Clay Shirky at ETech

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a
discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are
literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of
expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the
explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are
trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have
short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when
we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in
the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having
the language to talk about this is the right place to start.