The Guardian, 14 June 2011
In November 2008, a 34-year-old security guard called Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, New York, by what local papers described as an «out-of-control» mob of 2,000 «frenzied» shoppers who had queued overnight in the promise of a slash-price sale. With the crowd outside chanting, «Push the doors in», staff climbed on to vending machines to escape the resulting stampede. Even when police later declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, angry shoppers remonstrated with officers. One yelled: «I’ve been queuing since yesterday morning.» The bargains on offer included a 50-in plasma HDTV priced at $798.
Rachel Botsman, a «social innovator» who has presented her ideas at Downing Street and before Microsoft and Google executives, retells the event in her book, What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. «It’s a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff.»
Botsman rails in the book against the excesses, futility and contradictions of mass consumption, but she doesn’t rehash the usual tropes of anti-consumerism. Rather, her book is a cry for us to consume «smarter» by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership – and the lust to own – towards one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our «time and space».
The notion of «collaborative consumption» is not, she notes, new – it has been around for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking, coupled with «geo-located» smart phones, has super-charged a concept that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of our environmental and economic crises. Collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise «idling».
Botsman uses the example of motoring to show where collaborative consumption already makes sense. «Cars are 90% under-utilised by their owners,» she tells me from her home in Australia. «And 70% of journeys are solo rides. So we now see car club companies such as Streetcar proving very popular in cities. In Munich, BMW now has a scheme where it lets members pay for a car by the minute rather than by the hour. And websites such as ParkatmyHouse.com are allowing people to make money from unused space outside their properties. A great example is a church in Islington, London, which was facing financial trouble. But it started renting parking space out front and it now makes £70,000 a year from doing so.»
If the internet and social networking act as lubricants for collaborative consumption, then trust is the glue that binds it together. None of this would work if we didn’t have faith that the invariably anonymous person at the other end of the transaction will do what they promise; namely, pay for your goods or services, or deliver what they have advertised.
«Really interesting things are happening with trust at the moment,» says Botsman. «We don’t trust centralised monopolies, but we do trust decentralised systems. So we see peer-to-peer money-lending sites proving popular, in stark comparison to banks. ‘Trust circles’ are being built online for things such as skill-sharing, space rental and task-running. eBay has shown us that trust-based transactions work online. The US is about 18 months ahead of the UK at the moment with all this, but sites such as TaskRabbit and Hey, Neighbor! are redefining what a neighbour is.»
One of Botsman’s most radical ideas is that the rise of collaborative consumption in coming years will see the advent of «reputation banks». In her book, she writes: «Now with the web we leave a reputation trail. With every seller we rate; spammer we flag; comment we leave; idea, comment, video or photo we post; peer we review, we leave a cumulative record of how well we collaborate and if we can be trusted.»
Soon, Botsman argues, our reputation rating will be as, if not more, important than our credit rating. «It is only a matter of time before there is some form of network that aggregates your reputation capital across multiple forms of collaborative consumption. We’ll be able to perform a Google-like search to see a complete picture of how people behave and the degree to which they can be trusted, whether it’s around products they swap and trade or money they lend or borrow or land or cars they share.»
Botsman’s advice for anyone considering diving into the world of collaborative consumption is to begin by drawing up an inventory of your assets. Gumtree.com estimates that the average UK home has nearly £600 worth of unused items – old gadgets, books, clothes etc – collecting dust. But Botsman says to think more laterally: consider the spare storage space you might have under the stairs or in a garage; the electric drill you could rent to neighbours; your unique skills – dog-walking, accountancy, shelf-fitting – you could hire by the hour, or exchange for someone else’s skill.
Like many people, I’ve dabbled with some of these concepts before. I’ve flogged unwanted items on eBay. I’ve signed up to lift-sharing websites and joined a car club. I’ve looked into how TimeBank works. I enjoy eking out extra value from my «idling assets», but I also hate waste so relish any opportunity to see a resource fully utilised.
But critical mass seems to be just as an important an ingredient to collaborative consumption as trust and the connectivity of the internet. If there aren’t enough people «out there» offering or demanding these goods and services, then these systems quickly wither. «Yes, you’ve got to have critical mass for this to work,» says Botsman. «Not just geographical, but across subject categories.»
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/jun/14/collaborative-consumption