forests, similar canopy.

What I’ve Carried

Out of Control was the first of your books I owned, and I’ve read it several times across the years. What struck me then, and strikes me still, is how well it holds up. Thirty years on, that core insight about distributed systems, emergent behavior, biological logic infiltrating machines—it reads less like prediction than observation of something already underway that most people hadn’t noticed yet. You weren’t speculating about the future; you were describing the present with unusual clarity.

Since then I’ve accumulated more than half your prodigious output. The advice books, the photography from Asia, the technological meditations. I subscribe to Recomendo, the Technium, Cool Tools. What keeps me coming back isn’t just the content—it’s the stance. You’re relentlessly optimistic, but it’s a grounded optimism, the kind that comes from someone who has seen things, who has slept rough in foreign countries and photographed cultures on the edge of vanishing. When you write about technology’s trajectory, it carries weight because you’ve paid the observational dues.

This matters more than ever in our current moment. We’re drowning in confident voices untethered from any obligation to be correct—personal social bullhorns optimized for amplitude, not accuracy. You’re playing a different game. An infinite game, to use your own terminology. Building a body of thought that has to cohere over decades, that your future self will have to live with. There’s integrity in that. Intellectual skin in the game.

Notes for the Walk

If we ever did walk together—along some coastal trail, perhaps, or through one of the reserves I spent my career protecting—here’s what I’d want to discuss:

I’d want to tell you about the Macroscope, the integrating framework I’ve been building for my remaining years. It’s an attempt to weave together everything I’ve learned about environmental sensing, data visualization, and ecological observation into a coherent paradigm. EARTH for climate and geography, LIFE for biodiversity and ecology, HOME for the built human environment, SELF for personal health and intellectual work. Sensors, AI agents, visualization tools—all orchestrated to help us see patterns across scales. I think you’d recognize the impulse. It’s Out of Control logic applied to a lifetime of field ecology.

I’d want to ask you about the technium’s relationship to place. So much of your thinking emphasizes technology’s evolutionary trajectory, its tendency toward increasing complexity and connection. But I’ve spent forty years in specific landscapes—the San Jacinto Mountains, the oak woodlands of the Bay Area, now the Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest. How do we reconcile the global sweep of technological evolution with the irreducible particularity of bioregions? Can the technium be grounded, literally, in soil and watershed?

I’d want to explore your thinking on AI, because I find myself in an unexpected place. Each morning, around 5 AM, I have coffee with Claude—an AI developed by Anthropic—and we write essays together. This blog you’re reading now emerged from those conversations. It’s a genuinely collaborative process, a form of intellectual companionship I didn’t anticipate and still find surprising. You’ve written about AI as an amplifier of human capability, and I’m living that reality in a very particular way. What does it mean that two curious minds—one biological, one artificial—can produce something neither could produce alone?

And I’d want to talk about sequencing. I’ve been thinking this morning about how choices compound—how the order of decisions matters as much as the decisions themselves. It’s not pure luck, though luck plays a role. It’s more like informed navigation through a possibility space. Plant the wrong pioneer species and certain climax communities become unreachable. Make the right choices in the right order and doors open that wouldn’t otherwise exist. At 71, I can look back and see the sequencing that brought me here: the encounter with Whittaker at 19, the decision to go to Cornell, the decades in the San Jacintos, the pivot to independent research. Each choice biasing the probability space of what came next.

The Door Left Open

I’m writing this as an open letter because that’s what it is—a hand extended across parallel tracks. You seem like someone who responds to thoughtful strangers. Your whole ethos is about connection, generosity, unexpected correspondence. Cool Tools was built on that spirit. So was the Whole Earth Catalog, for that matter.

Maybe this reaches you and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe we eventually take that walk and maybe we don’t. Either way, I wanted to mark this Thanksgiving morning by expressing gratitude for the thinkers who’ve shaped my own thinking—and you’re chief among them. Your grounded optimism, your prolific generosity with ideas, your insistence that we’re participants in something larger and more interesting than we usually allow ourselves to believe—these have been gifts, even at a distance.

The walk I haven’t taken yet is still possible. These are my notes for when it happens.

Happy Thanksgiving, Kevin. Thank you for the decades of thinking to think about.

Mike Hamilton

Canemah Nature Laboratory, Oregon City, Oregon

Thanksgiving 2025