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
Security
Public
Used
Make
Things
Cheap
Expensive
Private
Computer

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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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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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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We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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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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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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