Читать книгу What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live - Rachel Botsman, Rachel Botsman - Страница 6

Anyone who has travelled in rural Africa knows that one adjective describes its economy: ‘more.’ The people there need more. They need more water, food, infrastructure, education, health and governance. This lack of the most basic resources and the consequent poverty also confronted Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago. Smith, the great Scottish economist, sought a way out of the agrarian squalor of the eighteenth century. He believed a more productive society would lead to a wealthier society. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that humans are motivated by self-interest and ‘self-love’, and that the exploitation of this trait leads to greater wealth for all and a more effective distribution of labour.[112]

Looking back, one can understand why Adam Smith wanted to work out how to get the economy to produce more. Britain in the 1700s was not a nice place to live. The average life expectancy was just thirty-five years. Dead dogs, cats, rats and even horses decayed on the cobblestone streets, and raw waste spilled everywhere, creating a breeding ground for diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and smallpox. Medicine was still so primitive that in 1775 more than eight hundred deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to ‘Teeth’.[113] Most people lived in just one room in buildings made of crumbling bricks. It was not unusual for such buildings to collapse.

But today, in a rampant consumer economy, ‘more’ has lost its meaning. Smith would probably be mystified by how his simple goals of increasing productivity and achieving market efficiency have become an ideological threat to our economy, society and planet. In When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten writes, ‘Smith did not advocate a market system based on unrestrained greed. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest – but it is not greed.’[114]

Adam Smith and later Milton Friedman both believed that an individual pursuing his own self-interest promotes the good of society as a whole. In Chapter Two, we saw how in just a few generations, this concept was transformed from a relatively healthy narrative of technological ingenuity to a frenetic quest for personal identity through brands, products and services, before finally becoming an extreme system of insatiable consumerism. So much so that by the 1950s, the dawn of hyper-consumerism, we started to perceive ourselves first and foremost as a society of individual consumers, and as a group of citizens second. We ended up believing that we were better off relying on corporations rather than cooperating with each other. Collective- and community-based values were shunned in favour of consumer independence and a mind-set of ‘me, me, me’.

The promises of individuality and independence were wrapped up in the falsehood that ‘what’s mine is mine’ and that complete self-reliance was the ultimate goal. Douglas Rushkoff writes in his book Life Inc., ‘Each home was to be its own fiefdom. Self-sufficiency was part of the myth of the self-made man with his private estate, so community property, carpools, or sharing of almost any kind became anathema to the suburban aesthetic.’[115] And that neighbour on the other side of the fence, do we even know him well enough to borrow his ladder? Sadly, neighbours being ‘total strangers’ is more the norm these days than the exception. A recent survey shows that three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbours.[116] In the UK, six out of ten people don’t know their neighbours’ names.[117] It would seem that the consumer culture of ‘more’ helped businesses get bigger while prizing us further and further apart.

Through the fifties and sixties, manufacturers and marketers encouraged American workers to give up their hobbies and free time for the choice of bigger cars, better homes and more technology. The result was a dramatic decline in ‘social capital’. Robert Putnam, a political science professor at Harvard University, was responsible for popularizing the concept of social capital, defining it as ‘the trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’.[118] In his book Bowling Alone, he traced the decline in social capital through a study of American membership in bowling leagues. Putnam found that between 1980 and 1993, while the total number of people who bowled in America increased by 10 percent, the number of bowling leagues decreased by 40 percent. And as Putnam notes, ‘Lest this be thought a wholly trivial example, nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once during 1993, nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections.’[119] In short, the more people who bowl alone, the fewer conversations over beer and pizza, and the greater the overall decline in human interaction. The less time people spent socializing, the more time they spent in the office or shopping. The irony is that while Americans tripled their capacity to consume between 1980 and 2000, they found themselves with far less time to enjoy the fruits of their labour.[120] As former president Bill Clinton said in a 1993 speech, ‘Most Americans are working harder for less.’[121]

Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman, philosopher, and – as one might now call him – futurist, was ahead of his time when he wrote in 1757, ‘The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop; not to be satisfied with any reasonable requirement. . but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit of more.’ It is this ‘insatiable pursuit of more’ that we must now address. Adam Smith remarked that Burke was ‘The only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do.’[122] They both wanted to create a better society through competition but with a healthy balance between pursuit of self-interest and pursuit of the greater good. Over two centuries later, their vision might be taking shape.

