Shirky Quotes

#1. The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

Clay Shirky

#2. I certainly never intended for myself an academic career and, were the academy to suffer, I'd just go do something else. I don't have a commitment to it or to really, frankly, almost any institution that assumes that it has to be stable forever.

Clay Shirky

#3. We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

Clay Shirky

#4. The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

Clay Shirky

#5. The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.

Clay Shirky

#6. Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

Clay Shirky

#7. I am not somebody who believes everyone is equally talented; talent remains unequally distributed.

Clay Shirky

#8. Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone

Clay Shirky

#9. Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

Clay Shirky

#10. [T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

Clay Shirky

#11. What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

Clay Shirky

#12. 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.

Clay Shirky

#13. 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

#14. Collaboration is not an absolute good.

Clay Shirky

#15. The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody

Clay Shirky

#16. When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Clay Shirky

#17. The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.

Clay Shirky

#18. 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.

Clay Shirky

#19. We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

Clay Shirky

#20. The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

Clay Shirky

#21. Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

Clay Shirky

#22. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Clay Shirky

#23. Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.

Clay Shirky

#24. Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

Clay Shirky

#25. How we treat one another matters, and not just in a "it's nice to be nice" kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.

Clay Shirky

#26. How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

Clay Shirky

#27. The Dean campaign had accidentally created a movement for a passionate few rather than a vote-getting operation.

Clay Shirky

#28. [C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.

Clay Shirky

#29. Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

Clay Shirky

#30. For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.

Clay Shirky

#31. Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

Clay Shirky

#32. Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.

Clay Shirky

#33. People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.

Clay Shirky

#34. Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.

Clay Shirky

#35. Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

Clay Shirky

#36. 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.

Clay Shirky

#37. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

Clay Shirky

#38. Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.

Clay Shirky

#39. One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction ...

Clay Shirky

#40. We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.

Clay Shirky

#41. Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

Clay Shirky

#42. The other is Shenzhen, the southern city most known for electronics manufacturing - it is the location of the largest Foxconn factory, where iPhones and iPads, among other devices, are assembled.

Clay Shirky

#43. 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

#44. Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Clay Shirky

#45. Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Clay Shirky

#46. Using the market to gradually fix a totalitarian government is like making a pot of tea by running a volcano through a glacier.

Clay Shirky

#47. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

Clay Shirky

#48. 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

#49. There is no news industry.

Clay Shirky

#50. The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [ ... ].

Clay Shirky

#51. Curation comes up when search stops working,

Clay Shirky

#52. We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.

Clay Shirky

#53. 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

#54. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it.

Clay Shirky

#55. Facebook is not very good at dealing with named groups; they're not very good at saying, 'We've got this book club and I'm a member and you're not.' But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action.

Clay Shirky

#56. [R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.

Clay Shirky

#57. There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.

Clay Shirky

#58. Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.

Clay Shirky

#59. Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public.

Clay Shirky

#60. We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.

Clay Shirky

#61. When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'

Clay Shirky

#62. Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.

Clay Shirky

#63. An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.

Clay Shirky

#64. Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.

Clay Shirky

#65. It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Clay Shirky

#66. Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution

Clay Shirky

#67. A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

Clay Shirky

#68. 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

#69. If it's a revolution it can't be predictable. And if it's predictable it can't be a revolution.

Clay Shirky

#70. The Facebook of China, however, is Renren, launched in 2005. (The Google of China is Baidu, and the Twitter of China is Sina Weibo.)

Clay Shirky

#71. Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.

Clay Shirky

#72. Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [ ... ] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.

Clay Shirky

#73. [N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

Clay Shirky

#74. If what you're doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.

Clay Shirky

#75. Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate ...

Clay Shirky

#76. The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

Clay Shirky

#77. Growing up with a name that rhymes with turkey - and jerky - was no great fun. But, as an adult, I tell you, being globally unique in the age of Google can be extremely helpful.

Clay Shirky

#78. 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.

Clay Shirky

#79. 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

#80. We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

Clay Shirky

#81. In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Clay Shirky

#82. There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

Clay Shirky

#83. 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

#84. [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

#85. 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

#86. [F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.

Clay Shirky

#87. The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.

Clay Shirky

#88. More interesting than thinking about what's possible in 10 years is thinking what's possible now but that no one has built.

Clay Shirky

#89. The transfer of [ ... ] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.

Clay Shirky

#90. Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

Clay Shirky

#91. If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.

Clay Shirky

#92. Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Clay Shirky

#93. 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

#94. The only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it

Clay Shirky

#95. Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead of some sophisticated task.

Clay Shirky

#96. Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Clay Shirky

#97. 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.

Clay Shirky

#98. Any system described by a power law [ ... ] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.

Clay Shirky

#99. Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

Clay Shirky

#100. When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.

Clay Shirky