sawyl | Gin versus Gilligan's Island

I very much liked this, from a piece by Clay Shirky:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

Shirky takes the view that as gin was to industrial revolution, so has been the sitcom to the 20th century. That is, a way to wile the time surplus generated by the labour-saving innovations of the last 50 years.

So now, when people ask how it was that Schubert was able to write hundreds of songs despite dying at the age of 31, whereas you — despite being both older and more alive than Franz Peter — have achieved nothing, you can answer them simply: Schubert didn't have a television.