Clay Shirky Quotes & Sayings

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

Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process. — Clay Shirky

If it's a revolution it can't be predictable. And if it's predictable it can't be a revolution. — Clay Shirky

It's not information overload. It's filter failure. — Clay Shirky

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

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse. — Clay Shirky

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

The web's democratic in one way and distinctly undemocratic in another way. And I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. So, it's democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people; it, it essentially opens up participation in the public's mind. — Clay Shirky

The loss of control you fear is already in the past. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. — Clay Shirky

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response. — Clay Shirky

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive. — Clay Shirky

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure. — Clay Shirky

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. — Clay Shirky

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

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move. — Clay Shirky

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

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

Think about spam filters; if email didn't come from someone that someone you know knows, that's an important signal, and one we could embed in the environment; we just don't. I just want the world to be filtered through my social graph. — Clay Shirky

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

The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody — Clay Shirky

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

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. — Clay Shirky

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

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing. — Clay Shirky

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action. — Clay Shirky

Makery-ness in the U.S. comes as part of a complex of oppositional attitudes toward mainstream culture that is more about social signaling than unvarnished commitment to DIY. The Maker Movement involves ostentatiously DIY products, designed and assembled against a background of nostalgia for the old U.S. manufacturing industry, often produced in small batches for connoisseurs of the handmade, created as a form of conspicuous production. Meanwhile, — Clay Shirky

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

The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is ... what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn't any additive solution to the problem. It will be both governmental and social because that's the scale of the problem. — Clay Shirky

Curation comes up when search stops working, — Clay Shirky

rule. The first, widely known, was the Great Leap Forward. This was a set of national policies implemented in the 1950s that included collectivization of agriculture, a disaster everywhere it has been tried, but nowhere as much as China. The resulting famine killed between 20 and 40 million people in three years, the deadliest in human history. — Clay Shirky

A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation "More people, more power." Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China's average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they'd hampered their agricultural system. — Clay Shirky

The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China's long-term leader after Mao's death, announced that the country would pursue "Socialism with Chinese characteristics," which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China. — Clay Shirky

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

This work is not easy, and it never goes smoothly. Because we are hopelessly committed to both individual and group effectiveness, groups committed to public or civic value are rarely permanent. Instead, groups need to acquire a culture that rewards their members for doing that hard work. It takes this kind of group effort to get what we need, not just what we want; understanding how to create and maintain is one of the great challenges of our era. — Clay Shirky

The simplest answer is that the user had access to reality - every company builds a bubble around itself, where the products get built and tested in a more controlled environment than they get used in. This is especially true of complex software. What the early users enabled Xiaomi to see was how MIUI actually worked when real (albeit unusually technically proficient) people tried to install it on a wide variety of devices. — Clay Shirky

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention. — Clay Shirky

Wikipedia [ ... ] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation. — Clay Shirky

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

Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over duration that were previously unimaginable. Unlike personal or communal value, public value requires not just new opportunities for old motivations; it requires governance, which is to say ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group. — Clay Shirky

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

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting. — Clay Shirky

Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration. — Clay Shirky

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. — Clay Shirky

The transfer of [ ... ] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal. — Clay Shirky

A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing. — Clay Shirky

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation. — Clay Shirky

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. — Clay Shirky

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. — Clay Shirky

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution — Clay Shirky

The Dean campaign had accidentally created a movement for a passionate few rather than a vote-getting operation. — Clay Shirky

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming. — Clay Shirky

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not? — Clay Shirky

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

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product. — Clay Shirky

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional. — Clay Shirky

[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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

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

Curation comes up when people realize that it isn't just about information seeking, it's also about synchronizing a community. — Clay Shirky

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. — Clay Shirky

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

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public. — Clay Shirky

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. — Clay Shirky

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

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it. — Clay Shirky

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

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

[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation. — Clay Shirky

Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith. — Clay Shirky

Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting. — Clay Shirky

The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [ ... ]. — Clay Shirky

Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone — Clay Shirky

When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.' — Clay Shirky

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media. — Clay Shirky

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

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action. — Clay Shirky

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word "publishing" means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says "publish," and when you press it, it's done. — Clay Shirky

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

Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws. — Clay Shirky

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

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

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

Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press. — Clay Shirky

A revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors — Clay Shirky

[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

One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction ... — Clay Shirky