Thanks for posting this. It ties in remarkably well with the way things have happened with the Mudcat over the years. I'm sure I'll come back to it and read it again and ponder it. It also has a lot of pointers to stuff I'd like to follow up. Including more of Clay Shirky's writing on the Internet.

"Obvious"? Well, perhaps that's really another way of saying true to life. I think it throws up a lot of issues that could help make sense of some of the problems the Mudcat has run into. I think it's an article that a lot of people here could benefit from reading.

And it's got a wicked snse of dry humour at some points. "Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.)

One slightly sobering point, when Shirky mentions something as "written in the middle of the last century", and I'm thinking Dickensian times - and then the penny drops, that is my century he's referring to...