With the shift from blue collar to white collar employment in the developed world, I wonder if there hasn't been an overall decline in cognitive surplus in the past 50 years.
After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.
When I got my first job, my older parents and extended family members laughed (in a friendly way) that these new tech companies were letting me work “bankers’ hours”. One older relative had serious concerns for my job because I said my boss liked to arrive at 7:30AM every day but I didn’t show up until 9. That was unthinkable to them.
When they grew into the corporate world you were expected to be there before your boss and stay until after your boss left, finishing any last minute work before the next morning. Weekend work and long travel days were common.
Going back even further, I heard stories and saw photos about my ancestors struggling to secure enough food to eat every year. Black and white photos of what was left of their dirt-floored houses. Every day was work and worry about securing basics for survival of the family farm.
So if your job is a clean 8 hours of desk work with some meetings and e-mails mixed in, I’d say it’s actually less demanding than what was expected years ago.
The proportion of people who work corporate jobs vs the assembly line has surely changed though. The latter work their hours, go home and forget about work until next morning.
The percentage of single-earner households was also higher back then. Having a wife who handled the domestic front lessened the load on the people working demanding corporate jobs. Nowadays it's common for both of the couple to have that type of job.
And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature. That kind of proves my point.
> Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature.
Almost every human group I've ever encountered has been prolific in the production of art. I think you may be confusing a certain conception of culture with culture itself, in a way that ensures certain social classes will seem more artistic than others, which I believe to be false.
> And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees.
A lot of those jobs remain unchanged, with a college degree now required as essentially an empty gatekeeping step.
> Subsistence farmers have never been prolific producers of art or literature.
"A lot of those jobs remain unchanged, with a college degree now required as essentially an empty gatekeeping step."
This is simply untrue. Huge numbers of data entry and switchboard style jobs have disappeared due to automation.
Just grab "9 to 5" and see how much paperwork went into jobs before computers.
> And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees.
TBF back into the 1970s most of the F500 company CEOs had only high school degrees.
> The latter work their hours, go home and forget about work until next morning.
I mean, you should also do this when you work a corporate job. I work as a team lead in my org, and outside office hours unless something is actively on fire, I am not responding to anything. If I see a Slack notification, I'll check it, and if it's something that absolutely 100% needs me and I'm able and not already committed, sure, I'll jump on. But anything short of that, nope. 9AM Monday I'm on it.
> And like, with all due respect, there were also a lot of mentally undemanding desk jobs back then. People got hired into them with just high school degrees. There are no "paper-pushers" anymore because there is no paper.
Also this is categorically not true. In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been. Academia too. Administrative jobs have been growing for decades now, absolutely ballooning in corporate America. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber covers this in hilarious and tragic detail.
That's already a mental tax that previous generations never had.
> In tons of bigger, older corporations, there are more paper pushers than there have ever been.
Consider the qualifications needed to land those jobs today. The amount of posturing, scrapping, backstabbing, and drama that goes into them. Bullshit jobs surely drain cognitive surplus.
How many of those do you get a day, as well as a proportion of daily notification number? I know that any kind of notification is a significant mental tax for me, especially if i feel compelled to check it in case it's a fire. It forces a context switch, demands you enter a completely different mode which to me is wholly incompatible with the majority of modes i enjoy taking in my free time.
Personally, I'll never willingly enter an on call channel ever again. Nearly every night there was some thing i had to read and understand while i was in the middle of deep thought or creativity. Sometimes when they start they'll ping endlessly for hours. It's as if this dead claw of work is reaching in and eating away at my brain.
How does that actually happen, though? Have you signed into your work accounts on your personal machine? If so, why did that seem necessary?
It takes me no effort to ignore work Slack notifications, because I don't open my work laptop until it's time to work. This seems obvious to me, yet many people complain about being distracted by their notifications, so I wonder what they are doing differently, and why.
