What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. Rachel Botsman

empty and even wrong. Sociologists studying shopping behaviour report that shoppers have ten times more conversations at farmers’ markets than at supermarkets.²³ 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.²⁴,²⁵

      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.’²⁶ 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.’²⁷

      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.’²⁸ 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’²⁹ – 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.³⁰