What’s Mine Is Yours–The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
By Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Harper, 233 pages
Often, economic tracts can be a remedy for insomnia. But What’s Mine Is Yours—The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers is more than the exception. It’s a highly readable, “hip” if you will, book full of “seeing moments.”According to its publisher, it “explores the rise of new economic models based on shared resources and collective consumption—and [is] the first articulation of a major socioeconomic phenomenon.” It is that and more, and woke up my own thinking about today’s economic paradigms.
What’s Mine Is Yours’ Introduction is humble enough to start with Internet apartment sharing, in a way that helped augment the 40,000 rooms in Denver that would never have caught up with Obama’s speaking in a 75,000-seat arena there. It was the “sharing websites” already in operation in 2008 that helped everyone get comfy, including craigslist, youth hostels, even “nonmonetary travel exchanges such as Couch-Surfing that helped travel by creating a network of couches available to sleep on for free.” The force behind this untapped opportunity for reasonably priced accommodation was, yes, trust. You remember that.
What’s Yours Is Mine and trust form the paradigm for the new social networks that bring people together to fulfill their needs for goods and services. Their new business models provide unique benefits are services to the consumer as well as reasonable profit to the entrepreneur. If that seems radical, it isn’t. It harkens back to a time when people did rent rooms in their homes, did sell off their garaged stock of items in the backyard. Now eBay or craigslist or any number of similar exchange/purchase Internet services have become virtual backyards, trading, sharing and exchanging a wide variety of goods, services, and thinking, for fees or other returns, from contributions, ad or announcement placements.
Add to these networks, more than 3 million Flickr virtual communities, more than 3 million Flickr images loaded, 700,000 new Facebookers, 5 million tweets, 900,000 blogs posted, plus 20 hours of YouTubes loaded per minute equal to Hollywood releasing 90,000 new full-length movies each week. The means of trade include sharing, bartering, lending of co-housing, co-working or solo, living together, communes for life-styles, articles on government, science, social psychology from economic and other journals brimming with the self-organizing behaviors of ants, the smarts of honeybees, the cooperation of schools of fish and flocks of birds. Alors, why not us? After all, the collaboration of social networks’ bottom line is Collobarative Consumption. And we are living it, whether we know it or not.
Why we need Collaborative Consumption
Chapter 1 brings us to the Pacific Ocean, east of Japan, west of Hawaii, where a monument of waste to our present mindless consumption has formed. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling under the surface, a trash mass twice the size of Texas, some places 100 feet deep, 3.5 million tons of garbage, 90 percent plastic, including bottle caps, toys, shoes, lighters, toothbrushes, nets, pacifiers, wrappers, takeout containers, shopping bags from the world’s four corners.
Local fishermen call it “the desert” for its lack of fish. T.S. Eliot called it The Wasteland. This is the endgame of thoughtless consumerism, containing minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of thousands of plastic fragments, a soup of plastic plankton that spits up a TV’s cathode-ray tube, a gallon bleach bottle which crumbles to the touch to smaller pieces that birds and fish will eat, mistaking it for food, including bottle caps, poison pills, some 1600 found in one dissected bird. Are we happy? I don’t think so.
The authors remind us that one hundred million tons of plastic are produced a year, forever’s legacy, degraded by sunlight into “nurdles,” too tough for voracious bacteria to break down. Plastic now outweighs surface plankton by six to one in mid-Pacific Ocean. Since 1960, we’ve consumed more of everything than all previous generations together. Since 1980, we’ve consumed one-third of planet resources—forests, fish, minerals, metals, other raw materials. Tropic deforestation takes out a patch the size of Greece each year, more than 250 million acres. A middle-class child born today that will live till age 80 consumes 2.5 million liters of water, wood of 1000 trees, 21,000 tons of gasoline, far outpacing other nations’ progeny. That’s just the shortlist of excesses that Bots and Rogers aptly call Throwaway Living, which we should definitely throw away.
They point out that Throwaway Living is driven by our constant barrage of advertising, pushing competitive consumption, the need to personally own and hold, not share, products from A to Z, like 100 billion plastic bags each year to, guess what, hold our garbage. What has driven this consumer debacle since WW II has been not only victory, but resulting increased incomes, a sense of keeping up with the Joneses, multiple ownership of everything from cars to TV’s, shoes, beds, rooms, and the means to increase them. The worst piece of plastic of all to surface was the credit card, the enabler which gave consumers from the late 50’s on the chance to believe that “The unaffordable was affordable.”
