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236 | 16 Gin, Television, and Social Surplus Clay Shirky I was recently reminded of something I read in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian who argued that the critical technology for the early phase of the Industrial Revolution was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to cope was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing: there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to create the institutional structures that we associate with the Industrial Revolution today. Things such as public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders didn’t happen until the presence all of those people together stopped being perceived as a crisis and started seeming like an asset. It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus that they could design for, rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we now think of as an industrial society. If I had to pick the critical technology for the twentieth century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would have come off the whole enterprise, I would say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War, a whole series of things happened, including rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy, and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced an enormous number of its citizens to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time. What did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a Gin, Television, and Social Surplus | 237 crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement. This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?” I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was a lot of activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in a ruckus, asking , “How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” A little bit at a time they move the article—fighting offstage all the while—from stating that “Pluto is the ninth planet” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an oddshaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”1 So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story, and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for fifty years.” How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of one hundred million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about one hundred...

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