An Army of Davids Quotes

“One thing that would remain scarce is time. Personal services like teaching, lawyering, or prostitution wouldn’t be cheapened in the same fashion. We might wind up with an economy based on the exchange of personal services more than on the purchase of goods.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“If I’m curious about the Hephthalite Huns1 or the rocket equation2 or how much money Joe Biden3 has gotten from the entertainment industry, I can have it in less time than it takes the barmaid to draw me a beer.4”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Just try this thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 1993. The Web is just appearing. And imagine that you—an unusually prescient type—were to explain to people what they could expect by, say, the summer of 2003. Universal access to practically all information. From all over the place—even in bars. And all for free! I can imagine the questions the skeptics would have asked: How will this be implemented? How will all of this information be digitized and made available? (Lots of examples along the line of “a thousand librarians with scanners would take fifty years to put even a part of the Library of Congress online, and who would pay for that?”) Lots of questions about how people would agree on standards for wireless data transmission—“It usually takes ten years just to develop a standard, much less put it into the market-place!”— and so on, and so on.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“(lawyers invented hypertext for paper back in the Middle Ages, but that’s another topic)”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“you’d expect that email lists and similarly structured systems would succumb to a tragedy of the commons: excessive posting that consumes so much time that people abandon them and they die. (As a corollary, it would seem likely that the people whose time is the least valuable will post the most—since they incur the lowest cost in doing so—and if you assume that their time is less valuable because they’re, well, dumb or crazy, then the more posts you see, the lower their likely value.)”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Americans’ trust in traditional Big Media has been declining for years, as people came to feel that the news they were getting was distorted or unreliable. Such distrust, while a natural phenomenon, can’t be a good thing over the long term.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Beware the people who are having fun competing with you!”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a
mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged
status. —ERIC HOFFER1”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“A society that’s rich and free will have citizens who—entirely on their own—develop a wide range of skills. Most of these skills will never provide more than hobby-level amusement for their owners, but in the aggregate they provide a resource that could not easily be developed through any sort of government program.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“we should not lose sight of what it is that makes us strong—the flexibility and decentralization that make American society great, and that drive bureaucrats nuts.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Armed citizens, especially if trained in what to look for, could be a very valuable line of defense against terrorism. In almost every instance of terrorism, the true first responders will be the people already on the scene.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Societies that encourage open communication, quick thinking, decentralization, and broad dispersal of skills—along with a sense of individual responsibility—have an enormous structural advantage as opposed to societies that don’t, an advantage that increases in a world of high technology and unconventional war.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“information is power in bureaucracies, and people are not all that keen about sharing power.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“especially in light of the software industry’s tendency to punish those who point out flaws in fear of bad publicity.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“At this point, their comparative advantage isn’t technological or creative: it’s the advantage conferred by a friendlier legal environment.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“The secret to success in big business and politics in the twenty-first century, I think, will involve figuring out a way to capitalize on the phenomenon of lots of people doing what they want to do, rather than—as in previous centuries—figuring out ways to make lots of people do what you want them to.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“it will represent a dramatic reversal of recent history, toward more cottage industry, more small enterprises and ventures, and more empowerment for individuals willing to take advantage of the tools that become available. We’re likely to see a movement from the impersonal, imposed means to an end to a more individualized, grassroots way of doing things. In fact, we’re already starting to see that, as many people—laid off or voluntarily departed from big organizations—start small businesses.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“People have been making jokes about office politics and bureaucratic idiocies long before Dilbert. But in the old days, you had to put up with those problems because you needed the big organization to do the job. Now, increasingly, you don’t. Goliath’s strength compensated for his clumsiness. But now the Davids can muscle up without all of the unnecessary bulk.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“It’s not just that fewer people can do the same work, it’s that they don’t need a big company to provide the infrastructure to do the work, and, in fact, they may be far more efficient without the big company and all the inefficiencies and stumbling blocks that its bureaucracy and techno-structure tend to produce.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“A worker in Adam Smith’s pin factory, or Henry Ford’s automobile factory, performed a single repetitive task with no real connection, emotional or intellectual, to the overall product. Nor—unlike those old-time craftsmen—did factory workers have much of a connection to the economics of the business. Although factory workers did much better economically than peasant farmers had done, their share of the proceeds was trivial compared to that of the people who financed and ran these large capital-intensive operations— people who became known as “capitalists.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“Big organizations doing big things: it’s the story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, it was so much the theme of those centuries that it’s easy to forget what a departure this was from the rest of human history. But it was a huge departure, brought about by the confluence of some unusual technological and social developments.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

“You can build big things, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, but at enormous cost, and only by making people choose between hauling bricks or being killed. For most of human history, this was the norm.”
― Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths