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Quote by Clay Shirky

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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

This book examines the transformative potential of internet-based communication technologies in enabling group coordination and social movement. Drawing on examples ranging from file-sharing communities to political activism, the work argues that new digital tools lower the barriers to collective action, allowing individuals to organize spontaneously around shared interests and causes without the need for formal institutions or hierarchical leadership. The author considers how these developments are reshaping expectations about participation, community, and influence in contemporary society. more

Author

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is a writer known for his insightful analysis of how technology shapes social structures and human behavior. His work delves into topics such as collaborative networks, information overload, and social media. more

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“Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren’t even really about your body, they’re about society and our society’s wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a “good” body. Your body didn’t do anything wrong. What’s fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body.”

“One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. OK, so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. (...) So that's when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts.(...) They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh! (...) They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all spout the same slogans, and they love listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? (...) Revolution or not, the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholes. And what is a revolution? It sure as hell isn't just changing the name on city hall. But those guys don't know that - those guys with their big words.”

“Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?”

“We can grant, too, that for social problems to be diagnosed, some detachment from society is necessary…But social problems are rarely to be solved by men totally outside of society – certainly not by men not merely outside of a particular society but outside of the very concept of society. For if all institutions are “dirty,” why really bother to amend them? Destruction is simpler, purer, more logical, and certainly more exciting. Conscience without responsibility – this is truly the last infirmity of noble mind.”