Clay Shirky needs to stop drinking kool-aid laced sterno.
............
True!
But to be fair -- or, more to the point, make sure the bullets hit all guilty parties -- Shriky's relentless wheel re-inventing is a typical example of what passes for sagacity within Internet punditry circles.
There are exceptions. For example, Bruce Sterling brings a broader POV, deeper reading experience and above average familiarity with serious works such as _Capital_ to his futurism (and I write this as a bloke who really dislikes futurism).
This is what makes his stuff usually more bearable (at at times, even insightful;) than most of his colleagues.
Shirky and co., on the other hand, are clever but simply don't know as much as they suppose.
Come to think of it, there's probably a nifty bit of analysis waiting to be uncovered here (and actually, I think you're doing it on the fly shag): that is, how the social relations of the Internet elite class produce inescapably middlebrow intellectual output.
.d.