Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky is one of those people whose name keeps coming up but never with enough context for me to pay attention.
I stuck with this piece and was rewarded: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
I re-read this paragraph for about 20 minutes and it clicked a couple things together in my head. My thoughts generally aren’t all that well organized any more, so I’m going to go away and think about this. But see if you don’t see what I saw in this. (Oh, and go read the article. It’s a little ‘zeitgeist’y for my taste, but worth your time.)
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.
This is really interesting to me.