Quote

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

Clay Shirky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Loss
Already
Control
Fear
Past

More quotes by Clay Shirky

Image
We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
Clay Shirky
Image
[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.
Clay Shirky
Image
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
Image
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
Clay Shirky
Image
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
Image
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'
Clay Shirky
Image
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?'
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
Clay Shirky
Image
Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
Clay Shirky
Image
There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.
Clay Shirky
Image
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
Image
Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Clay Shirky
Image
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
Image
Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Clay Shirky