general

To elaborate on the previous post:
Clay Shirky has a Daniel-Bell-cum-Norbert Wiener-like theory that goes something like:
Earlier societies had to deal with surpluses in the form of agriculture or industrial capacity, which were problems, just like scarcities are a problem.
Our society has a cognitive surplus, resulting from too much leisure time.
In the '50s and '60s this surplus went to watching hours of TV.
In the '00s a portion of the surplus goes to making YouTubes and photocartoons of cats, as well as political activism.

It is important, now that a potentially upsetting surplus has been identified, that we begin to quantify and apportion it so its detrimental impact to society is minimized. Cognitive surplus credits would be a system similar to "cap and trade" agreements for pollution control among companies or nations.

Example from the previous post (a small beginning): artists are limited in the number of YouTubes they can post vs. posts with substantive argument. YouTubes are taken off for high fiving other artists online.

Another example: You watch an hour of Lost and must devote an equal amount of time to helping Barack Obama in a get out the vote email campaign. Credits would be added and subtracted online in a database managed by an NGO run jointly by Microsoft and AT&T.

proposal to jeff sisson re: "cognitive surplus credits" (tried this link on twitter but tinyurl made my url too tiny and then I wanted to 'url)

Jeff,
I propose we have cognitive surplus credits.
You can trade comments you have posted elsewhere in English for three of these YouTubes.
High-fiving Tracky results in a loss of one YouTube credit.

Not really, but Clay Shirky has convinced me we need to start taking our surplus more seriously

Update: More on cognitive surplus credits.

Joel Holmberg's Rhizome Commission proposal: Live Streaming Video of Some Dude's Mac Screensaver (thx, cosmic)

This is funny, underdetermined, and an example of XYZ art where X becomes X using no fancy algorithm whatsoever and does not purport to save the world through art. Holmberg says of the nascent work: "Like many of my previous works LSVoSDMS uses the computer environment as a generative system while conflating parody and sincere appreciation."

That is, 4chan, 7chan, etc.--collective sites of posts by mostly anonymous users that serve as breeding grounds for animated GIFs and other "meme" art. Vijay Pattisapu has an informative rundown on them in the Rhizome.org discussion forum. Some have furrowed their brows wondering how that kind of anarchic creative energy, native to the world wide web, can be translated into capital A art. But they have not furrowed their brows enough for some other people, as can be seen on the same Rhizome thread.