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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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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Among
Social
Primates
Sense
Gorillas
Also
Chimpanzees
Life
Relatives
Primal
Closest
Literally
More quotes by Clay Shirky
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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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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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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Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
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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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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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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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Collaboration is not an absolute good.
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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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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
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[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.
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The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?
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Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
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When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
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Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
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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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