9th March 2011
On Cyber-Utopianism
“On another level, though, Shirky’s new book is more than corporate-visionary hackwork. What’s striking is how Shirky pursues the utopian drift of the cottage industry in web apologetics to its logical conclusions—beginning with the collective time evoked in his book’s title. He estimates that this pooled global cache of time capital is a “buildup of well over a trillion hours of free time each year on the part of the world’s educated population.” Obviously, plenty of free time goes into all kinds of endeavors—from producing execrable reality television to composing crowdsourced fan fiction. To assign it all an aggregate value of potential hours of creative and generous activity is about as meaningful as computing one’s velocity on a bicycle as a fraction of the speed of light: it tells us nothing about either the public value or the opportunity cost of any given web-based activity.
Why assign any special value to an hour spent online in the first place? Given the proven models of revenue on the web, it’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of those trillion-plus online hours are devoted to gambling and downloading porn. Yes, the networked web world does produce some appreciable social goods, such as the YouTubed “It Gets Better” appeals to bullied gay teens contemplating suicide. But there’s nothing innate in the character of digital communication that favors feats of compassion and creativity; for every “It Gets Better” video that goes viral, there’s an equally robust traffic in white nationalist, birther and jihadist content online. A “cognitive surplus” has meaning only if one can ensure a baseline value to all that dreary inconvenient time we “while away” in our individual lives, and establishing that baseline is inherently a political question, one that might be better phrased as either “Surplus for what?” or “Whose surplus, white man?”
