I assumed that the producer and I would jump into a conversation about social construction of knowledge, the nature of authority, or any of the other topics that Wikipedia often generates. She didn't ask any of these questions, though. Instead, she sighed and said, "Where do people find the time?" Hearing this, I snapped, and said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from." She knew, because she worked in the industry that had been burning off the lion's share of our free time for the last fifty years.

This is the core of Shirky's argument (and perhaps my favorite passage in the book): whereas we used to spend hours a day passively watching the tube, now we spend our time editing Wikipedia articles and creating lolcats for every occasion. In a vacuum those acts may seem trivial; but the collective consequences can be vast (witness the open-source software movement). Moreover, even a silly act like crafting the perfect title to place above the photo of an obese cat is more creative—and more productive, more satisfying—than merely watching Seinfeld. The lolcat is more evolved than the sitcom.

Unschooling is a movement based on the ideas developed by an educational reformer named John Holt, who died in 1985. In 1981, he told a reporter, "It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."

Pat Ferenga, who is carrying on Holt's work, describes unschooling as "…the way we learn before going to school and the way we learn when we leave school and enter the world of work."

Which perhaps says more about how we've defined "school" than anything else. The best schools are less a place than a state of mind.

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

So, take an activity—say, cooking, which may be one of the most natural, human things we can do for one another—and break it up into a thousand pieces and you'll find yourself with a dreary workforce and inferior biscuits. That we ever got to this point, when it is so clearly a source of despair, is astonishing. Further proof that we need an economy built not to maximize profits but to improve the quality of human life.

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

The natural result of such a state is that the people who labor to produce these items remain as obscure to the world—and so, as defenseless—as are the means by which they toil. But it needn't be this way.

Sometimes thinkers make their greatest discoveries while appreciating and interpreting the genius of others. It is as though, in the very process of doing justice to the superiority of another individual, we awaken something superior in ourselves.

Of course, one could argue that such interpretation should be done at a distance, lest our own superiority drown in another's.