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Clay Shirky in 2005: if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos.

Nicol Wistreich

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“As with the printing press, if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state.

“I’m not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this [but] 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage… and institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be.”


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  • @nic
    Thank you for linking to this TED talk. Wow!

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