Clay Shirky wrote a book in the early 2000's called Cognitive Surplus: Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators.

The thesis was about a new wave of creation.

TV was an inherently passive experience.

You tuned to one of a limited number of channels, and then plopped down and images and sound were beamed into your eyes and ears, with no interactivity.

Hyper passivity.

The late 90's was a depressing time, dominated by passive consumption and TV.

But the internet opened up a new venue for interactivity, for creation.

You could create a webpage… and even if you didn't do that, you decided where to visit, what to engage with, out of nearly infinite options.

What would humanity achieve with this new cognitive surplus?

(Note that as TV stopped consuming all of our hours, TV didn't go away… in fact, TV's golden era of prestige TV occurred after the Internet had gotten big)

We're in a similarly depressing era today as the late 90's.

Everyone's attention is absorbed by the infinite feed.

The infinite algorithmic feed is like TV in its passivity, but even worse.

The infinite feed is hyper-TV.

Instead of one-size-fits-all content of TV, it's infinitely customized to hold your engagement in particular, in a maximally passive stance.

Needing to create is costly and hard, so for a service with a feed to maximize engagement they want to make it as easy as possible: just lean back, and let the algorithm figure out how to keep you engaged.

Amusing ourselves to death.

The internet was a disruptive technology that invited creation, a return to a more active stance.

LLMs are a disruptive technology, too.

Let's use them to help encourage creation and human agency again.