Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption
A TEDX talk from last May in which Rachel Botsman sets out her mission to make sharing hip.
Key points:
Technology is enabling trust between strangers. Social networks and real-time technology have wired us up to share and taken us back to earlier forms of bartering based on face-to-face contact.
Crucial to this are new trust systems. The 'millenials' are growing up sharing much of what they experience. They are moving us from a culture of 'me' and 'hyper-consumption' to an economy of 'we'.
'Collaborative consumption' isn't just about online sharing via things like Flickr and YouTube but is beginning to happen in the real world via much greater activity with commuter car-sharing and in agriculture and micro-banking.
Three models for what's going on in 'Collaborative Consumption':
1, Redistribution markets -- reduce, reuse, recycle, repair, redistribute to extend the lifestyle of physical things
2. Collaborative lifestyles -- LandShare (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's market for sharing land that is not being used with those who want smallholdings
3. Product service systems -- pay for the benefit of a product without ownership. Particularly powerful when there is a lot of 'idle time'. Power drills are used typically for 12-13 minutes during their entire lifetime. Libraries and launderettes are old-fashioned examples.
Car usage is a good example of how fast things are changing. The typical car lies idle for 23 hours a day. Within eight years we have gone from outright ownership to car sharing (zipcar) to ride sharing (zimride) and now to P2P car rental (DriveMyCar).
The engine behind all this is new systems of trust. In the old ownership world trust didn't matter -- the only important thing was your credit rating.
Now we are signalling with our sharing activity how trustworthy we are.
Reputation capital is set to become as important if not more important than a credit rating.
