Ch. 29 The Sharing Economy

"As people's access to the internet grows

we're seeing the sharing economy boom -

I think the obsession with ownership is at a tipping point

and the sharing economy is part of the antidote for that."

- Richard Branson

The Third Industrial Revolution is really about sharing. Sharing knowledge, sharing resources and even sharing a common purpose. 

In our current neo-liberal capitalist system based on consumerism, ownership and the accumulation of wealth - sharing may seem like a radical idea. 

But we already share a multitude of resources.

The commons and public resources 

"The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly." (Wikipedia.org)

The commons should also be thought to include tax-payer funded public resources and infrastructure: roads, bridges, public services, education, railways, air traffic control, the internet, energy infrastructure, public lands, waterways etc. 

Every single American uses and depends upon these commonly held resources every single day. 

Whether they like it or not, or will even admit it, the Capitalists and Economic Extractionists are also dependent upon the commons. Walmart, Tesla and Amazon are completely dependent upon roads, bridges, airways and the internet. Without these tax-payer funded, working class built and maintained resources, these big corporations could not exist. Yet they do everything in their power to avoid paying their fair share in the taxes that fund them. They rail against the "big government" that maintains them, and the regulations that help to protect them. And they often pay wages so low that their employees are forced to rely on taxpayer funded subsidies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

Our common resources should be protected, appreciated, and adequately funded by everyone who uses them. 

However, these common resources are just the beginning of a true Sharing Economy.

Communication and information sharing

We are already enjoying the myriad benefits of shared information and open source development via the internet. Which was itself publicly funded and collaboratively constructed. It should be noted that US taxpayers invested something like $142 million dollars to fund the creation of the internet. That investment has paid for itself many times over. Progress tends to pay for itself. 

Energy

We have talked in depth about creating a smart, renewable, cooperatively owned energy grid. Through this new Third Industrial Revolution system we can collaboratively harvest clean, low cost, renewable energy from the sun, wind, water and earth. We can then share that low cost energy with anyone connected to this smart grid. 

As Jeremy Rifkin says, this is literally power to the people. 

Transportation

We also talked about creating a network of clean public transportation; high speed rail, light rail, electric buses, etc... We would bolster this with various platforms for ride sharing and car sharing.

Remember, every shared car takes 18 cars off the road. Buses running every 15 minutes or so along one commute route can take up to 168 cars off the road each hour. A bus could replace around 30-40 cars. One train can take 300 trucks off the road. And one full passenger train can take up to 600 cars off the road.

This is where we begin to see how we can not only share information and energy, but we can also share things. 

The Sharing Economy was initially intended as a way to make use of idle resources. You have a car sitting idly in your driveway? Share it. You have a room you aren't using? Share it. So what might be possible if we applied these same ideas and principles to... well, everything? Virtually all goods and services. 

The "Internet of Things"

Internet of Things (IoT): the interconnection via the internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data. (Oxford Languages) 

These days, many of the products you purchase are embedded with some kind of technology that connects to other things that are embedded with some kind of technology. 

Your watch can count your steps, measure your heartrate and connect to an app on your phone so you can get reports on your physical activities. Your smart fridge can tell you if you still have milk or need to buy some more, and let you know which food is close to it's expiration date and needs to be used. 

Sensors can send out an alert if an elderly person living alone has a medical emergency, fall or seizure. Sensors on a farm can monitor data on temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind speed, pest infestation, and soil content. (Wikipedia)

As the technology improves and we discover new connections and applications, this trend will only increase. Soon, everything will be connected to everything else. An Internet of Things. 

It's understandable if this brings up concerns about a lack of privacy and autonomy. These concerns will need to be addressed in some way. But this is already happening, so for the sake of this conversation let's widen our lens a bit. 

Perhaps the IoT 

Our current system is based on ownership. 

You own a car, tools, clothes, cookware, books, toys, and furniture. You use these things until they break, wear out, become unfashionable, or you simply grow tired of them. Then they clutter up your closet, your garage, your attic, or your junk drawer until you finally get rid of them. Maybe you have a yard sale, or give them to your local charity thrift store. Often they just end up in a landfill.

But you don't need to "own" something in order to have access to it. 

We rent cars, movies, party tents, and construction equipment. We borrow books from our public libraries. We pay for a bus ticket, train ticket or airplane ticket. Most of us don't own the plane, we pay for access to the plane. 

Consider a new sharing economy. An economy based on access, not ownership. 

There is already a couple of models in place for this kind of system.

