and sharing files, code, photos, videos and knowledge. And now we have reached a powerful inflection point, where we are starting to apply the same collaborative principles and sharing behaviours to other physical areas of our everyday lives. From morning commutes to co-working spaces to the way we borrow and lend money to the way fashion is designed, different areas of our lives are being created and consumed in collaborative ways.
This book does not posit that we need to pick between owning or sharing. In the future, most of us will have our feet in both camps, just as successful business models such as Airbnb may become a hybrid of both traditional commerce and collaboration. Collaborative Consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, much as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as The New York Times. But in the same way that the one-way flow of information from the media is over, we are reaching the close of a pure one-way consumerist culture based on just owning more and more stuff. ‘Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the eight track, what the solar panel is to the coal mine. Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward,’ New York Times journalist Mark Levine commented recently.14
Concepts and connotations of ‘sharing’, ‘collectivism’ and ‘communalism’ need to be updated. In his classic novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll writes, ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all”.’15 Meanings of words can change as our cultural acceptance of ideas is reframed.16 Hotels don’t call their business ‘bed sharing’ for good reasons, and as Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, says, craigslist does not call its ride-sharing board ‘hitchhiking.’
Collaborative Consumption is not asking people to share nicely in the sandbox. On the contrary, it puts a system in place where people can share resources without forfeiting cherished personal freedoms or sacrificing their lifestyle. A distinguished political scientist who shares this view is seventy-six-year-old Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom. In October 2009, while we were writing this book, she won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom is the first person ever to win the award with a proven theory on the efficiency of commons-based societies and how they work. Michael Spence, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, commented shortly after Ostrom won the prize that her work demonstrates that ‘economics is not really fundamentally about markets, but about resource allocation and distribution problems.’17 From alpine grazing meadows in Switzerland to irrigation canals in Spain to forests in Japan, Professor Ostrom has spent her life studying commonly managed resources and probing how they succeed or fail. Her research has demonstrated that even in capitalist societies, if simple rules are applied, a self-organized commons can work. Individuals will cooperate to act in the common good.
Perhaps what is most exciting about Collaborative Consumption is that it fulfils the hardened expectations on both sides of the socialist and capitalist ideological spectrum without being an ideology in itself. It demands no rigid dogma. There are, of course, limits to the system, specifically situations where people simply won’t and can’t give up on individual ownership or doing things by themselves. But this rigidity, too, could shift.
Although this book is a good-news book about promising solutions and long-term positive change, we start out by showing how the system of consumerism that we live with today – the system that is now our collective habit – was manufactured. Entire books have been written on this subject, and it is not our goal to provide another detailed history or critique of the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century. Ultimately, we are much more interested in the future. But if we can look back and deconstruct what got us on what cultural critic Juliet Schor calls the consumer escalator, ‘ever moving upward’, we can then look forward to figuring out how to get off it.18
Part 1
CONTEXT
Chapter One
Enough Is Enough
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, just east of Japan and west of Hawaii, a gigantic accidental monument to the waste of modern consumerism has formed. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest landfill in the world, except that it is not on land; it’s in the ocean. This swirling mass of rubbish is estimated to be roughly twice the size of Texas and in some parts one hundred feet deep, if not deeper. It’s a floating stew of 3.5 million tonnes of garbage, 90 percent of which is plastic, containing everything from bottle caps and toys to shoes, cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, nets, babies’ dummies, wrappers, takeaway containers and shopping bags from all corners of the world.
For years the patch was out-of-sight, out-of-mind, lying just beneath the surface of the water, invisible to satellites. The patch is located in a remote part of the ocean that is usually dodged by sailors because of its gentle breezes and extreme high pressure systems and shunned by fishermen, who call it the ‘desert’ due to its lack of fish. Charles Moore, a sailor, environmentalist, organic farmer and onetime furniture repairman, discovered the patch by accident on 3 August 1997. He was on his way home with his crew after finishing in third place in the Los Angeles–to-Hawaii sail race known as the TransPac, when he decided to take a shortcut. He steered the Alguita, an aluminium-hulled catamaran, into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre – a part of the ocean known for its vortex of swirling undercurrents that trap debris. Moore, an old sea dog who had been voyaging in the Pacific since childhood, knew that the region lacked the wind to propel the boat but was not worried, as the Alguita was equipped with engines and an extra supply of fuel.
In the week it took them to cross the Gyre, the crew were astonished to find themselves surrounded by so much floating rubbish in such a desolate place, thousands of miles from land. As Moore later wrote in his story about the discovery, ‘I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, the Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.’
Moore resolved to return to the area as soon as he could on a proper trawling and research mission with marine scientists to start to learn what was going on. And so he did, just over a year later, with a team of volunteers and a net apparatus resembling a manta ray that skimmed the ocean surface. The crew found ‘a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments – a plastic-plankton soup’.1 Venturing out on inflatable dinghies, they picked up everything from a cathode-ray tube for televisions to a traffic cone to a gallon bleach bottle so brittle it crumbled in their hands. Birds and fish mistake the plastic for food, especially the bottle caps, which Moore calls ‘poison pills’. One bird, when dissected, contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.2
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, sadly, isn’t a lone phenomenon, though it is perhaps the biggest of them all. Together, these areas could cover 40 percent of the sea. ‘That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,’ Moore says. ‘So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.’3 To convey the scope of the problem, Moore likes to give the example of Pagan Island (between Hawaii and the Philippines), where there is a ‘shopping beach’. ‘If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of the plastic trash that’s washed up there from thousands of miles away.’4
Rubbish
