Top 80 Clay Shirky Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

— Clay Shirky

Featured in: Technology Quotes

2. “A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

— Clay Shirky

3. “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.”

— Clay Shirky

4. “Human beings are social creatures – not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.”

— Clay Shirky

5. “The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.”

— Clay Shirky

6. “Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.”

— Clay Shirky

7. “Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.”

— Clay Shirky

8. “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

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

— Clay Shirky

10. “It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”

— Clay Shirky

11. “Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can’t be knowledge no one knows.”

— Clay Shirky

12. “More interesting than thinking about whats possible in 10 years is thinking whats possible now but that no one has built.”

— Clay Shirky

13. “It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it’s expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.”

— Clay Shirky

14. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

15. “We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

17. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

18. “Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.”

— Clay Shirky

19. “Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.”

— Clay Shirky

20. “We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

22. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

23. “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

— Clay Shirky

24. “If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.”

— Clay Shirky

25. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

26. “If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.”

— Clay Shirky

27. “Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.”

— Clay Shirky

28. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

29. “We’re not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast.”

— Clay Shirky

30. “Publishing isn’t a job anymore. It’s a button.”

— Clay Shirky

31. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

32. “Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

34. “When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

36. “There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.”

— Clay Shirky

37. “Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.”

— Clay Shirky

38. “It’s not a revolution if nobody loses.”

— Clay Shirky

39. “The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

41. “A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.”

— Clay Shirky

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

— Clay Shirky

43. “Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.”

— Clay Shirky

44. “The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.”

— Clay Shirky

45. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

48. “What you need for a participatory system to work: “a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.””

— Clay Shirky

49. “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.”

— Clay Shirky

50. “We use the word ‘organization’ to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.”

— Clay Shirky