Clay Shirky Quotes

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society.

Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction.

If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.

[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.