Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

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.

If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.