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
Computer
Security
Public
Used
Make
Things
Cheap
Expensive
Private

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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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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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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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.
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
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Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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.
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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.
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If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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