Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

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.

The loss of control you fear is already in the past.

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it.