Television and The Cognitive Surplus

A few weeks back I finally pulled the plug on television. Since I don't own a television, this meant not visiting hulu.com any more. Since then I've noticed some extra time in my life that I'm not used to using, that has long been consumed by passive consumption.

Here Clay Shirky talks about the vast 'cognitive surplus' that our society has, the free time that we don't yet know what to do with and generally spend on things like television, and how social media like Wikipedia are beginning to tap into it.

My favorite stats from his talk: The entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. Americans alone watch 200 BILLION hours of television per year. That's 200,000,000,000 hours. Or 2,000 Wikipedias per year.

If people spend 1% of that television time do something productive, that's 20 Wikipedias per year. And this year we're going to sprinkle in a WikiChoice.

(ht @gapingvoid)

24-Hour WikiChoice Tagline Contest!

[Update: Hit up the WikiChoice blog to see the winners!]

WikiChoice is coming right along, and in the spirit of community we've decided to open up a contest to crowdsource taglines! We're looking for something short, inspiring, and focussed on the WikiChoice mission.

The best so far: "Postive choices for a world of impact" from Charles.

Can you do better? Leave a comment here, or at the new WikiChoice blog.

Three Principles of Ethical Economics

As I prepared for my recent 'Discipleship Economics' workshop I tried to strain some foundational principles out of my swirl of thoughts about personal economics grounded in personal values. So far I have come up with Three Principles of Personal Economics that I hope you'll find as valuable as I have. They are all based on what I call the Transcendent Virtue: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

1) Simplicity - Free your time, commitment, and money by limiting your personal needs and meeting them with a minimum of resources. If we ought to care for our neighbors as we do ourselves, it stands to reason that our personal economics must leave room for our neighbors. This begins with limiting how much of our resources are devoted to our own needs.

2) Generosity - Simplicity without generosity is only stinginess or laziness. If a need can be filled by giving your Time or your Commitment, that is probably the best way. Give money as an act of relationship, not in lieu of it. Money is best given within established, ongoing relationships. Generosity should be proactive: Set aside time, commitment, and money; seek out great ways to use them. The results might amaze you.

3) Ethicality - Even as you simplify your lifestyle you will continue to buy things. Many products are made using substandard ethical or environmental practices. Make a serious effort to buy only the most ethically and environmentally sound products. Remember, your neighbor is anyone that you have the opportunity to care for, and each time you make a purchase, you have the opportunity to care for the people behind your product.

(The difficulty in finding this information is why my friends and I are building WikiChoice, a web service that will give you instant access to the best consumer choices. Follow us on Twitter here.)

WikiChoice Wins Best Idea!

Two ideas from our little Creative Action Group were chosen for the top 3 ideas of The Idea Camp conference in Irvine, CA this weekend - Bake It Forward and WikiChoice. And WikiChoice was chosen as the best idea of the conference!

The video below starts with Emily pitching Bake It Forward, then there's a pitch to put non-profit logos on band-aids, then at 4:10 you can watch me pitch WikiChoice. Enjoy.


The Idea Camp Competition - Top 3 from Jonathan Chan on Vimeo.

Anyone care to make a short film?

Idea for a very short film to promote WikiChoice.com (like Radiohead's "All I Need" video)

A movie theater is packed full of Americans. On the screen plays a series of powerful ads - for shoes, for clothes, for electronics. The audience is in awe.

Cut to a dim, noisy sweatshop. Asian children are making shoes, clothes, electronics. An American man in a suit stands over them, barking orders, dolling out punishment.

Back to the theater. The same man in a suit stands at the front of the theater, surrounded by stacks of boxes of new products, and smiling as he jots down orders and sends smiling, uniformed American youth to take the boxes up into the audience and collect money.

Back to the sweat shop. The American man in the suit is angry, shouting that the kids aren't making enough products, that he's going to sell out too quickly.

Back to the theater, the stacks of boxes are almost gone. The American man smiles sheepishly and ducks behind the screen as the ads continue to play. We follow him and find that the sweatshop is right there behind the screen. The man in the suit cocks his harm to hit a child, who screams in fear, but --

Back to the theater. The scream from behind the screen is drowned out by the beginning of the next ad.

Cut to black, and the text: "What will you choose when you know? WikiChoice.com"

There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Recently Google staged the beginning of a contest. They call it "10 to the 100th." They accepted submissions for ideas that would "change the world by helping as many people as possible," and they've put up $10,000,000 to make the winning ideas a reality. I submitted one.

I'm finding it hard to get around the notion that the force shaping today's world more than any other is the rich, Western consumer market. That is, when you or I run to the local Target, we are exercising our share of the world's most powerful aggregate force. Think about it - we're busy making money to buy things, and the rest of the world is busy making those things. More lives are shaped by our collective purchasing decisions than by any other identifiable factor.

The problem is, this power is not recognized by the public, the consumers, us, and so not used intentionally. Those who have recognized it are large multinational corporations, who realize that they can drive down costs by forcing poor people to work in poor conditions, and reap huge profits by advertising their cheaper products to rich people as cool, new, expensive.

And corporations are far more flexible than the governments that regulate them. They can work in many countries at once, while any one government may only govern one. The drive for profits in this void of accountability has led companies to despicable business practices, taking advantage of workers and the environment in countries where the government is unable or unwilling to effectively regulate them.

So now an American mother buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter might be buying clothes made by a little girl who will never go to school. And when a little boy pulls a Christmas chocolate out of his stocking, there's a good chance a little boy in West Africa was enslaved to make that chocolate. And yet still we buy.

We base our purchasing decisions on what will benefit us and our families - what will look good, taste good, feel good, etc. Our main source of information on new products is the litany of commercial advertisments we are subjected to.

But this barrage of ads is a slight of hand, a painting over, a curtain falling between us and the reality of the products we are buying. The truth is that they came from somewhere, they were made by someone, and this history matters far more than whatever version of hip the advertiser wants us to associate his product with. And it's only if we care about and act on this history that we can harness the power of our own purchases and make the changes we'd like to see in the world.

After all, the ultimate power lies with us. We have the money. And if we won't buy it, companies won't make it. Collectively we have the power to improve millions, if not billions of lives, simply by making more informed, more intentional purchases.

So what has kept people from doing that so far? At first I thought it was lack of information, that no one knows where and how products are made, or who makes them. But I have come to learn that it's not that the information isn't out there, it's that it's not accessible. It's spread out across 100 books and 1,000 websites. Many don't know how to go about learning all that would be necessary to make proactive purchases. So what do we do?

This is what I proposed to Google. Create a wiki-based website, like Wikipedia.com, that collects all the information about the ethical practices of all the companies that we buy from. So if all you want is to buy an ethical toothbrush, just do a search on the site for 'toothbrush,' and the five most ethical options will pop-up. If you want to go deeper you can type a company name and read through the collective knowledge of its ethical practices, good and bad. And you can search for an industry, like chocolate, and find out what is happening in the chocolate industry that you might want to consider before buying chocolate.

I call it WikiChoice.com. If Google likes it as much as I do then it will be entered into a round of voting in January, and I will need your help to make sure that this idea is chosen.

Truly, there is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.