We may be coming out of the consumer trance we have been living in for the past fifty or so years. At the heart of this transformation are two interlocking phenomena. The first is a values shift. There is a growing consumer consciousness that infinite growth and consumption based on finite resources are not a viable combination. Consequently, we are finding ways to get more out of what we buy, and more importantly, out of what we don’t buy. At the same time, we are starting to recognize that the constant quest for material things has come at the expense of impoverishing relationships with friends, family, neighbours and the planet. This realization is causing a desire to re-create stronger communities. We are experiencing a tipping point from the pursuit of ‘what’s in it for me?’ towards the mind-set of ‘what’s in it for us?’ But more than that, we are beginning to see that self-interest and collective good depend on each other. It is in my self-interest to stop global warming; it is in my self-interest to participate in elections; it is in my interest to correct an online entry on Wikipedia.

Reclaiming Old Virtues

Our awareness of the false promises of our consumer economy is not new. Just as mass consumerism was taking hold, a visionary tried to halt the emerging culture of materialism. Cereal giant Kellogg Company founder W. K. Kellogg decided in 1930, right around the start of the Great Depression, that most of his fifteen hundred employees would go from a traditional eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown championed the initiative, announcing at the time, ‘Four six-hour shifts. . instead of three eight-hour shifts, will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.’[123] The existing workforce took a slight pay cut, but Kellogg raised the hourly rate to offset the loss and promised production bonuses to encourage people to work hard.

But Kellogg wanted to do more than provide and save jobs. He recognized that rather than passing time, like previous generations, people were spending it, getting lost in the ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. This mania was leaving them disconnected from their communities. Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day that Brown and Kellogg hoped to show that the ‘Free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.’[124] It was a bold vision, and it worked – for a while.

The workers in Battle Creek embraced the extra two hours. Beyond the time spent at home with their family and friends, the time also created a sense of freedom to pursue leisure interests. Women sewed, gardened, visited neighbours and cooked together. Men exercised, hunted, visited libraries and explored other hobbies. As Hunnicutt writes, ‘Those extra two hours were precious and offered an opportunity to craft the employee’s sense of family, community, and citizenship. . The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older. . more convivial kind of working together.’[125]

Kellogg’s six-hour workday produced not just a qualitative social benefit by creating ‘happier’ employees with more leisure time. There were quantitative results for the company, too. The shorter workday influenced employees to work harder. On average, ninety-six boxes of shredded wholewheat biscuits were packed per hour instead of eighty-three.[126] Overhead costs, labour costs and the number of work-related accidents also decreased. The company polled workers in 1946 (after the programme had been temporarily suspended) and found that 77 percent of men and 87 percent of women would choose a thirty-hour week even if it meant lower wages.[127]

Despite its success and popularity, Kellogg stopped its experiment in 1943. The labour shortage and product demand from World War II pushed the company back to an eight-hour workday. President Roosevelt launched a series of policy initiatives that led to the standard forty-hour working week that for the large part we still adhere to today. These political forces were impossible for even Kellogg to resist. As one employee later commented, ‘Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.’[128]