Personal phone. I have separate computers for work and personal stuff but it's too much of a fuckabout to have more than one phone and watch, so I don't. I regularly use my phone both to test our products and to communicate with coworkers. My phone is mine, my work computer belongs to my employer.
I know some people do the work phone thing and more power to them, but for me, I found it grating and irritating to have to have two handsets on me.
That being said, while my email and Slack access are shared to my personal phone, again, unless something is actively on fire, I don't answer, and, in those rare instances, it's always appreciated by my leadership is a favor I'm doing them, not an expected/demanded part of my job. I don't think that's an unreasonable way to do things.
But a lot of people work 40-hour desk jobs and still struggle to secure enough food to eat every year. The amount of job work may have decreased, but that doesn't mean life is easier. If one 9-5 job doesn't pay enough, you can't just work two of them. And, the work isn't as secure. Your "farm boss" (whoever that was at the time) couldn't fire you from your farm because he was struggling as much as you were, and he'd have to do your work himself, but a lot of office work is completely meaningless and just doesn't need to get done.
You are missing a crucial point: Until very recently, it was completely normal to have at least one person per household completely dedicated to household stuff, like cleaning, tidying, shopping, childcare, etc. Nowadays, both parents have to work full-time, and are expected to take care of that in addition to everything else.
Also, there is lots of research showing that subsistence farmers actually worked both fewer days, as well as fewer hours, compared to the modern standard.
8+ hours workdays are not natural in any way, they were introduced through the industrial revolution.
> Nowadays, both parents have to work full-time, and are expected to take care of that in addition to everything else.
This is true, those social expectations are in place. But I think it's worth noting that it generally doesn't happen this way in practice. Even though women have entered education and the work force, often in higher numbers than men, they are still doing much more additional unpaid labour than men in every country in the world [0].
Would it be fair to say that women have experienced the effects we're talking about to a greater degree?
There is also compelling evidence that hunter-gatherers had even more daily leisure time than both modern industrial or historical agricultural societies.
I have a question. Aurornis' comment was greyed for me. What does it really mean when that happens. How many people have to downvote what seems a perfectly reasonable comment before it starts to fade?
Edit: changed is to was because it's no longer grey.
> All comments start with a score of 1 point […]. After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment. Downvoted comments (i.e. with a score < 1) reduce their placement on the comment thread and will appear desaturated to other users deemphasize them. There is no upper limit on the score of a comment, but the minimum score is -4 points. Additional downvotes after that still subtract points from the user's Karma, but the comment won't go below -4. [0]
The one example I saw in a quick search that was -4 (dead) did not have the arrow to allow downvoting. So it appears that, once it's at -4, you can't subtract any more points from the user's karma via that post.
[dead] means the account is shadow-banned. You can see them because you have changed the default of “show dead” in your user settings. Otherwise you wouldn’t see the post. You have to be a bad boy or girl to earn that badge. Voting isn’t allowed (probably) because votes no longer make a difference.
And the points on a post are not displayed to anyone but the one who posted the comment.
You're probably thinking of [flagged] [dead]. People can keep downvoting a -4 post indefinitely and it won't do anything to hide the post or reduce the poster's karma total. People have to separately flag the post, apart from downvoting, for it to become [flagged] [dead].
It's easy to misinterpret because posts that attract heavy downvoting also tend to attract flagging.
You generally cannot downvote old posts (24 hrs and above I think, but not sure), but can upvote for months (maybe forever). Was the post you checked with no downvote arrows older than 24 hrs?
Found another one to double check. It says "dead", so I assume that means it's at -4. It also doesn't say [flagged], so it's not flag killed. 19 hours old. No down arrow. No up arrow either, for that matter. No arrows at all. The only thing I could do was vouch for it.
But almost all of that author's recent comments are dead, so maybe what I'm seeing instead is someone who's shadowbanned.
A comment starts with a score of 1. As long as the score is 1 or higher, it stays dark. It starts to fade when the score is below 1. With each step below that, it fades more.
