Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky has me riveted. I've been reading essays about post-television culture since Alvin Toffler keeled me over half-way through my senior year in high school, but Shirky's write-up of his 2008 Web 2.0 Conference speech is among the best.

The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Source: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

While this hopeful logic echoes the "1% of a billion people" fallacy, the immense amount of work directed at projects such as wikipedia attests to huge reserves of untapped intellectual energy.

We're going to need it.