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Supernova2007: Clay Shirky on Love

June 21st, 2007 (Visited 2443 times) Tags:

UNESCO turned down a Shinto shrine in Japan for a World heritage site because it’s about solidity of process: getting rebuilt regularly, rather than solidity of edifice. They rebuild it on the same site, to the same plan.

Tells story about how his group was able to get support from a Perl newsgroup on Usenet, but the C++ engineers from AT&T not only didn’t believe that it could happenm, but even after it happened, didn’t think that it would work, because they knew it couldn’t in theory.

Today AT&T is in trouble, but Perl is a Shinto shrine, because millions of people love Perl and love one another in the context of Perl. No contracts, no money changes hands.

Love seems too squishy to talk about at these sorts of conferences. But what we have is a set of tools to aggregate things people care about, in ways that are unpredictable – simple things like mailing lists, and Usenet, nothing fancy. Love becomes a renewable building tool.

You will make more accurate predictions about software and services, if you ask not what is the business model, but whether the people who like it take care of each other. Linux gets rebuilt every night by people whose principal goal is that it exist the following morning.

Future commercial opportunities will be inextricably intertwined with this practice. When Torvalds posted his first message, he got a global network of collaborators within 24 hours. And that pattern was new – but now it is Wikipedia, the immigration stuff coordinated on mySpace, Flickr to coordinate after natural disasters.

This pattern will go way more places than it is today. We will always love one another, we’re human. With love alone you can go far, but coordinating tools take it farther. In the past love did big things, but now we can do big things to love.

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Ain’t talking ’bout love « /random wrote on June 21st, 2007 at 9:30 am:

[...] June 21st, 2007 in Uncategorized Raph Koster made some notes on a talk given by Clay Shirky at the Supernova conference, and one of the sentences jumped out at [...]

3pointD.com wrote on June 21st, 2007 at 10:52 am:

Shirky and Caruso at Supernova: Risk vs. Love…

Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky opened Supernova 2007 this morning by approaching the socially networked environment of the World Wide Web from two different directions. Caruso’s basic thesis was that people needed to break out of their insular soc…

Conversation Hub » More Supernova 2007 coverage wrote on June 21st, 2007 at 10:31 pm:

[...] Weinberger: Denise Caruso on anti-social software and Clay Shirky’s lovefest Raph Koster: Clay Shirky on Love Raph Koster: Denise Caruso on risk Jay Cross: Supernova 2007 [...]

Shirky and Caruso at Supernova: Risk vs. Love - watch the video, vlog, or podcast - Mefeedia wrote on July 5th, 2007 at 12:25 pm:

[...] | Website | Download [...]

Prokofy Neva said on June 21st, 2007 at 1:48 pm:

Love can take you only so far, Raph. If your best answer for “Love” is….Linux? And…a shrine in Japan? Then, you have to ask — why Microsoft? why Cathedrals? And that’s the problem. Love is good, but you also need money to pay for stuff, and that means property and proprietary stuff.

I don’t know why this discussion ALWAYS turns into “all or nothing”. Either everything has to all be free and everybody sings Kumbayah and holds hands and knits and perls together and Loves Linux, or else there is the walled garden of Microsoft. Can’t we have both?

Supernova2007: Clay Shirky on Love

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