Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.
A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors.
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...
What you need for a participatory system to work: “a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.”
There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.
More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
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.
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
We use the word ‘organization’ to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.
Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.
It’s not a revolution if nobody loses.
Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.
A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.