So all the grey means is that someone downvoted it, once, before anyone upvoted it. That happens - someone reads it (or misreads it), decides it's wrong or offensive or whatever, and downvotes. That happens rather often, even to completely innocent posts. Usually it self-corrects after a bit, as others decide that there's no reason for the post to be downvoted and therefore upvote it.
>> 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.
That sounds true, but as someone who made the same shift, I think it is more likely that the rural people drink themselves into a stupor.
The history of human civilization is told through an ever-shifting lense. A lot of the modern problems have always been there, they just weren't seen as problems, there were no names for them or people hid it better. So if I hear such a claim, I need a good citation. Sure there are many reports of the bad situations in early industrialized cities. But how many reports of rural places that starved before had not been written because there was no one there to witness it? Cities did surely create their own breed of problems, there is no denying that, but cities also increased the visibility on problems that had existed elswhere as well.
This is an apolitical comment! If you reply please avoid the political aspects!
I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch.
Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many.
Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time.
Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”.
I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.
> A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time.
Pre-MAGA you saw these effects everywhere, and they were often satirized. Just look at the dynamics of the "Boca Vista" retirement village from Seinfeld where Jerry's parents live. Many episodes were built around the completely inane battles they would have (e.g. the condo association election) with the subtext being that they all had enough time to spend on these pointless minutiae. Heck, I'll shine the spotlight on myself - I think I'd be pretty embarrassed if I calculated how much time I spent writing HN comments...
This is one reason I'm extremely skeptical of the "Basic Income people" who think that if we all had the security of basic income then we'd be happy sitting around writing poetry and taking pottery classes. To be clear, there are plenty of other reasons basic income may or may not be a good idea, but if you look through the course of history, giving lots of people loads of free time without any guiding principles or direction has tended not to end well.
There's a theory that the medieval tournament (jousting, etc.) arose because rulers wanted to make sure that (a) their aristocracy was prepared for war, but (b) as it's really difficult to distinguish war game preparations (large gatherings of armed and provisioned knights) from rebellion preparations, the formal tournament —announced well in advance, with a recorded list of participants— meant an aristocracy kept busy by the former had no free time for the latter.
(a little like the principle that one should encourage one's sales force to take up expensive hobbies and acquisitions: keeping them hungry for the next commission)
I kinda just want basic income so that I won't feel guilty about never donating to charity. Everything else is centralized and specialized, charity could be too.
With basic income, presumably more people will want to run charities. Next you end up with everybody competing for how much charity they give - this happens already. Go to a charity store and look at who works there and why.
You'd be guilt/tripped and pressured by your well meaning peers.
And the only upper limit on how much charity we can give is the number of hours we have free. This spirals out of control in some groups (e.g. some religious charitable organisations or orders)
Different charity stores have different employees - I presume that is worldwide.
The animal rights charity here has very different volunteers than a religious charity which has very different employees than you find at Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity stores here.
> unhoused people who can only stay in the shelter if they work at the store.
I believe that doesn't exist here in New Zealand. It worry be very difficult to run a charity that way here because employees and tenants have very strong legal rights. I don't know how you could structure it to work - maybe a religious organisation with homeless members of that religion?
I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.
Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors".
Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.
Look at house cats: they are mostly rid of any wants of wild cats. When they are not asleep, they either cuddle or engage in mildly destructive playful activities. Humans are more inventive than cats, and way more hierarchical; I expect their games in a society devoid of wants to be much more elaborate, intense, and dangerous.
A world without wants has been tried in mice several times, with disturbing results [1].
Human brain is a device for overcoming limitations. It gives a distinct advantage in an environment where there are many limitations worth overcoming. In a world order without wants, some of this energy will be spent on undermining that same order, as a way to entertain oneself, and as a part of the never-ending quest to try new things.
In Star Trek, we don't see much of the utopian society back on Earth; we see people who face a ton of problems, including a real risk of death. Humanity needs wants, needs problems to solve, and will seek them, ideally by expanding its habitat and having a frontier, but it also is good at finding and fighting imaginary problems, like a house cat playing with toy or imaginary mice, be it computer games or conspiracy theories.
