#clay shirky

[justwatchmyeyes]

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

Clay Shirky

#Clay Shirky #quotes #life #love #important #tumblr #instagood #aesthetic #girl #literature #sad quotes #sad poem #zitate

[colemanm]

Kevin Kelly:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." —Clay Shirky

I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence.

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.

#clay shirky #kevin kelly #complexity #organizational design

[koolinus]

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. – Clay Shirky

#Clay Shirky #quotes #inspiring quotes

[usunezukoinezu]

''It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race—a misfortune because surplus is always more dangerous than scarcity. Scarcity means that valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus means that previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.''

''This shock of inclusion, where professional media give way to participation by 2 billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year), means that the average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything anytime, how could it not? If the only consequence of this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.''

-Clay Shirky, The Invisible College

#Clay Shirky #The Invisible College

[adrianomaini]

A questo punto non è più la carta stampata ad avere il primato nella diffusione dei contenuti

Dall’Unità d’Italia in poi, l’editoria intraprese una strada tortuosa, disseminata non di attività redditizie, ma di pressioni sul potere politico per fare affari in altri campi dell’industria, come quello chimico e automobilistico. Purtroppo la penisola non poteva vantare ancora un’ampia cerchia di lettori, per cui gli editori furono costretti a condizionare la politica attraverso i giornali…

View On WordPress

#C.W. Anderson #Clay Shirky #dopoguerra #Emily Bell #futuro #giornalismo #internet #Marco Pratellesi #Novanta #Ottanta #pubblicità #quotidiani #Sessanta #web

[bagnabraghe]

A questo punto non è più la carta stampata ad avere il primato nella diffusione dei contenuti

Dall’Unità d’Italia in poi, l’editoria intraprese una strada tortuosa, disseminata non di attività redditizie, ma di pressioni sul potere politico per fare affari in altri campi dell’industria, come quello chimico e automobilistico. Purtroppo la penisola non poteva vantare ancora un’ampia cerchia di lettori, per cui gli editori furono costretti a condizionare la politica attraverso i giornali…

View On WordPress

#C.W. Anderson #Clay Shirky #dopoguerra #Emily Bell #futuro #giornalismo #internet #Marco Pratellesi #Novanta #Ottanta #pubblicità #quotidiani #Sessanta #web

[giveafuckofyou]

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

Clay Shirky

#Clay Shirky #quotes #life #love #important #tumblr #instagood #aesthetic #girl #literature #sad quotes #sad poem #zitate

[azspot]

Sorry, but the Here Comes Everybody phenomenon Clay Shirky predicted has not worked out so well. Public discourse doesn’t work at scale. It’s fine at the corner pub. Watch out for Joe. He says crazy bigoted stuff. Whenever Joe comes in, we stop talking about politics and change the subject to sports. Five people can moderate or avoid the intransigent bigotry of someone in their real community. These local, non-scaled examples of public discourse are not a replacement for CNN or the New York Times. But neither is social media, even though so many people now think they’ve got to run to those platforms to get the real story. That’s because the real news networks are turning to twitter as if it were a primary source. Let’s go to Twitter to find out how the public feels about this war. Really? That’s like going to the psych ward at Bellevue to find out how people feel about current events. If you report from X, you’re in even worse shape because Musk has gone and tweaked the whole thing to favor authoritarianism. He’s institutionalized and amplified the worst qualities of the mob.

Why I’m Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago Google’s Sergey Brin at PC Forum https://craphound.com/google.html

#20yrsago Social Software panel at PC Forum https://craphound.com/socialsoftware.html

#15yrsago Clay Shirky’s Harvard talk: Here Comes Everybody https://web.archive.org/web/20161226034209/http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/events/Misc/2008-02-28_shirky/2008-02-28_shirky320web.mp4

#5yrsago London police finally admit they fed intel to UK construction cartel to build illegal blacklist of labour organisers https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/officers-likely-to-have-passed-personal-files-to-blacklisters-says-met

#5yrsago Services that deliver the same functions as Facebook, for after you #DeleteFacebook https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-alternatives/

#5yrsago Republicans and Trump kill anti-wage-theft rule, will funnel your taxes to companies that rob and endanger workers https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-trump-wage-theft-unsafe-working-conditions-20170328-story.html

#pluralistic

[nakanohajime]

ディーン ケーメンの言葉ですが 「自由な文化はその称えるものを手に入れる」ということです 私達の前には選択があります 年に1兆時間という時間があります 私達はそれを無為に消費することもあるでしょう 何もしなければそうなります しかし私達はまた 思考の余剰で市民的な価値を 生み出そうとする人々を称え 報いることもできるのです そして私達が そのようにする度合いに応じて 社会を変えていくことになるのです

Clay Shirky: クレイ・シャーキー 「思考の余剰が世界を変える」 | TED Talk

[zoela23]

This week in COMM-440 we read the first chapter of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone”. “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone” tells the story of a lost phone and the quest to get it back. 

