March 17, 2009

Save Me from This Squeeze

Clay Shirky writes:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

More from Clay Shirky

1 comment:

  1. Awesome find. Time well spent to read this whole article. Recently the Seattle PI( Hearst Publications) went under, and i know that major media groups are scrambling to save their newspapers in some way shape or form.

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