If you wanted to build a bomb to blow up a society, the explosive and containment vessel you need are:
1. People with a lot of free time on their hands.
2. Those same people not feeling they have accessible ways to spend their energy on something meaningful, rewarding, and socially esteemed.
If people are prevented from feeling actualized and valued, and they have the time to dwell on it, they will burn down the walls for even a tiny shred of chance that the resulting cinders will leave room for a future society that gives them a better chance.
I think Gamergate, 4chan, MAGA, Christian millennialist, doomsday preppers, all of that, has this as the fundamental throughline. We have a whole lot of younger and older men in the US who feel like society has taken away their means of generating esteem, and all they've been given in return is distracting videogames.
Now, whether or not they are correct in their belief is a separate question. But many do believe that, and that belief fuels a lot of the unrest we see in the US. I can't tell you how many Trump supporters I've talked to over the years that voted for him specifically because is a bull in a China shop. They knew he was chaos walking, and they wanted him to tear down institutions. They didn't think he'd be a good President. They wanted a bad President to break the system.
Again, whether they would actually be happier in a world where our cultural institutions have been shattered is a separate question. But they believe it, which reflects something about how little they think our current institutions value them.
Please avoid being political like that in this thread as it could derail the discussion.
It might be worthwhile to look at ways that some people fit your two criteria might head to contributing (e.g. writing Wikipedia pages or answering questions on the web site of the local national park) rather than tearing down.
4chan is a good example of user creation though! Didn't think of that.
I don't think you can talk about group behavior without being political. Whether discuss politics is partisan is sort of a different point, which I accept.
> It might be worthwhile to look at ways that some people fit your two criteria might head to contributing (e.g. writing Wikipedia pages or answering questions on the web site of the local national park) rather than tearing down.
I think by definition, that doesn't fit my two criteria. If someone feels they have meaningful ways to contribute to collective enterprises like Wikipedia or their local national park, then they aren't falling prey to my second point.
It's when people have energy but no perceived outlet that trouble brews.
I think the positive way to spin my observation is to say, "OK, there are people that are falling into this trap. How can we help them avoid that?" How can we give people productive avenues to reach meaning and social esteem? But it's very hard to do that because it is often perceived as reducing their agency when you try to help them.
Meaningful and rewarding seem awfully easy compared to socially esteemed. (the Brave New World approach was to condition everyone to esteem their station, which —although we do do this currently via targeted advertising— is ... problematic)
I guess we could —slightly less problematically— provide generative AI claques?
> Proverbs 16:27 may have inspired St. Jerome to write in the late 4th century: fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum, or “engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.” This was later repeated by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, which was probably the source of its popularity.
I'd like to think we could make the economy wither* away, but maybe a prereq is that we have to figure out how to educate (in the savoir-vivre sense) everyone first?
> On
12th April, with the arrival of elements of
the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organisation and activity would be redundant, as every want could be
satisfied without effort.
(I'm trying to keep this non-political, but one troubling aspect of "every want" seems to be that some primates are not happy unless they are certain other primates are unhappy; cf the roots of 1984 on the playing fields of St Cyprian's, as revealed in Such, Such Were the Joys)
Edit: occupying people harmlessly is also a major theme of Brave New World, although to be frank this supposed dystopia fails to be dystopic to me, as tortured creative souls always have the option to go to the islands...
As someone living in the twenty-first century, it'd be tempting to suggest they grow a pair and respond to their insignificance in a vast and uncaring universe by imposing their own meaning on their own lives, but it doesn't take much reflection to realise that, as natural followers are unlikely to read even Kierkegaard, the message would likely be much better received by sticking to tradition and its frogs.
Considering the venue and the rules around same I'll try to be as indirect but on point as possible.
Free speech is a cherished right, but like other great power, comes with great responsibility. It has been abused over several decades to brainwash a significant portion of the population that their desire for a king is normal and right.