For instance, between 1989 and 2001 alone, credit cards billings almost tripled from $238 billion to $692 billion, and went up to $937 billion in 2007, working on the premise that the more credit we have the more stuff we have was an inherent, inalienable good. Americans hold more than 1.3 billion cards, four cards per American. The Chinese own a mere 5 million credit cards for 1.2 billion people. Europe rolls in with only 0.23 credit cards per person. We have become the debtor nation with a debtor populace. According to MSN-Money, average US households carry some $8,000 in revolving credit card debt. Our cumulative national debt rolls in at nearly $14 trillion, mind-boggling to say the least.
Credit cards, Bots and Rogers tell us, helped consumers cross the line from cash and carry to swipe and own, leaving a rising indebtedness, rolling balances through the decades to the spiraling personal and corporate bankruptcies of today. And “99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within six months.” What we toss is only half the waste. The other half is what we buy and never use. I can attest to a mass of dead pairs of shoes sitting in the bottom of my closet and two pairs that are alive, well, and walking. Then there are my seven leather jackets, some of which I never wore after purchase, in search of the perfect one.
But what we use and never use calls for more space, more rooms and more garage or attic storage, more outside storage, which costs some $9.99 billion a year. What we lost in all this acquisition were the values held pre and during WW II of conserving, living with shortages, one car or none, less purchases, less debt, less of everything, but not necessarily happiness and well-being.
Now we change homes to accommodate acquired stuff, filled again with still more stuff. Stuff is US. Botsman and Rogers detail this factually, brilliantly, and particularly the increase in credit-card usage to underwrite the waste. With several studies, they also prove that people buying with credit cards will pay more for the same items, tip bigger, and buy high-ticket items with plastic easier than with cash. Reaching in your pocket for real cash is a more sobering way to pay for high-ticket items than sliding the plastic and signing your name. These purchase patterns go for every category. A couple I knew put a down payment on a vacation home on their credit card. Now, they have to rent it most of the time to make the mortgage payments and the credit card payments. The bills always arrive.
The things you own end up owning you
The subhead above is an apt chapter heading from Botsman and Rogers. Throughout their book, the devil is exposed in the factual detailing of their writing: from using advertising to disparage the products you already have (that adland told you to buy), i.e. the “new improved product;” to the power of Public Relations titan, Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), who learned to influence consumer behavior or opinion by “connecting them on a deep unconscious level, particularly their drives towards aggressiveness and sexuality . . . to want stuff . . . linked to human patterns . . . what we despise, what we love, what we hate and fear.”
For instance, Bernays peddled cigarettes to women in the 1920’s by declaring it was their right to smoke. He had a photo taken of a crowd of women lighting up all at once. He sent it with a press release around the globe. The bottom line was a 20% increase in cigarette sales. This before it was known that smoking was an equal-opportunity killer, not an object of feminine liberation, the latter the net takeaway, i.e. the famous Benson & Hedges campaign “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” in the 1960’s, an entendre on the long slim cigarette.
Surfing the wave of trends, advertising and P.R can dish up a product or personage, ideology or lemon as irresistibly delicious, something you must have, including something as ambiguous as “Change.” Caveat emptor!
Then we have the buying-to-match principle, buying the suit to match the tie, the house to match the family’s ambitions; the car, the pool, the toys to match the house that matches the neighborhood. The buying never ends to stop the engine of production for consumption. But what is different with collaborative consumption is that it is designed to contribute to the common good, and what is bought can be shared, exchanged or bargained off for other people’s stuff or space, maximizing usage and reducing rote over-production.
Collaborative consumption is not about the ever-wanting I/me but serving the larger needs of we the people, society. Its opposite is that group of ever-selfish, conservatives and their Tea Parties, constantly whining over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the the creation of regulatory government agencies to protect our wealth, care for seniors, the poor, and our battered environment. They fortunately are not sick, old, poor, or in need of retirement funds.
We are all in this together
This Bots and Rogers’ chapter heading illustrates how we are and must continue coming together economically via the newly created Internet magnet; that is, to share news for common action, to share gardens, to build the food supply, bartering for better lives, for less production of more junk, allowing the Wal-Mart of our bad dreams to deflate before it explodes into more garbage. Thus, What’s Mine Is Yours stresses building virtual, even off-line community, family, networks of friends, not armies of destruction.
This new economic paradigm contradicts the older paradigm of being independent hunter-gatherers. Man, since his inception, the authors point out, has gathered in tribes, clans, groups of all kinds, to share and survive. What’s Mine Is Yours’ economics present a virtual and off-line sharing humanity contra lone-wolf, I/me/ism. It is laudable too for its courage to be utopian in a world drowning in cynicism’s garbage. A world that is deadly serious about profit yet lacking in economic imagination to create new business models that thrive by sharing not stealing other people’s goods and money or wrecking nature’s assets.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
