Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators is a 2010 non-fiction book by Clay Shirky, originally published in with the subtitle "Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age".

In it, Shirky argues that "As the Internet radically reduces the costs of collective action for everyone, it will transform the relationship between ordinary individuals and the large, hierarchical institutions that were a dominant force in 20th-century societies".

[6] Shirky argues that since the 1940s, people are learning how to use free time more constructively for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration.

[citation needed] One critic Russell Davies writes, "There are revealing thoughts in every chapter and they're particularly important for people trying to do business on the internet, because they shed light on some fundamental motivations and forces that we often miss or misconstrue".

"[9] Upon its release, Cognitive Surplus was praised by Tom Chatfield of The Guardian and James Harkin of The Financial Times who both are complimentary of Shirkey's depiction of the Internet and its effect on society.

"[14] Lehmann's review compares the contradictions Shirky makes in his argument about quality being democratized to hailing "a cascade of unrefereed digital content as a breakthrough in creativity and critical thought is roughly akin to greeting news of a massive national egg recall by laying off the country's food inspectors.

It would likewise ring strangely in the ears of the leaders of the civil rights movement, who used a concerted strategy of nonviolent protest as a means of addressing an abundance-obsessed white American public who couldn't find the time to regard racial inequality as a pressing social concern.

The explicit content of such protests, meanwhile, indicted that same white American public on the basis of the civic and political standards—or rather double standards—of equality and opportunity that fueled the nation's chauvinist self-regard.

and if you "Consult virtually any news story following up on a lottery winner's post-windfall life—to say nothing of the well-chronicled implosion of the past decade's market in mortgage backed securities—and you'll get a quick education in how playing games with other people's money can have a deranging effect on human behavior.

For all too transparent reasons of guilt sublimation, patrician apologists for antebellum slavery also insisted that their uncompensated workers loved their work, and likewise embraced their overseers as virtual family members.

This is not, I should caution, to brand Shirky as a latter-day apologist for slavery but rather to note that it's an exceptionally arrogant tic of privilege to tell one's economic inferiors, online or off, what they do and do not love, and what the extra-material wellsprings of their motivation are supposed to be.

[14] The possibility for the web to fundamentally change the government is also questioned as Cognitive Surplus is already aging badly, with the WikiLeaks furor showing just how little web-based traffic in raw information, no matter how revelatory or embarrassing, has upended the lumbering agendas of the old nation-state on the global chessboard of realpolitik—a place where everything has a price, often measured in human lives.

More than that, though, Shirky's book inadvertently reminds us of the lesson we should have absorbed more fully with the 2000 collapse of the high-tech market: the utopian enthusiasms of our country's cyber-elite exemplify not merely what the historian E.P.

[15] According to Matei, "A broader conclusion of the book is that converting 'cognitive surplus' into social capital and collective action is the product of technologies fueled by the passion of affirming the individual need for autonomy and competence."