Remember Napster? Not the corporatized, legal version now owned by Best Buy – but the totally illegal version we used waaaaaay back in 2001? Back then, CDs were going for 20 bucks which got you maybe 15 songs. Finally, some genius college student created a program to facilitate the sharing of music files and, suddenly, kids in their twenties were sharing the same songs from their CDs in a new, totally different way.
Yes, we all knew that technically it was stealing but nobody felt too bad about because we were stealing from The Man and not someone’s grandma, and there was just something about digital music that needed to be shared in a better way. It turned out, Napster was our first experiment in collaborative consumption.
It makes you wonder, “what else can we share in a better way?”
But first, what is collaborative consumption? In a nutshell, collaborative consumption it is the reliance on a community, local or virtual, to share goods and resources to reduce general, overall consumption and stress on the planet.
The collaborative consumption movement has grown past rebel twentysomethings sharing music to address real challenges of everyday people. For example, everyone knows kids outgrow their clothes like crazy so the site thredUP is empowering families with growing youngsters to swap clothing online. Got some books or DVDs you don’t want anymore? At swap.com you can trade those in for media items you really want.
Collaborative consumption creates a sense of community with people facing similar problems and helps them avoid spending lots of extra cash on new clothing every few months. But collaborative consumption isn’t just about sharing your hand-me-downs. Companies like ZipCar and Lending Club are allowing people to rely on – sit down for this one – other people for needs like transportation and loans instead of giant companies.
If you’ve watched Annie Leonard’s, The Story of Stuff, you know how destructive the practices of large corporations can be – lots of resources being squandered in delicate places all over the world only to end up in a trash heap here in the U.S. This 20th-century mindset of buy-use-dispose has been destructive with both our planet and our wallets – but also our sense of community.
Switching our collective mindset from relying on companies to relying on community presents the dilemma of trusting strangers. It’s tough not to imagine the worst-case-scenario of receiving a box of discarded clothing from a stranger or lending money to a person across the country. We’re definitely a less paranoid generation than our Boomer parents but are we trusting enough to make this collaborative consumption idea really take off?
As we learn about the shady tactics of companies we’ve trusted for so many years, if we think about it, shifting our trust to a neighbor (albeit one over the internet) may be a smarter idea. Faceless companies think nothing of infusing our food with foreign chemicals but food from a CSA box will be inherently safer.
I believe in the collaborative consumption movement and I hope you take a moment to check out the information on this site. We should continue with this momentum using the internet to build community across borders and across cultures (even locally). It will strengthen our power and we will rely less on large companies.
