Clay Shirky

Shirky claims that our actions and behavior are generated by convenience. Writer and analyst Megan Garber writes: “The more people we have participating in media, and the more people we have consuming it—and the more people we have, in particular, creating it—the better. Not because bigger is implicitly better than the alternative compact, but because abundance changes the value proposition of media as a resource."

He then states we are in a similar period today with open-source programmers and their use of distributed version control or DVCS. DVCS, he argues, allows for "more arguments" to be made into "better arguments". DVCS also allows for "cooperation without coordination" which Shirky states is "the big change". He then suggests that DVCS fits naturally with law as it, and software development, are "dependency-related." Shirky presents another application for DVCS – drafting legislation. He cites Open Legislation, a listing of legislative information from the New York State Senate and Assembly, as an early step in that direction.

In January 2012, at TED Salon NY, Shirky gave a talk titled "Why SOPA is a bad idea." He cites SOPA as a way for traditional, mass media producers to "raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs." After an offending internet site is identified, with the identification process itself not specified in the bill, the targeted site will be removed from the Domain Name System (DNS). Shirky claims since you can still use the static IP address of the site in question, removal from DNS is futile. He identifies the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 as a law that was able to delineate between sharing with your friends as being legal and selling for commercial gain as illegal. Unsatisfied, media companies, Shirky claims, continued to push government to create more sweeping legislation which would hinder any form of sharing. This pressure, in 1998, created the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was now legal for media companies to sell uncopyable material although uncopyable digital material does not exist. To remedy this fact, Shirky states that media companies now tried to break consumer's computer hardware to create the illusion that the media they purchased was indeed uncopyable.

On June 29, 2012, Shirky participated in Session 12: Public Sphere of TEDGlobal 2012. Shirky made the observation that many of the technological advancements in communication throughout history, from the printing press to the television, were heralded as harbingers of world peace yet ended up creating greater dissent. "The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with." However, Shirky claims, with this increased "arguing," comes an increased "speed" of information exchange. Shirky cites "The Invisible College" as an example of a group that was able to utilize this effect created by the printing press, via the scientific journal, to help launch the scientific revolution.

In March 2011, Shirky responded to questions raised by Evgeny Morozov about consulting he had done for the Libyan government. Morozov tweeted "With Clay Shirky consulting the Libyan govt, it's now clear why dictators are so smart about the Web". Shirky explained he had been invited in 2007 to speak in Boston to Libya's IT Minister. Shirky stated the talk was "about using social software to improve citizen engagement in coastal towns. The idea was that those cities would be more economically successful if local policies related to the tourist trade were designed by the locals themselves." Shirky added that nothing came of the project beyond his initial talk. He defended his underlying desire to expand representative government in Libya and concluded that "the best reason to believe that social media can aid citizens in their struggle to make government more responsive is that both citizens and governments believe that."

In the Fall of 2010, Shirky was a visiting Morrow Lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government instructing a course titled: "New Media and Public Action".

In April 2010, Kevin Kelly cited the phrase "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution", and called it the "Shirky Principle", as the phrasing reminded him of the clarity of the Peter Principle.

In June 2010, Shirky participated in TED@Cannes wherein he spoke about cognitive surplus and its role furthering communal and civic value. The talk was titled, "How cognitive surplus will change the world," and the possibility for change, which Shirky presents, runs the spectrum at one end with communal value being increased and at the other end with civic value being furthered. Digital technology has allowed human generosity and "the world's free time and talents," which Shirky calls cognitive surplus, to combine and create a new form of creative expression. This creative expression can take the form of lolcats or endeavors such as Ushahidi; the former Shirky says increases communal value, "it is created by the participants for each other" for simple amusement, whereas the latter he cites furthers civic value meaning the group action is taken to benefit society as a whole.

In June 2009, Shirky participated in a TED@State talk titled "How cellphones, Twitter and Facebook can make history" aka "How social media can make history." In the talk, he explains that this is the first time in history that communication is possible from many to many. In the past, communication to a large group excluded the possibility of having a conversation, and having a conversation meant not interacting with a group and instead was necessarily a one-to-one structure. Shirky labels this incongruous exchange as asymmetric. In Shirky's view, this feature is one of the main reasons that the internet revolution is different from communication revolutions that preceded it.

In 2010 Shirky published Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age which expands on themes introduced in Here Comes Everybody. The book follows concepts he introduced in a Web 2. 0 conference presentation April 23, 2008 called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus", Herein he popularizes the concept of cognitive surplus, the time freed from watching television which can be enormously productive when applied to other social endeavors. Technology has turned many past consumers into producers. This new production capacity, combined with humanity's willingness to share, can change society if applied to civic endeavors.

In July 2005, Shirky gave a talk titled "Institutions vs collaboration" as a part of TEDGlobal 2005. This presentation reveals many of the ideas and concepts that would ultimately be presented in Here Comes Everybody and in future TED talks. Shirky compares the coordination costs between groups formed under traditional institutions and those formed by groups which "build cooperation into the infrastructure." Classic institutions have to create economic, management, legal and physical structures and inherently, by creating these rigid structures, must exclude large numbers of people. Companies like Flickr, however, having built "cooperation into the infrastructure" of their company, do not have to build massive infrastructure nor exclude large groups of potential contributors.

He has written and been interviewed about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client–server infrastructure that characterizes the World Wide Web. He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies."

After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art in 1986, he moved to New York. In the 1990s he founded the Hard Place Theater, a theatre company that produced non-fiction theater using only found materials such as government documents, transcripts and cultural records and also worked as a lighting designer for other theater and dance companies, including the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service and Dana Reitz. During this time, Shirky was vice-president of the New York chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and wrote technology guides for Ziff Davis. He appeared as an expert witness on cyberculture in Shea v. Reno, a case cited in the U. S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Clay Shirky (born 1964) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism.