Quote

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.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Expensive
Private
Computer
Security
Public
Used
Make
Things
Cheap

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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.
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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.
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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
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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?'
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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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.
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We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
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The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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