Today there is a conscious movement to return to the same intentions that motivated the six-hour Kellogg working week. Across America, and much of Europe and Australasia, we are seeing a drive to reclaim leisure time to self-educate, self-relate and revive neglected forms of social capital. The urge to regain meaning and community in our lives is popping up everywhere – and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in our kitchens. Roo used to visit his Grandma Dada in her middle-class home in Wimbledon every Saturday. When Roo walked in the door, he would run to the fridge. Everything you needed to know about Dada could be understood in the way she cooked. She had a routine. The first Saturday would be a roast chicken, the leftover bones would be turned into stock for the following Saturday’s risotto, the leftover risotto would be used for the following Saturday’s stuffed tomatoes, and the leftover stuffed tomatoes would be turned into pasta sauce. Roo and his brothers would joke that when there was something that she couldn’t reuse she’d turn it into the soap she made them wash their hands with. There is more to this process than resourcefulness. For Dada, making lunch was about finding balance through a value system that integrated her history, as well as her sense of responsibility to her family and community. Roo thought of his grandmother in June 2009 when he, his wife and their fourteen-month-old daughter took a trip to China to visit distant relatives. They stayed on the fifty-seventh floor of the JW Marriott in Shanghai. As they walked around the breakfast buffet, he was struck with an intense feeling that what lay before him wasn’t rational. Smoked salmon from Scotland, lobster from Maine, French croissants, Italian spring water and Costa Rican coffee. The sense of globalized freedom that the buffet offered felt overwhelming and oppressive. But most of all, the choices were without meaning. He was in Shanghai, and he wanted a Chinese breakfast and something that made him feel his fourteen-hour flight had transported him somewhere new. And here is where his grandmother’s old world and his own new world values meet, in the desire to find purpose and an authentic story behind what we buy, make, do and create.

Return of the Local Marketplace

In high school, Rob Kalin would skip classes to shoot and develop his photographs. He graduated with a D-minus average but won admission to a studio programme at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Over the next six years, Kalin attended half a dozen colleges before finally finishing his degree, with a major in classics, from New York University in 2004. He was twenty-five years old at the time and pessimistic about how his degree would help him in the job market. The son of a carpenter, he grew up with a ‘hands-on’ approach to life. He started to make furniture in his Brooklyn apartment, turning IKEA kitchen work surfaces into stereo speakers and reclaimed wood into desks. But Kalin discovered it was hard to sell his stuff, even online. There was a lot of ‘advice and hand-holding’ for artisans but no viable marketplace to exhibit and sell their creations. At the same time, he was not a fan of brick-and-mortar chain stores. He would just walk around and see shelves upon shelves of ‘anonymous mass-produced products’ – and think that he wanted to create the opposite experience.

In early April the following year, Kalin was sitting in a big orange chair facing his apartment window. He started to sketch the initial ideas for his vision – a vibrant community of people across the globe connecting with and helping one another, and ultimately buying and selling unique handmade goods direct, with no big middleman. Working with three friends and fellow NYU graduates – Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell – Kalin transformed his initial scribbles into a live website in just two months. Etsy was born. In just three years, Etsy has attracted 200,000 sellers, a million registered users and more than $27 million in funding.[129]

Etsy connects buyers with independent creators of all things handmade, the result being that you pay less and the seller makes more. In 150 countries, from Australia to England to South America, more than 3 million people are buying and selling everything from ‘myrtle wood electric guitars’ to ‘crocheted bath puffs’ to ‘bookcases handcrafted from canoes’. At the same time, through forums and live chats, as well as via offline crafts events and workshops known as Etsy labs, the Etsy community provides these artists not just with the platform but with the information and support they need to earn a living. ‘This human-to-human relationship of the person who’s making it with the person who’s buying it is at the core of what Etsy is,’ Kalin explained.[130]

Kalin posits that handmade ‘isn’t a fad, it’s a resurgence’, and indeed the growth and sales of Etsy have been phenomenal. In November 2008, when much of the consumer world was in a panic, Etsy had twelve record sales volume days in the month; $10.8 million of goods were sold – a 27 percent increase over October; and 135,165 new members joined the community. In the first six months of 2009, more than $70 million worth of goods were sold and more than 1 million new sellers and buyers joined.

