So NYU New Media professor Clay Shirky has come up with something called cognitive surplus, which is a name for all that extra mind matter we no longer need to direct toward survival, since the Industrial Revolution has given us far more productive and less harrowing lives. It is this brainpower, left unused like a Soloflex in the garage, that we've now put towards watching television. He says, as a whole, Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV – which he sees as bad - especially since it only took 100 million hours of thought to create something called Wikipedia, which I believe is a dating site for Wiccans. Shirky's point: if only we directed some of that wasted brain power toward inventing something useful, what a big yummy world we'd have with awesomely cool things.

This is crap.

Television is not sapping creativity – it is merely a wondrous result of it. Forget its ingenious programs. Just look at how TV has evolved from a cumbersome monstrosity to a sleek wafer thinner than Donald Trump's hair –this is as pure a measure of human ingenuity as you will find outside of snack cakes.

More idiotic, however, is to think America wastes its life in a stupor, roasting like 7-11 hot dogs in front of Two and a Half Men. Plus, the idea that if we stop watching it we'll suddenly start inventing flying thermoses and edible door knobs, is even more retarded. That's because most of us do our best thinking while watching television. TV only exists as a backdrop to our thoughts – allowing us to think about our lives, cushioned by the safety net of Frasier ordering a latte. It's that harmless noise that keeps us immune from thoughts that, isolated in silence, might drive us mad.

Finally, the idea that we need more impressive creations like Wikipedia is ludicrous. Wikipedia is actually WORSE than television, for it pretends to make you think, when all you're doing is looking up crap. TV would never do such a thing. Instead, it humbly offers you jaunty theme songs and a group hug with every episode. Unless it's Law and Order: SVU. Then it's just sodomy.