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And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel. For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community

I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.

If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.