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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Opportunity
Filtered
Motivation
Behavior

More quotes by Clay Shirky

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Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
Clay Shirky
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Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
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When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Clay Shirky
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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.
Clay Shirky
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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
Clay Shirky
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A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.
Clay Shirky
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Society is not just the product of its individual members it is also the product of its constituent groups.
Clay Shirky
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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.
Clay Shirky
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
Clay Shirky
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky