Clay Shirky Quotes

When we change the way we communicate, we change society

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

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

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

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.

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

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

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.

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.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Collaboration is not an absolute good.

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

Writer and Internet activist Clay Shirky has noted that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

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.

This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

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.

[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.

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

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.

social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivation alone

The systemic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

Many groups use the media and successfully manipulate what Theodor Adorno calls our psychological frailty. This psychological frailty correlates to anxiety. It also precedes and foments fascism, sexism, and racism. Because of our sense of free will, day-to-day anxiety can creep in as a form of guilt or the desire to belong / be loved. It is this frailty that is manipulated which may later be expressed in fascism, nationalism, sexism, racism. It's based on superego storytelling. But what's going on concurrent with all this is a shift from storytelling to storymaking. There's an entire subgroup, mostly the younger generations, that have been participating in gaming and social media in a way that will bring about a new synergy. This is Hegel's dialect approach to society. Jane McGonigal talks about this in her book Reality is Broken, Cathy Davis talks about this in her book Now You See It, Clay Shirky talks about this in his books Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody. Tapscott talks about this in his book Wikinomics.

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.

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

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.

10. What books would you recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur? Some quick favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke

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 uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.

Clay Shirky summed it up in 2008, and he’s still right: “The problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure.” Our

The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus.

In one of the more evocatively titled papers in the history of social science, “The Social Origins of Good Ideas,” Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago detailed his research into the relationship among social capital, social structure, and good ideas.

First, most good ideas came from people who were bridging “structural holes,” which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable even when other variables, such as rank and age (both of which correlate for higher degrees of social connection), were controlled for.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. —CLAY SHIRKY, PROFESSOR AT NYU AND AUTHOR OF HERE COMES EVERYBODY AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS

It is agreed by both game theorists and evolutionary biologists that the prospects for cooperation are far greater when there is a high expectation of repetition than in single-shot transactions. Clay Shirky has even described social capital as ‘the shadow of the future at a societal scale’. We acquire it as a means of signalling our commitment to long-term, mutually beneficial behaviours, yet some businesses barely consider this at all – procurement, by setting shorter and shorter contract periods, may be unwittingly working to reduce cooperation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun

when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another.

Writer and internet activist Clay Shirky has noted that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." Fear is the problem. It's a fear that's stoked by the day's news. As soon as there's a horrific crime or a terrorist attack that supposedly could have been prevented if only the FBI or DHS had had access to some data stored by Facebook or encrypted in an iPhone, people will demand to know why the FBI or DHS didn't have access to that data-why they were prevent from "connecting the dots." And then the laws will change to give them even more authority. Jack Goldsmith again: "The government will increase its powers to meet the national security threat fully (because the People demand it)." We need a better way to handle our emotional responses to terrorism than by giving our government carte blanche to violate our freedoms, in some desperate attempt to feel safe again. If we don't find one, then, as they say, the terrorists will truly have won. One goal of government is to provide security for its people, but in democracies, we need to take risks. A society that refuses risk-in crime, terrorism, or elsewhere-is by definition a police state. And a police state brings with it its own dangers.

multitude of books is a great evil

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...

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.

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.

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

the only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it

Clay Shirky calls cognitive surplus. “The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,” he

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,

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

As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.

Las instituciones tienden a intentar preservar el problema para el cual son la solución. CLAY SHIRKY

Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

These two facts are not incompatible. Meetup is succeeding not in spite of the failed groups, but because of the failed groups.

The first thing companies did with computer technology back in the 1980s was to multiply the number of choices for their customers. More colors, more styles, more features, more models, more messages, more channels, more services, more brand extensions, more SKUs. The siren call of “consumer choice” proved impossible for companies to resist. If a little choice was good, they reasoned, more choice was better. Customers loved it. For about 15 minutes. Today their lives are so cluttered by choice that they can barely breathe. Americans now see that a little choice increases their freedom, but too much takes it away. Do you really want to spend three hours learning how to use the features on your new Samsung TV? Or sort through 17 varieties each time you buy Crest toothpaste at the supermarket? Or deal with the 3,000 pages of items shown in Restoration Hardware’s 15-pound set of catalogs? Not if you have a life. Of course, none of us wants to give up this lavish banquet of choice. We just want it off the floor and out of the way. “It’s not information over-load,” media consultant Clay Shirky famously said. “It’s filter failure.” Our brains can’t handle the deluge. We’re desperate for a way to organize, access, and make use of so many options. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called it “cognitive overhead.

Journalistic privilege is based on the previous scarcity of publishing.

En los últimos años, unos cuantos autores han comparado la invención de la tecnología digital —y, en especial, de las redes sociales— con la de la imprenta. Según Clay Shirky, «antes había que tener una antena de radio o de televisión, o una imprenta. Ahora no se necesita más que acceso a un cibercafé o a la biblioteca del barrio para hacer públicas tus ideas».3 Heather Brooke viene a decir lo mismo con mayor concisión si cabe: «Nuestra imprenta —escribió— es internet. Nuestros cafés son las redes sociales».4

Shirky principle, named after economics writer Clay Shirky. The Shirky principle states, Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

If a change in society were immediately easy to understand, it wouldn't be a revolution.

Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.” “Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,” says Shirky.

Today we know both partners in this political minuet were correct. Digital media can be exploited by self-assembled networks to muster their forces and propagandize for their causes, against the resistance of those who command the levers of power. But this understates the distance between the old and the new. A churning, highly redundant information sphere has taken shape near at hand to ordinary persons yet beyond the reach of modern government. In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book. And it was arrived at, in part, by pursuing threads of analysis about the nature and consequences of new media first spun by Clay Shirky.

Como dijo el escritor norteamericano Clay Shirky: “Cuando estás acostumbrado al privilegio, la igualdad se siente como opresión”220.

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

The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.