Ivanna’s phone got left in the back of a taxi one day in 2006. She went to her friend Evan to offer a reward to whoever found it. The finder didn’t respond, but the pair got her identity when Ivanna got a replacement that copied information. The sixteen year old girl now in possession of the phone was contacted directly. The girl responded to the request for the phone with insults and threats of violence. 

Evan posted the story online. The online presence of the story got the phone back. The girl didn’t think Evan would get the phone back. Evan and Ivanna weren’t likely to come to Queens to get the phone. Her family and her friends backed her up, providing stories on how the phone came into her possession and threats. The police were unlikely to involve themselves. The phone only cost 300 dollars so it really wouldn’t be worth too much effort.

The effort didn’t come from a single source. The story spread online and plenty of people offered what help they could. Some provided legal advice, but most merely put pressure on the NYPD and the girl. 

Humans at their cores are social beings. We’ve made it this far through shared efforts. When someone behaves immorally it creates a perceived threat to the group efforts. Even didn’t present the story as a quest to return stolen property but as a quest to right a wrong. With the girl’s threats and rude behavior she undermined the shared efforts even if the people who reached out to help would never actually meet or work with her. Technology allows groups to form quicker, larger, and over longer distances.

[krinndnz]

pitiless phrases

Managers were given a team-wide budget for raises that was mainly a function of headcount, which was then doled out to team members in a zero-sum way. Unfortunately for each team member (at least in terms of compensation), the team pretty much only had productive engineers, meaning that no one was going to do particularly well in the zero-sum raise game. The team had very low turnover because people like working with good co-workers, but [the effect was that] the company was applying one the biggest levers it has, compensation, to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams. Because this is such a common setup, I've heard of managers at multiple companies who try to retain people who are harmless but ineffective to try to work around this problem. If you were to ask someone, abstractly, if the company wants to hire and retain people who are ineffective, I suspect they'd tell you no. But insofar as a company can be said to want anything, it wants what it incentivizes.

that one's from a Dan Luu post about corporate-world hiring problems and somehow it always shows up in my head as a double feature with Joseph Tainter (summarized by Clay Shirky):

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler — the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake — "Under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response," to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites. When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

I am nowhere near as good at systems thinking as I'd like to be, but something about the juxtaposition of these passages always makes me nervous.

#krinnposting

[bloggingbrin]

Manifestos ✊

Manifestos of the modern age Is a book that was kindly lent to me by one of my professors. All of the manifestos in the book are available online.

I'm currently reading 1 or 2 manifestos every day during breakfast. Read them with me.

