How The Internet Will (one Day) Transform Government
The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub — so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.
Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.
It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. … It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.