I don't have a solution to this problem but it vexes me that any conversation about the topic today is impossible because "absolutists" refuse to acknowledge that any problem exists with their ideology.
Shirky argues that since the 1940s, people are learning how to use free time more constructively for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration.
MAGA is not a collaborative or creative endeavor. It is very much run from the top, with one singular figurehead & is subject to his whims. It is all designed around the idea of consumption, be it tweets, cable news, hats made in China, etc.
I did make your point in my comment: `Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch.' This is in line with Shirky's description of watching TV, and the baby boomers (of which he is apparently one) grew up steeped in that culture.
However I do think there's more to it, and mentioned that other groups have sprung up to ride on its coattails, which can form a positive feedback loop if they get any traction. I don't know if I'd strain his metaphor or example and call them competing shows or what. They are of course further examples of these professionally and centrally managed entertainment events.
What I think is more important is the "fanfic" culture, which has long been heralded by the "new forms of collaboration" advocates of the 90s and 00s as the predecessor culture of participation and collaboration and which itself has become huge with cosplay, Twilight fanfic morphing into 50 Shades of grey, etc. In the MAGA universe, Q is a perfect example of that, as are the people who plaster their homes with signs, make memes and artwork, and other, often deeper, engagement.
And looping all this back to the comment to which I was replying: harry potter or Marvel fandom may have some significant revenue impact, but hardly really changes the world, while the MAGA case fits the requested "changing the world in the interim".
I wonder how that will change over time. I’m pretty sure my generation would default to burning cognitive excess on video games. It isn’t the most damaging hobby!
>; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim?
I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt)
Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable.
This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0.
The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations.
Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.
I still think the biggest bottleneck is curation. Searching for videos gives me a lot of spam. Same on so many platforms. The constant technological warfare between spammers and indexers, and it looks like currently spammers and trolls are a bit ahead the historical average on most platforms?
That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling.
There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work.
I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...
Yes and: I conluded ~1989 that curation was biggest value-add. A surplus of information ("infoglut" h/t BYTE Magazine) creates a scarcity of intepretation.
Source: Was a "thread blaster" on CompuServe. Ran hub for modest niche BBS network. aka "Sysadmin". Spent most of my time moderating, filtering, summarizing, intepretting, operations, etc. Basically proto-journalism.
Every day, I'm flabberghasted that social media forfeited that job/roll to recommenders. Algorithmic hate machines vs curation. Completely misses the point. Is proactively harming people and society. For the banality of mere profits.
> ...X community notes
A welcome innovation. Delighted it seems to be working. Very surprised it happened during Musk's reign.
Would appreciate any links, cites about communite notes, if you have them handy. TIA.
I feel like an open social-graph could be used to create reputation and trust - opening up a lot of things and closing down many avenues of exploitation … or I guess I used to feel that way, that the combination of FoaF (friend-of-a-friend), OPML and RSS would somehow usher in a type of freedom. But Social Media TM sucked all the oxygen out of the room and locked away any hope of such things being broadly interoperable or able to create any general value that wasn’t fully controlled.
Hmm sorry don't have anything. I recall hearing about some international research project that was used as input when creating the Twitter community notes but can't find it anymore.
Interesting graphical tools exist nowadays to navigate the citation web and I guess one could try to backpropagate from this paper by Twitter employees, (Wojcik 2022):: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723
My (entirely anecdotal) observation is that while digital tools may have freed cognitive surplus, the continuous information bombardment and distractions of the attention economy does not work to align motivations to join collaborative efforts. The cognitive surplus is used to tailor ones own preferences for what to work on, and people fragment rather than unite. "Your initiative is nice, but not for me as I am aware of so many choices I would make differently".
There seems to be a mechanism built into humans that they do not make use of that cognitive surplus. In the sense that they are unable to collectively build a tower up into the sky (Tower of Babel).
But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism.
It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.
The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.
Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks.
Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks
Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox
* each of which is filled with screenshots of the other 5?