1974 - 1999

[x] 1974-computer-lib.md

[x] 1985-GNU-manifesto.md

[x] 1986-hacker-manifesto.txt

[x] 1987-unstable-media.md

[x] 1991-cyberfeminist.md

[x] 1996-02-indep-cyberspace.md

[x] 1997-05-11-The-ABC-of-Tactical-Media.txt

[x] 1997-05-29-Piran-Nettime-Manifesto.txt

[x] 1997-web-independant.txt

[x] 1999-Hackerethik.txt

[x] 1999-LowTech-manifesto.md

2000 - 2009

[x] 2001-07-hacktivismo-declaration.md

[ ] 2001-agile-manifesto.md

[ ] 2002-12-30-Wireless-Commons-Manifesto.txt

[x] 2007-Zero-Dollar-Laptop.md

[ ] 2007-avant-pop.md

[ ] 2007-ubuntu-manifesto.md

] 2008-01-21-anonymous.txt

[x] 2008-05-lo-fi-manifesto.md

[ ] 2008-06-The-Uppsala-Declaration.md

[x] 2008-07-Guerilla-Open-Access.md

[x] 2009-02-powr-broccoli-kopimi.txt

[x] 2009-03-cult-of-done.txt

[x] 2009-11-werebuild.txt

[ ] 2009-glitch-studies.md

[ ] 2009-piracy-manifesto.txt

2010 - 2015

[x] 2010-01-02-Slow-Media-Manifesto.txt

[x] 2010-09-Open-Design.txt

[x] 2010-Dead-Drops.txt

[ ] 2010-Hardware-Hacker.txt

[x] 2011-02-03-A-DIY-Data-Manifesto.txt

[ ] 2011-Bitcoin-Manifesto.md

[x] 2011-Critical-Engineering.txt

[x] 2012-02-15-we-the-web-kids.txt

[ ] 2012-06-03-iterative-book-development.txt

[ ] 2012-10-03-cryptoparty.md

[ ] 2013-04-user-data-manifesto.txt

[ ] 2013-09-EPP-manifesto.md

[ ] 2013-10-04-computer-users-rights.md

[x] 2013-11-manifesto-for-the-truth.txt

[ ] 2014-03-balconism.md

[x] 2014-05-29-feminist-servers.txt

[ ] 2014-10-cybertwee.md

2015+

[x] 2015-01-21-Critical-Interface-Manifesto.md

[ ] 2015-01-new-clues.md

[x] 2015-03-additivist-manifesto.txt

[x] 2015-07-xenofeminism.txt

[ ] 2015-08-29-User-Data-Manifesto-v2.txt

[x] 2015-08-we-lost.txt

[ ] 2015-art-after-failure.md

[ ] 2015-open-web-index.txt

[x] 2016-02-perfect-medium-user.txt

More manifestos

Here are some manfiestos I found interesting that I believe are good:

1998-12 Mieke Gerritzen - Manifesto for Creative Growth

2007-07 Clay Shirky - Love, Internet Style

2016-? Rejecta manfiesto

2018-05 Laurel Schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

2018-12 Patrick LeMieux & Stephanie Boluk, What should we do with our games

2020-12 Cortney Cassidy - A soft manifesto

2022-05 Eric - Impossible Games Manifesto

#brindoes #blogging #manifesto #good shit

[myziukadam]

I enjoyed listening to Clay Shirky's thoughts on how we utilize social media and how it has evolved and changed over the years. Social media is one of the most powerful uses of communication since anyone can type out a message or send a video or picture within seconds. In today's world, social media can change anyone's viewpoints on certain topics. Your told growing up to not believe everything you see online yet social media controls some people's minds and opinions and what they do on a daily basis.

There are definitely positives and negatives to the use of social media. One example is the earthquake in China that Clay discussed and that their citizens were posting their firsthand experiences of the traumatic experience and the government couldn't stop them once it was on the internet and seen by others outside the country. If it wasn't for the internet and social media, who knows if the government would have covered it up or something worse. The internet has great tools that are handy to us today, but the people that run these social media services are trying to control what goes out there on the internet, because some people don't like the world having the freedom to do whatever they want on the internet and speak their mind. But as said before, with all the negative things happening, the rate which people are able to communicate through social media has made the world faster and improved at communicating and spreading messages. I believe communication through the internet and social media will only get better and improve in the coming years.

#social media #marketing #freedom

[jacobwood15]

My TED Talk Response

I found this talk to be very accurate but also slightly out of date; especially considering how drastically technology, specifically social media, has grown and advanced into our everyday lives since the inception of COVID.

The point about China was a profound example of how powerful social media can be in the hands of ordinary citizens, providing the capability for us to break free from the traditionally curated and controlled media. While China obviously put an end to that following the earthquake situation, the majority of the rest of the world has (thankfully) not followed suit; allowing for more raw and unfiltered world updates than ever before in history.

His topic at the end regarding how we will best make use of the medium was really thought provoking, as it often worries me that the corporations currently running platforms have the power to entirely dictate how that will proceed. Over the last few years, I have witnessed platforms like Twitter and Facebook flex the authority to determine what is "right" about controversial issues, often banning and censoring people that disagree with the "correct" view of those topics. Rather than censoring, I would much rather see discourse from both sides leading to understanding. Banning these individuals has only lead to more polarization and "us versus them" thinking. Hopefully that is not the path that these corporations continue to walk, as social media now directly impacts how our world and societies co-exist.

[theil1sn]

How Social Media can Make History - Clay Shirky

In his TED Talk titled "How social media can make history" Clay Shirky explains how the nature of social media is revolutionizing the way information is spread in our society and giving control to amateurs with smartphones. I found it interesting when he explained how citizens of China went to social media to show the devastation of a massive hurricane before the government could announce what had happened, taking control away from people of higher power and allowing the raw story to be told to the world by those who witnessed it in real time. Higher authority can no longer change the narrative of important events to their advantage because social media gives the microphone to average people.