Gather round, netizens, for Clay Shirky has a story to tell. It’s a simple yet stirring saga of self-organization online, and an extension of the paean to the spontaneous formation of digital groups he delivered three years ago in his breakout book, Here Comes Everybody. But where Shirky’s earlier tract focused principally on the potential organizing power of the digital world, Cognitive Surplus asserts that the great Net social revolution has already arrived. The story goes likes this: once upon a time, we used to watch a lot of television, to spend down the new leisure we acquired during the automated postwar era, and to adjust to the vaguely defined social ills associated with atomized suburban life. That was a one-way channel of passive consumption, and it was bad.

Now, however, we have the World Wide Web, which has leveraged our free time into an enormous potential resource. This is very, very good. With the emergence of Web 2.0–style social media (things like Facebook, Twitter and text messaging), Shirky writes, we inhabit an unprecedented social reality, “a world where public and private media blend together, where professional and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” This Valhalla of voluntary intellectual labor represents a stupendous crowdsourcing, or pooling, of the planet’s mental resources, hence the idea of the “cognitive surplus.” ...

[but] In The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov, we finally have a long-overdue market correction to cyber-utopianism, which Morozov defines as “a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside.” Morozov, a Belarussian web activist who works with the New America Foundation, sizes up the social media web for what it is—a powerful tool for communication, which like most such tools in modern history is subject to grievous distortion and manipulation by antidemocratic regimes.