Clay Shirkyon has written a brilliant essay: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It's essentially a response to the question "Where do people get the time to build to Wikipedia?". Clay answers this by tracing back the historical curve of leisure time; the insight: we've just entered a new era in which people (a lot of them) are using their free time to make things of broad social value. This is happening because a) the cost of the tools needed to make things has dropped precipitously (notably, digital/web/networked tools) and b) our free time is evolving from leisure = consumption (watching TV, drinking gin), to leisure = production (e.g. making things like Wikipedia, composing a blog) that have social and economic utility.
I suppose that this is not entirely new -- the idea of having a "hobby" has been around for some time. But the scope of it has changed because access and ability to share is now virtually free and instantaneous. Want to know about, say, letterpress printing? A whole universe on this topic is a Google search away. Ten years ago, finding information (and like-minded enthusiasts) on this subject would be very, very slow-going. No wonder TV used to be a more interesting diversion.
Clay's essay is a reason to be optimistic and hopeful. Consider what could happen (is happening) as people use their free time to work on problems like our broken food system -- essentially a subset of the larger climate change problem. Maybe -- with hundreds of thousands of people working on this problem, spreading information, sharing their successes and challenges, inventing new ideas, egging each other on -- maybe we can fix it. It is indeed amazing what you can accomplish when you turn off the TV, put down the glass of wine, and actually make something.
