I keep several playlists on my YouTube account. My favorite one is called just “gems”. In it I keep a few videos that I often look back, because they had such an impact on me when I first watched it.
Clay Shirky’s TED Talk from 2012 (below) is one of them. He is thinking about the power that systems such as git could have in governments. But the part that really struck me the most was when he went all the way back in time to show this concept, using the Philosophical Transactions, from the Royal Society to explain the idea.
I’ve worked in the past digitizing archives from the Royal Society, and to hear him making those connections all the way to modern version control systems was just fascinating to me.
Watch it below:
The video and transcripts can also be found here