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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.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
System
Participants
Law
Described
Definition
Power
Definitions
Firsts
Several
First
Curious
Average
Effects

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
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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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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
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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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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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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
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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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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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