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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Internet
Nobody
Loses
Possible
Society
Admitting
Think
Significant
Thinking
Revolution
Positive

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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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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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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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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
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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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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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Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
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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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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.
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Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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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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One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.
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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're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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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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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
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