Clay Shirky Quotes

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society”

— Clay Shirky

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

— Clay Shirky

“[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

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

— 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

“One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.”

— 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 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

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

Multitude of books is a great evil

— 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

“Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.”

— 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

“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

“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

Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun

— 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

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

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

— Clay Shirky

“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

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

“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

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

“There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it - even if only to crack their friends up - has already crossed that chasm to doing something. That's the sea change, and you can see it even with the cute cats.”

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

“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

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

— 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

“If it's a revolution it can't be predictable. And if it's predictable it can't be a revolution.”

— Clay Shirky

Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

“Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.”

— 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

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

“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

“We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.”

— Clay Shirky