Tag: Clay Shirky

  • Wealth, leisure and the attention economy in the 18C

    A while back, Clay Shirky (Gin, Television and Social Surplus) invoked 18C England in arguing that gin was the enabling – and stupefying – technology of rapid urbanisation. Television, he argued, played the same role in – presumably, he doesn’t really elaborate – the suburbanisation of the US in the second half of the 20C.…