Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.

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.

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

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.