Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are…

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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 great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.

— Clay Shirky

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

— Clay Shirky

There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a…

— 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…

— 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…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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

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

— Clay Shirky

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities…

— Clay Shirky

“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state,…

— Clay Shirky

Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think…

— Clay Shirky

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to…

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

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

— 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,…

— 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…

— Clay Shirky