Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.