Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

Everyone knows the old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world’s most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well.

You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

the modern experience of shopping trickled into the world as a minor subculture, enjoyed by a tiny fraction of the overall population, ignored by the mainstream—until one day when the mainstream woke and found that it had been profoundly redirected by this strange new tributary. Every now and then, the creek floods the river.