Clay Shirky, author Here Comes Everybody
"Every inefficiency you can find is someone's top line profit."
The book's thesis is "Group action just got a lot easier."
"Bill Watson was pushing flash mobs as a critique of hipster culture." Now Clay's talking about how flash mobs were incorporated into political protest in Belarus, and making a great point that in relatively free societies, new coordinating technologies get used frivolously but can be "profoundly political" in another environment.
"William James maintained that thinking is for doing... increasingly, publishing is for acting... it creates the possibility of a platform for coordination."
"Nothing says 'dictatorship' more than pictures of police arresting people for eating ice cream."
"The principle danger to this freedom to act is principally a regulatory one... Law isn't internal to itself... [it] grows up with the structure of the society... Up until recently, all speech regulation in this country [has been] an iterated game of Prisoner's Dilemma... The one thing I tell [my students] is... prior to the mid-90s, if you had something to say in public, you couldn't. You had to get permission to say something in public..." The domain name system is the best place for centralization and professional management of censorship on the Net (wikilinks, ratemycop, etc)."
Q&A
Micah Sifry: Can you talk about future shock and backlash?
A: The really interesting example is where 40,000 LA students walked out to protest an immigration bill, organized using SMS, etc. "The thing that worries me most... is that punishments might become extreme.." to raise the threat level.
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"To be sure, [society] cannot exist except through the individuals who serve as its substratum; it is, however, something more than a collection of individuals. A whole is not identical to the sum of its parts, even though without them it would be nothing. In the same way, by coming together in a definite structure..., men [sic] form a new entity which has its own nature and its own laws." -Emile Durkheim, A Course in Sociology
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Why do wars and revolutions happen? We do not know. We know only that to produce the one or the other men [sic] form themselves into a certain combination in which all take part; and we say that this is the nature of men [sic], that this is the law" -Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"A phase transition is a sudden, global change in behaviour arising from the interactions of many constituent particles" -Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
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Self
About Me
- Nathaniel James
- Washington, DC, United States
- In my professional life, I'm the Campaign Coordinator at the Media and Democracy Coalition. Beyond my commitment to advancing the values of justice and democracy in the media sphere through policy change and advancing community media, I have an intense interest in the social structure and process of intra and inter-organizational collaboration; social networks and social network analysis; network theory; complex systems; and emergent phenomenon. The views expressed here are my own and don't reflect the positions of any organizational entity.