Get In The Lab

Clay Shirky responds to Freddie:

I’ve been writing quite matter-of-factly about the inevitable destruction of the classified market by the internet since the mid-1990s, so if I don’t seem sufficiently riled up, it's because I think the change is not merely fundamental, its absolutely unsurprising. It would be like shaking my fist at the sun for setting to have been anything other than analytic about this change, even a dozen years ago, much less now.

That’s probably the same attitude that infuriates you, but if you believed what I believe, you wouldn’t be jumping up and down either. The newspapers were an interesting historical accident, now ending. Spending a lot of energy lamenting that fact risks using up the very energy we’re going to need to put into a whole lot of new experiments, simply we don’t have any idea what good new models for journalism are, and we won’t know for a decade or so which of those experiments will be of any use at all. Between nostalgia and innovation, I think innovation is the bigger imperative right now.