Etsy is a throwback to the way consumerism used to be, individuals buying from individuals, and re-creating old forms of virtual market bazaars. It is a part – or you could say a pioneer – of the resurgence in the popularity of older craft industries – knitting, printmaking, crochet, ceramics, quilting, woodworking and so on. More and more people are looking to reconnect with the ties and variety of local and custom-made goods that got lost in mass production. Chain-store culture and shopping centre-fuelled conformity have created extraordinarily impersonal experiences with products that have no history, story or person behind them. In his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis observed, ‘Everything’s the same; nothing’s unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying and owning. But the small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy.’[131]

In 2009, Kalin travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to talk to world leaders about Etsy’s vision to ‘create millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again’. In a prepared video message made for the Forum, sitting on an old sofa covered in a pink and red quilt, and surrounded by patchwork cushions, a brightly coloured oversize toy octopus and two teddy bears (obviously all made by Etsy sellers), Kalin explained that ‘these millions of local living economies around the world are more sustainable for the planet than a small number of huge conglomerate companies.’ Kalin is a realist as well as an idealist. He admits that ‘there can’t be no mass production altogether’ but is equally ‘flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save twelve cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer’.[132] These days it seems more and more people agree with him.

There are currently more than 5,750 local farmers’ markets in the United States, compared with 1,700 in 1994, making them the fastest-growing part of our food economy.[133] To put that in perspective, there are more than a thousand more farmers’ markets in the United States than there are Wal-Marts – one out of every three of them started since 2000. There are now 550 farmers’ markets in the UK, compared to one in Bath in 1997. Significantly, 9 out of 10 people in the UK would shop at a farmers’ market if they had the choice. There is a newfound interest in being self-reliant and eating reasonably priced fresh produce that is not being carted all around the country and back again. Something deeper and more poignant is happening here. We are seeking to restore the missing link between producer and consumer. The experience of going into a supermarket to walk through aisle upon aisle stacked high with boxed, bagged or canned food is, for many consumers, starting to feel empty and even wrong. Sociologists studying shopping behaviour report that shoppers have ten times more conversations at farmers’ markets than at supermarkets.[134] As it turns out, many of us would rather stroll around a farmers’ market and chat with the people who have grown our food and find out what’s tasty and in season.

The recent resurgence in the desire to ‘eat local’ was symbolically celebrated when a 1,100-square-foot patch of the manicured South Lawn of the Obama White House was dug up and turned into a vegetable garden for the first time since World War II. It would seem that the Obamas have inspired thousands to follow suit. In 2009, seed sales were up by 19 percent and the number of homes growing their own vegetables increased by a staggering 40 percent.[135],[136]

Etsy and the local food movement are part of a mass re-evaluation of what and how we consume. They are also a part of a deep shift around three core values that lay the groundwork for a new consumer mind-set. The first is simplicity; consumers are yearning to go back to a time when markets meant community-based, traditional relationships with strong ties. When you purchase an item from Etsy or pick up a piece of homemade cheese from a farm stand, there is a history or story behind it. There’s a person behind it. The second is traceability and transparency – the notion that ‘local is good again’ and that consumers want to know whom they are buying from and learn more about the product than just its immediate purpose. As Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, ‘Instead of looking at labels, the local food customer will look at the farm for himself, or look the farmer in the eye and ask him about how he grows his crops or treats his animals.’[137] And the last is participation; people are increasingly seeking to be active participants more in control of their world – rather than passive ‘victims’ of hyper-consumption.

Today there is an unprecedented degree of interconnectivity as well as an infrastructure for participation. Our immersion in innovative information, communication and technology (ICT) platforms, specifically online social networks and handheld mobile devices, is the second phenomenon driving us towards a ‘we’ mind-set.

