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

A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

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

[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.