A system for sharing toys!

Toyshare, Toylo, and Toyswap all operate in similar ways. When a child gets a new toy, and then plays with it like crazy only to forget it a few weeks later, their parents can use their subscription based app to send that toy to a new family. In return, their child gets a new toy for the one that was swapped.  

Another system is cooperative ownership. 

For instance, cooperative housing is a system where a residential building or even a neighborhood or subdivision is collectively owned by a group of shareholders. In this type of cooperative people don't "own" their home, but are entitled to access to the unit, house, or apartment. They own a membership share in the cooperative, and their monthly payments accrue equity depending on the structure of the co-op. 

There are a lot of existing ways for us to share our knowledge and resources for the betterment of everyone, not just the the profit of the few. 

In fact, we must actively ward against professional service providers exploiting this same model for Economic Extractionism. When an investor purchases a home for the express purpose of renting it out on Airbnb, that's not someone utilizing and sharing existing surplus. That's someone taking more than they need in order to extract wealth from the community around them. It has been shown that when this happens enough in a specific community or housing market, it will artificially drive housing and rent costs up in that area. 

Obviously, this kind of system gaming for profit is the opposite of the community wealth building model we are striving for. 

We also want to be mindful of the resources we are extracting and the waste we are creating as a society. The Sharing Economy must be built on a foundation that is rooted in the principles of the Circular Economy.

Circular Economy

Our current capitalist "linear economy" looks like this...

Extract natural resources/raw materials - use human labor to transform those resources into a manufactured product - consumer purchase - product usage - disposal - landfill.

In this Extractionist Economy, we even throw things away that have never been used.

"ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food waste, estimated that retailers generated 10.5 million tons of food waste, sending almost one-third of wasted food to the landfill" (Helmer, 2021)

Side note: Food waste accounts for 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions and Reducing Food Waste is #3 on the Project Drawdown list for reversing global warming. (We'll get into this in Part 4. Ecology.)

To be fair, in the US food is required to be thrown out or destroyed after it's expiration date, for public health reasons. But there are other alternatives. 

In France, in 2016 a law was enacted with the intention of dramatically reducing food waste "supermarkets were forbidden to destroy unsold food products and were compelled to donate it instead" (zerowasteeurope.eu)

All of this food waste may not be able to be used for human consumption, but some can be used to feed animals or produce energy, and virtually all of it can be composted. (Composting is #60 on Project Drawdown's list for reversing global warming.) None of it should be going to the local landfill, just to decompose and contribute to a relatively large percentage of greenhouse gases. 

It's not just food that is thrown away. It is millions of tons usable products as well as plastic waste.

"Instead of reusing or redistributing usable products, Amazon is shredding them - by the thousands. One former employee even said that their 'target' was to destroy more than 100,000 unused or returned items every week." (Environment America, 2021)

Most of this waste is intended to maintain scarcity, manipulate the market, and increase profitability. Which brings up another important distinction of the Sharing Economy. In this model, sharing adds value. The more we share, the larger our network is, the more value added. In the old Extractionist model, scarcity adds value. Which is why we have landfills (and oceans) full of single use plastics and the of detritus of overconsumption and planned obsolescence. 

This kind of exploitation and waste is not stewardship of our planet and it's natural resources. It is exploitation of the same.

The Circular Economy does it's best to keep raw materials in a closed loop. 

We still extract natural resources, but extraction is minimized because once the product is manufactured and used, it is either...

• Reused - like our toy sharing example, an item is transferred to another user
• Repaired - a lot of the stuff that ends up in the landfill simply needs to be repaired
• Repurposed - tires used for retaining walls, t-shirts used as rags, empty containers used as planters 
• Recycled - making new products from what would otherwise be unusable trash of old products

With these principles, and the principles of the Sharing Economy, we can dramatically reduce the amount of resources we need to extract and the amount of waste we produce. 

Will this impact our consumer economy?

Certainly. 

Just as every Industrial Revolution in history has impacted the economy. 

When was the last time you drove past a horse-drawn buggy shop? When was the last time you got a telegram? How do you manage to read at night without a whale oil lamp?

Understand that this Sharing Economy has already taken root. Although older generations may have a harder time accepting this, our younger Digital Natives will have an easy time adapting to it. 

Future generations may see mass consumerism and private ownership as something of the past, like horse drawn carriages and oil lamps. 

In the next chapter we will combine the lessons from Part 2: Economy, and Part 3: Energy, and we will demonstrate The Power of the Collaborative Economy.