Shirky introduces the Gin Craze as an older version of a modern-day concern. Gin offered its consumers the ability to fall apart a little bit at a time. He relates this to how society today deals with free time in relation to technology. Since the Second World War, increases in GDP, educational attainment, and life span have forced industrialized world to grapple with something we'd never had to deal with on a national scale: free time. He claims that the sitcom, along with other technology and social media, has become the modern day Gin Craze. Something that makes today remarkable is that we can treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects. Society never knows what to do with a surplus at first (hence "surplus"). The "Milkshake Mistake" is the idea that it is a mistake to look at the meaning of or potential of something by looking at the history and original purpose of a product (such as drinking milkshakes for breakfast). Shirky says we do this when thinking about media. The use of technology is much less determined by the tool/medium itself; when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another. Ushahidi was one of the first examples of a program in response to this surplus of free time being used for a greater good (cognitive surplus). It was a service developed to help citizens track outbreaks of ethnic violence in Kenya. It grew to a bigger and better at reporting over a wide geographical area as a result of cognitive surplus. It brought people together to carve out enough collective good-will from the community to create resources that no one could have imagined years ago. Along with good-will acts, people with a surplus of free time also engage in the use of creativity (ICanHasCheezburger). Cognitive surplus, newly forced from previously disconnected island of time and talent, is just raw material. To get any value out of it, Shirky says, we have to make it mean something or be useful. We collectively aren't just a source of the surplus; we are also the people designing its use by our participation and by the things we expect of one another as we wrestle together with our new connectedness.
