Cognitive Surplus

I finally dug up a piece I that has been living rent-free in my head for sixteen years:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing 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 manage 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.

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This was a talk Clay Shirky gave in 2008, and the transcript lived on his website for a long time but eventually rotted away. I stumbled across an old bookmark the other day, and realized I could use that to dig it out of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so here we are!

A couple years later, Shirky turned this talk into a full book called Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, which is presumably why the prototype vanished off his website. The book is okay, but it’s a classic example of an idea that really only needs about 20 pages at the most getting blown out to 200 because there’s a market for “books”, but not “long blog posts.” The original talk is much better, and I’m glad to find it again.

The core idea has suck with me all this time: that social and technological advances free up people’s time and create a surplus of cognitive and social energy, and then new “products” emerge to soak that surplus up so that people don’t actually use it for anything dangerous or disruptive. Shirky’s two examples are Gin and TV Sitcoms; this has been in my mind more than usual of late as people argue about superhero movies and talk about movies as “escapism” in the exact same terms you’d use to talk about drinking yourself into a stupor.

Something I talk about a lot in my actual day job is “cognitive bandwidth,” largely inspired by this talk; what are we filling our bandwidth with, and how can we use less, how can we create a surplus.

And, in all aspects of our lives, how can we be mindful about what we spend that surplus on.