I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development.
The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.
I have heard the story about gin carts and the analysis about how gin was used to quell social disquiet at the beginning of the industrial revolution and the urbanization of the English public. Even if that is historically accurate, it seems a long jump to move from there to the eventual institutions like public libraries.
Producing require motivation, while consumption is passive. It doesn't seem guaranteed to me that people will be motivated in their free time in the way that will result in Wikipedia. In fact, it seems that leveraging passivity is probably more valuable. For example, the way TikTok gets people to rate videos is a byproduct of passive consumption - it requires no motivation at all.
This article also flies in the face of the normal attribution of 90% lurkers, 9% up voters, 1% creators [1]. I don't see any trends moving those numbers in the short term. Even a "sharing" action is in the 9% bucket.
So I share the skepticism against this idea. I don't see free time shifting away from passive consumption to content production anytime soon.
This article is a classic instance of a thought-provoking thesis that is supported by interesting assertions that don't hold up to scrutiny. See Yuval Noah Harari, Malcom Gladwell, Jared Diamond, etc. Every single one has included dilettante-level ideas that make a lot more sense when holding a beer.
The thesis is still interesting, and I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The purpose of the gin anecdote is less to provide an airtight proof of a scientific correlation, and more as a warmup act to get your mind to think about social behavior in a different way than you might naturally be inclined to. The author getting you to walk through a warmup exercise to get you ready to follow the argument they are about to make.
Not every piece of writing is meant to function as an academic thesis.
Hopefully it's clear that I agree with you - many critics are quick to make well-ackshually comments about this type of warmup content, and it misses the point.
This is interesting but incorrect if the thesis is that suddenly people spent a lot of time from the '50s on watching television (or the sitcom). Before TV people spent a ton of time watching movies. The 1940s was the peak years of movie watching in the US. When you went to a movie in those days you saw two and the numbers that Americans watched was much, much higher than today (or the late 50's), particularly per capita.
Then also before the rise of television there was enormously popular radio dramas that probably took up about the same amount of the average American's time as TV in the 30's and the 40's. So if this all represents an explosion of social surplus, I would argue that surplus existed in the US way before TV.
In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment.
Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.
That audience is now 19 and believes that “chat” is a standard second-person plural pronoun that points at people meant to be active, available to answer questions, and knowledgeable about anything Google knows or doesn’t.
While this doesn't directly match what you are looking for, you might be interested in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death from 1985.
From Wikipedia:
> In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act". He also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press. Rather than the restricted information in George Orwell's 1984, he claimed the flow of distraction we experience is akin to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
This is the kind of book I was looking for! Thank you!
Books are really changing my life, and the best suggestions come from this website! Great books are amazing, it's sad now people focuses on pics and funny videos. I hope my friends read more.
Thank you! Other users recommended Amusing Ourselves to Death, this is what I was looking for. I'll add it to my list. I'll be enjoying it next week! :)
Thank you. Wow, Reader, Come Home sounds very interesting! Now I am reading Reading in the Brain, a book that talks about how brain processes reading. Your suggestion it's a great match to follow it. I really like this topic!
And now we have Social Media. I doubt there will ever be a time in human history where the masses aren't spending their time doing _something_. As long as there is money to be made.
The way things are going we should go back to the gin. Although the modern stuff is way nicer (and safer) than what they used to drink in the London Gin Palaces back in the day.
It must have been. He’s still a bit of a local celebrity out in Chiswick, you can visit his house.
I did a gin tasting at the Portobello distillery and they give you an approximation of the historic gin palace gin. It’s not something you want to drink twice.
Curiously, it's literally across the road from the Fullers Griffin brewery.
Which, while not exactly craft beer, was perhaps the nearest approximation to what we now call craft that you'd be likely to encounter in late 20th century London.
--snip--
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 50 years."
--snip--
Honestly, it kind of warped my brain. Every fall my anxiety would peak until I found whatever project I had to keep entertained during the winter months.
After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.