Internet guru Clay Shirky sounds off on the recent “#amazonfail” controversy. Shirky apparently believes that Amzon’s screw-up—the de-listing of GLBT books, covered on MobyLives here and here —was more or less, a glitch. He says he was actually “an enthusiastic participant” in the Twitter mob that formed against Amazon and that, in Shirky’s opinion, went too far. Shirky writes “I went so far as to publicly suggest a link between the Amazon de-listing and the anti-gay backlash following the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont. My friend Nelson Minar called bullshit on my completely worthless speculation, which was the beginning of my realizing how much I’d been seduced by righteousness, and how stupid it had made me.”

But his essay is also a thoughtful explanation of why it is still okay to be a mad, even if he thinks the mob involved with #amazonfail might owe Amazon an apology: “It was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding ‘Safe Search’ options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out.”