I read this post and it floored me.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
I think this is the best way to think about the cultural shifts that are occurring in pop culture today. It's amazing to me that we've reached a point where young folks will talk about and use a large encyclopedia for fun, sometimes at parties. There's something much more profound to this though as this article discusses. We've got a surplus of leisure time, more or less. And we're seeing the beginnings of a cultural shift towards using that time for constructive communitarian projects, rather than pissing it away on television and self-destruction.
Monkeywrench, as a volunteer collective, is an example of this. None of us earn income from the project, we just do it. In a sense we're using our leisure time for it. This requires a bit more organization than a giant wiki project, but certain principles of experience are the same.