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.
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can’t be knowledge no one knows.
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
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.
When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.
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.
If what you’re doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.
When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’
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.
There is no news industry.
Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
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.
We’re not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.