Quote

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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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Law
Bureaucracy
Process
Complexes
Make
Complex
Bureaucracies
Burden
Suspend
Kill
Second
Thermodynamics
Easier
Temporarily
Create
Simpler

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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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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.
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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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Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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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.
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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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We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
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Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
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We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
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