Kevin Kelly is a big thinker on technology and culture, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Marianne Weems is artistic director of The Builders Association, a New York-based theatrical group. Hasan Elahi is a performance artist. What were they all doing on stage together at Pop!Tech Thursday morning?

Each, I think, was telling us in his or her own way how we live within a cloud of technology all around us. It's up to us to decide what use to make of it, and we'd better understand what it's doing if we're going to do that.

Try getting your head around a few of these ideas from Kelly: The basic computing power of the Web is going to exceed that of all 6 billion or 8 billion humans sometime between the years 2020 and 2040. Technology wants some of the same things evolution wants: to be everywhere, to become more complex, to become interdependent with other technologies. There are no bad technologies, Kelly says, only bad human parents who don't teach them the right rules of behavior (cue Asimov's three laws of robotics.) "Our job as humans is to parent our mind children."

With technology everywhere, we're more defined by what technologies we choose not to use. We have extraordinary choice and freedom in that way.

While Kelly cogitates, Weems is looking at how our encounters with technology can be expressed in theater. One video clip from a stage performance shows call center answerers in India, who learn American accents and cultural references by watching US television. But that makes for a strange life in which they develop two personae, one Indian and one American. Simple fiber optic phone lines have made them electronic American immigrants – sort of.

Elahi lives to embrace technology. An American citizen who was grilled by the FBI after 9/11, he struck back by making his life an open book. He wears an ankle bracelet that lets viewers see where he is at any moment. He records his airplane flights, his meals, even the restrooms he visits. And, just for fun, he sometimes flies to a country and then stays in the waiting area for several days, never actually passing through customs. What a puzzle that must present to anyone watching and trying to figure out what he's up to!

Airports are like the Guantánamo Bay holding area for American detainees, he says. Nowhere. A limbo land without a country. His reaction as a "technology artist" to the issue of privacy in a world with more and more electronic eyes and ears is to let them watch and listen all they want – perhaps the flood of banal information will make its own statement about watchers and watching.

That's a pretty provocative group to end the first morning at Pop!Tech. And all of them well worth learning more about and following their future projects.