The ‘We’ Generation

Chris Hughes co-created one of the defining businesses of the past decade, Facebook. Unlike his partners and Harvard roommates, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes was not interested in the software itself. Instead, he wanted to work out the ways that people would want to connect and share stuff with one another and how an online community could enrich the lives of its users – a passion that led to his nickname ‘the Empath’ among Facebook insiders. Hughes left Facebook in February 2007 just when it was taking off, with more than 10 million active users. His new calling was not another business start-up but to head the online organizing campaign for Barack Obama, who at the time was the underdog junior senator from Illinois. It was Obama’s belief in the collective power of citizens that drew Hughes away from Facebook. He admits, ‘I wouldn’t have left Facebook for any other person or at any other time.’[138]

The Obama campaign recruited Hughes because he knew perhaps better than anyone else how to use the Internet to coordinate and inspire supporters. Within a couple of months, Hughes led the launch of My.BarackObama.com (which became known as MyBO) and the Vote for Change sites. Hughes created a multitude of tools, such as the ‘MyBO Activity Tracker’. It gave people control of their campaign experience, but, also important, it turned the process of political canvassing into an interactive game, one with a serious prize – the presidential election. In this game, the users got 15 points for every event hosted, 15 points for every donation made to their personal fund-raising page, 3 points for every event attended and 3 points for a blog post. The site’s scoring system was weighted to give more points for offline activity than online activity. A single score was aggregated and posted on the user’s profile, and then scores were ranked to reward only the recent activities so that users would be encouraged to keep up participation. As Hughes puts it, ‘The more work you’ve done recently, the higher the number will be.’[139] A system of work and reward creates a market-like mechanism and appeals to our self-interest. MyBO hit the sweet spot of collaboration and healthy competition. By the time of the presidential election in November 2008, $30 million had been generated on more than 70,000 personal fund-raising pages and at more than 200,000 grassroots community events. And more young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five participated and voted in an election than ever before. Hughes’s role was so critical that Fast Company dubbed him ‘The Kid Who Made Obama President’[140] – a designation he achieved before he even celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday.

In the same year that Hughes was driving My.BarackObama, Rainer Nõlvak, an Internet entrepreneur; twenty-six-year-old Tiina Urm; and Ahti Heinla, one of the founders of Skype, masterminded a national grassroots cleanup day in Estonia called Let’s Do It. Ahead of the day, they got 720 volunteers to scour the country and photograph sites using mobile phones to pinpoint more than 10,500 locations where rubbish had been illegally dumped. These sites were plotted using custom-made rubbish-mapping software to create what they called the ‘the ugliest map ever’. Then, on 3 May 2008, they rallied 50,000 Estonians (many of them Millennials) – 4 percent of the population – to arrive at the sites with spades and bags to clean up the mess. An operation that otherwise would have taken the Estonian government three years and cost an estimated 22.5 million euros took just five hours (give or take a few months of planning) and cost only half a million euros.[141] Let’s Do It is just one example of thousands that show the power of the ‘we mind-set’ combined with technology to produce collective action. The participants as well as the entrepreneurs are often Millennials, just like Chris Hughes, who admits that he can work only on projects that will have ‘far-reaching social and life-changing impact but that are also fun, modern, and smart’. ‘Smart’ is a word Hughes uses a lot. When we had the chance to ask Hughes if he thinks his generation is more responsible, he answered in his calm yet astute way, ‘It’s not that we’re more responsible, it’s that we make smarter choices. We know, and I mean really know, that money doesn’t equal happiness. We know what’s important and not important. We still buy a lot, but we don’t buy needlessly.’

In March 2010, Hughes launched his third social venture, called ‘Jumo’ – a word in the African language that Yoruba translates as ‘together in concert’. It’s a site designed to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world. For Hughes and other Millennial entrepreneurs, the idea behind Jumo is philanthropy, social networking and volunteerism all rolled into one.

The Millennials are not a generation of Mother Teresas. They are not all do-gooders shunning well-paid jobs and luxuries for a utopian dream. Statistics show that they are as competitive, commercial and ambitious as any other generation in history. But they are abandoning the prevailing ethos of their parents’ generation of baby boomers and adhering more to the values of their grandparents, the war generation. In a 2006 USA Today poll, 61 percent of thirteen- to twenty-five-year-olds felt personally responsible for making a difference in the world; 81 percent have volunteered in the past year; 69 percent consider a company’s social and environmental commitment when deciding where to shop; and 83 percent trusted a company more if it was socially/environmentally responsible.[142]