10 ms·

I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is

I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line: http://www.shirky.com/ http://www.shirky.com/ I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky This is yet another example of the history of the early Web disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008. I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.

notRobot 5y ago
> while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web. Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?
- rwmj 5y ago
  I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but this is a classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky... "Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up"
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I’ve never read his blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.
    - Alex3917 5y ago
      I would honestly start with his presentations, they are amazing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky
    - rwmj 5y ago
      I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that it was quite prescient when I first read it, although it's sort of obvious in 2022.
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        Yeah that’s sort of what I’m driving at. He called a lot of stuff that wasn’t exactly an easy take.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Highly recommended: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky....
      - walterbell 5y ago
        Classic essay. > People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. > And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
        Forgeties79 5y ago
        That part really resonated with me too. Lots to unpack.
        walterbell 5y ago
        I wonder what Clay Shirky thinks about blockchains and cryptocurrency.
  - jp57 5y ago
    The title of that article is now itself a comment on the passage of time and the fading of things. How old do you have to be today to get the "I've fallen and I can't get up!" reference?
    - _jal 5y ago
      Sitting on the elbow of the curve describing the risk of not getting back up after a fall.
    - Vivtek 5y ago
      My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its own at this point.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.
  - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world. Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option. We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 options but that leaves room for other products.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands. And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.
influx 5y ago
Great essay, how did it influence your startup?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms. But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there we had more success.
clay_shirky 5y ago
This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic. At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years. And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say. I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago. And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay
- lathiat 5y ago
  You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
  - karjaluoto 5y ago
    Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)

notRobot 5y ago

> while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web. Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases?

rwmj 5y ago
I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but this is a classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky... "Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up"
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I’ve never read his blogs until today - thanks for sharing this.
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    I would honestly start with his presentations, they are amazing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky
  - rwmj 5y ago
    I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that it was quite prescient when I first read it, although it's sort of obvious in 2022.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      Yeah that’s sort of what I’m driving at. He called a lot of stuff that wasn’t exactly an easy take.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Highly recommended: http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140117014453/http://www.shirky....
    - walterbell 5y ago
      Classic essay. > People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. > And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        That part really resonated with me too. Lots to unpack.
        walterbell 5y ago
        I wonder what Clay Shirky thinks about blockchains and cryptocurrency.
- jp57 5y ago
  The title of that article is now itself a comment on the passage of time and the fading of things. How old do you have to be today to get the "I've fallen and I can't get up!" reference?
  - _jal 5y ago
    Sitting on the elbow of the curve describing the risk of not getting back up after a fall.
  - Vivtek 5y ago
    My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its own at this point.
lkrubner 5y ago
He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His point was that separate niches each maintained some unique offerings, but when everything was combined together into a single market, and attention focused on certain items, there would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of options, greater than ever before, while the total number of options decreased.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political example mentioning that every little local detail, now with social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the central power as small as possible.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world. Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option. We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 options but that leaves room for other products.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands. And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.

influx 5y ago

Great essay, how did it influence your startup?

lkrubner 5y ago
We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms. But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there we had more success.

clay_shirky 5y ago

This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic. At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years. And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say. I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago. And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay

lathiat 5y ago
You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
- karjaluoto 5y ago
  Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)