photo:The scene at Rome’s Piazza Navona. Credit: The Wolf
Allison Arieff talks with the founders of Shareable.net, who see their new effort as “an invitation to join the fun of building a new world.”
It’s strange how some times the most common sense things can come to feel transgressive. Consider victory gardens, once tended by post war, they’ve been experiencing a resurgence, often led by such unexpected ambassadors as installation artists and community activists like Amy Franceschini and the Rebar Collective. Similarly, sharing with one’s neighbors, once the mainstay of civilization fell out of fashion as we jumped in our cars to stock up at Costco, rarely if ever, seeking out a cup of sugar from a neighbor. But in recent years, sharing too has emerged as an almost radical act, seeing how it nearly flies in the face of contemporary American individualist tendencies. Individuals are rediscovering the value not only of neighborhoods but of neighbors.
They might be taking baby steps toward sharing—say, a babysitting co-op—or larger steps, like the near complete micro-economy established by Portland, Oregon’s 50+ family-strong Ainsworth Collective.
A brand new effort designed for this transformational shift in our collective consciousness is Shareable.net, described as “an invitation to join the fun of building a new world.” I spoke with Shareable’s founder and publisher Neal Gorenflo and its editor Jeremy Adam Smith about their hopes for their new venture and how it might help foster community.
AA: Tell me about your vision for Shareable, and how it got started.
JS: I want Shareable to become a point of intersection and discussion for people who are sharing in many spheres of life, from neighborhood babysitting coops to Zipcar members to cohousers to scientists to digital journalists to people who share code and video over the Internet. Why? Because I think one idea underlies all these activities: that everyone does better when everyone does better–in other words, that human societies thrive when people share what they have. However, I don’t want Shareable to become a propaganda organ. I want to show readers the shareable life that people are already living through storytelling, good writing, and discussion — not tell them what to think or how to behave.
NG:
What our stakeholders felt was missing was an accessible voice for this story, a voice that connected the dots between trends which on the surface appear different but operate under similar logic. When you understand the connections between web 2.0, carsharing, open source software, cohousing, microfinance, the nonprofit movement, and social enterprise, you get a much different vision of human nature and our future than you see in the mainstream media, a very positive one.
We believe the tide is turning, that we’re at the cusp of a new, more humane order. Our goal is to help accelerate this shift by telling this positive story and inviting people to organize their lives around this new logic. And practically speaking, connect them to sharing tools and ideas they can use today. Our next step, one in keeping with the value system we see emerging, is to launch a blog network so that this story can be peer produced. We see our editorial as the kernel of an open source project and the blog network as a way for anyone to contribute to the project. That’s our vision for a shareable magazine.
AA: Who is your audience?
JS:
I call our audience the sharing community. These are the people who engage
in sharing activities all the time. They’re members of City Car Share, they go to Burning Man, they live in cohousing or dorms, they organize potlucks and food clubs with friends, and they share code, videos, and news over the Internet. They’re also people who share professionally: designers, architects, scientists, nonprofit workers, digital journalists, sharing service employees, and so on.
AA: How does sustainability play into your notions of “shareable”?
JS:
When our goal is to own stuff, to amass square footage and cars and boats and electronic devices, our carbon footprint swells and we produce more junk. When we share all that stuff, our carbon footprint shrinks. It’s nice to own a crunchy electric car, but it’s better to share that car with our neighbors–or better, to ride public transportation. Sharing doesn’t just add to environmental sustainability–it also builds social and cultural capital and makes us as a society more sustainable. If we can’t learn to share, we won’t achieve sustainability in any area of life.
NG:
We think sharing is a bridge between the sustainability movement today and deeper social transformation. Sharing starts at a place we’re familiar with, self-interest and getting our material needs met, but often leads to new patterns of social organization that are satisfying and empowering, that encourage people to take it further, and gives them the capacity to take on even bigger challenges. On the collective level, it can build up our stock of social capital, which is a prerequisite for broad social change. We have to be connected and committed to each other to become powerful collectively.
We also did research to learn how to frame sharing effectively for our audience, which helped us understand how to make a contribution to the sustainability movement. Our natural inclination was to frame sharing as a sustainability thing. As our site shows, we decided not to do this. Instead, we frame sharing in real life as an extension of something that is natural as breathing online, and where the more you share, the more respect you get. In this way, we want to inject net culture into the sustainability movement, broaden its appeal, and create a new frame, which leverages the positive values of net culture for real change on the ground.
While the sustainability frame was familiar and worked well to a certain extent, it appeared to us that its appeal had limits. Surveys showed that a large majority of people agreed that the environment should be protected, but there seemed a failure to translate this sentiment into change. This told us that the values and stories within this movement may not work for us if we wanted to connect with a broad audience. What’s limiting this frame? My opinion is that at the core of this movement is a disempowering story of crisis and failure, that we have a life threatening crisis and can not adequately respond to it. The crisis is used to motivate people, but it can motivate only so many for so long. And the crisis remains. I also believe that this movement has elitist, proscriptive, and authoritarian tendencies. It’s not particularly inclusive. And it can make going green seem like a moral obligation and a chore.
By contrast, the story at the heart of net culture is one of possibility and success. That amazing things are possible when people work together as peers. That contributing is fun and engaging like a game. It’s inclusive, democratic, and merit based. Anyone can join in. You’re encouraged to participate. And that the more you contribute, the more respect you get. It became clear to us that this is the ascendant culture.
AA: What would be the best first steps or a good first attempt for those wanting to explore this broader concept of sharing?
JS:
I would not have called myself a sharer before I started this job but looking at my private world revealed to me that ways that I already share, all the time. We trade babysitting with other families, we launched a community organization and a cooperative preschool, we share rides and toys, and so on. The difference is that now I appreciate those sharing activities and their benefits. As a result, I’m looking for more ways to share in my life. So I think the first step is to look at the ways you’re already sharing, do an inventory. Then ask yourself, what else can I share? Pick one thing to share–and then give it a try and see what happens. If it works out, write an article for Shareable.net and tell us how you do it, so that other people can do it, too. If it doesn’t work out, tell us why–because sharing is hard and sometimes we fail to share. We have to keep learning; that’s the key. The site is a place where that learning can happen.
