Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant, and educator born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1964, whose work over three decades has examined the social and economic effects of internet technologies with a consistent analytical method: tracing how new tools reshape the
transaction costs of collective action and, through that reshaping, transform the institutions organized around the old cost structures. He taught for nearly two decades at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he developed the theoretical frameworks that crystallized in his widely cited books
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008) and
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010). These books argued that the internet's most significant consequence was not the information it made available but the participation it made possible, unlocking vast reserves of human creative energy previously absorbed by passive media consumption. In 2023, NYU appointed him Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education, a role from which