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Clay Shirky ties together gin, sitcoms and lolcats:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

I’ve been arguing for a while that blogging and web 2.0 grow out of a surplus of spare time/energy people have in the office — and that smart companies can recycle the energy thrown off by that “spare” work. Shirky takes this to the logical extreme, saying society can do the same. Hat-tip to Gmarch on twitter.