Clay Shirky Quotes

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

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.

A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.

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

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

The systemic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

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

There is no news industry.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China's long-term leader after Mao's death, announced that the country would pursue "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China.

Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

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

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'

To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

The other is Shenzhen, the southern city most known for electronics manufacturing - it is the location of the largest Foxconn factory, where iPhones and iPads, among other devices, are assembled.

For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.

[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.

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.

I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier.

We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it.

How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

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

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 web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public's mind.

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.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

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.

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

The only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it

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

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

There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats.

As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation "More people, more power." Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China's average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they'd hampered their agricultural system.

rule. The first, widely known, was the Great Leap Forward. This was a set of national policies implemented in the 1950s that included collectivization of agriculture, a disaster everywhere it has been tried, but nowhere as much as China. The resulting famine killed between 20 and 40 million people in three years, the deadliest in human history.

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful.

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public.

[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.

Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph.

I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem.

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media.

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.

The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.

Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era.

Any system described by a power law [ ... ] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

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

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism ... When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society,' the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work.

Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

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.

People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

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

Curation comes up when people realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also about synchronizing a community.

When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.

Curation comes up when search stops working,

An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang ... In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.