from alchemy to knowledge

That’s awfully familiar, I thought when reading about the early days of natural philosophy in Clay Shirky‘s second masterpiece Cognitive Surplus. I have tried to illustrate why open communications are essential for development aid by retyping this piece from Shirky’s book in the left column and rewriting the same piece but from a different perspective in the right column. Clay had the benefit of hindsight, I the benefit of the future’s unpredictability.