You know that feeling you get when you read something so lucid, so exactly correct, that you get goosebumps? It’s a classic “ah-ha” moment, leaving you smiling in satisfaction over the words that clearly resonate with you, and yet slightly frustrated over the fact that someone else was able to articulate a concept in a way you hadn’t— or couldn’t have — yet done.
In his thoughtful blog post, Social Production, the Good Life, and the Ways of Desire, Timothy Burke writes:
Middle-class well-being in the United States in the last ten years has been increased far more by social production than it has the addition of new material goods. Wikipedia, for all its faults, makes life better and easier. It’s true that Wikipedia happens to displace a material commodity, the encyclopedia, and it does so without replacing the jobs that the publication of the Encyclopedia Britannica provided. Not all social production is directly rivalrous with productivity in this way, but the key is that as social production rises, it supplements that sense that the world is fecund, full of wealth and possibility, it provides some of the well-being that material commodities also provide, and adds new kinds of well-being at the same time.
Yeah. Feel those goosebumps?
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