Cognitive Surplus (plus bonus Weird Al content)

This is something I've thought about on my own over the years, and this fellow has a name for it: Cognitive Surplus.

Here is a quick example of what Clay Shirky means by cognitive surplus:

[I]f 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 100 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 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

Not really sure what else I want to say about this, other than to note how much I love stumbling upon someone who has done the homework on something that's been rattling around my brain.

This confirms my suspicion that human potential is seriously untapped. As for my related suspicion--that anyone seeking to undermine, overthrow, or otherwise fuck with the organizational structures which suppress human potential is digging their own grave--well, I've said too much and I think I hear the black helicopters approaching.

At any rate, keep up the good work, Clay. One fewer thing for me to worry about! (One less thing thing to worry about? Wait, that sounds right. But it shouldn't be. But...)

Anyway, there's no doubt about who's right in this one: