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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.

The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.

If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.

The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.