I got some comments on Facebook about my previous review of “Fixing the Future” (bottom of the page) both mentioning collaborative consumption as a model to move forward with. It’s a subject that’s dear to my heart as my startup CloudFab essentially dealt with trying to do this for 3D printing and other types of manufacturing equipment. It makes a lot of sense that anything that you don’t use often that can be easily shared can be financed via such models as ZipCar, AirBnB, hackerspaces, etc. There’s a great list of them at Lisa Gansky’s Meshing.It website, and she’s also got a book “The Mesh” that is on my list about this trend.
The idea is an old one, but only now with the internet are we able to coordinate it with high efficiency. The ideas of Anarcho-Capitalism are very compatible with these forms of businesses, but I’m not sure I trust the Col-Con model for private police companies… The Minarchist’s Night Watchman State makes me feel a little better - I think I’d prefer an elected body having a monopoly on force and providing an official (not necessarily monopoly) body to enforce contracts.
The issue with these forms of governments is that they certainly are sub-optimal for giving the highest capabilities to the average citizen - which is really what the goal of Post Scarcity is. The idea of freedom for its own sake - without the full compliment of capabilities that are possible - seems to be empty. We could all live in a desert in a failed state with effectively no laws. It’d be total freedom from government rules, but then that would really be worthless because there’d be no services like internet, roads, etc. that must be connected to a network to be valuable.
I like Tim O'Reilly’s talk about government as a platform. I think this is the proper goal for a post-scarce society. Some services like power generation (ever see the big CAT back-up generators?), sewage (port-a-johns), etc. already have thriving private market versions that are basically the equivalent of collaborative consumption of what are normally government services. However all goods / services aren’t created equal in how they should be provided most efficiently.
To explain further, the concepts of rivalry and excludability are the key ones to focus on and form into 4 groups.
- Private Goods (Rivalrous & Excludable): Cars
- Club Goods (Non-Rival & Excludable): Movie Theater, Cable TV
- Common Goods (Rivalrous & Non-Excludable): Fish Stocks
- Public Goods (Non-Rivalrous & Non-Excludable): Information, Lighthouses
The first group, Private Goods, are well suited to being produced / provided / maintained by private entities: there’s no need for a government car company - it’s profitable for companies to do so. Likewise, no one is more concerned about your car than you - so you take good care of it - just ask any rental car company… These types of goods lend themselves to the Collaborative Consumption model as long as the risks of group ownership are offset by the proper incentives (i.e. if you crash a ZipCar, you have to pay for the damages).
For club goods, they range from utilities to actual clubs. For these, we have to look closer to the technical nature of what’s being provided. For utilities, where technical monopolies (laying cable, pipe, etc.) are inefficient to re-deploy privately, it’s seemingly best to have government regulation on the distribution to prevent a single corporation forming that seeks economic rent. For example, Comcast wouldn’t fully control access to fiber - anyone could start an ISP and - you know - provide a modicum of service or other improvements… However, for things like clubs, movie theaters, these aren’t technical monopolies - so the current private model works well - I’m not sure if you call them “Collaborative” or not…
Common Goods are most at risk in today’s world. They include things like the environment - where they can be over-consumed when no one has an incentive to stop taken until nothing in less - resulting in a “tragedy of the commons” . In this case, the government has to step in to provide pricing disincentives - like a carbon tax - or set up quotas - like for fishing. Post Scarce societies are still going to have to deal with such things - there’s no way around it…
Public goods bring about some of the most interesting problems. Some of them, like the lighthouse example, require some type of coordination - which may or may not be government - in order to facilitate. Others like MP3’s are intangible and infinitely copiable without loss. I haven’t got into IP yet, but I’d say that regulating the latter falls under excessive coercion and restricting information only leads to less of it being created. The other type of coordination might be something like a homeowner’s association all the way to a government project.
Conclusion
Other than the production of resources, scarcity is all about the allocation of resources. The Earth produces 2700 calories a day per person - it’s just not in the proper place. Innovation in entities: new government operating systems, collaborative consumption businesses, co-ops and many more are pointing the way to a future society with easier access to the currently scarce resources. Solving these social problems will be a huge part in enabling a future post-scarce society.
Just read this broadly thoughtful review of Fixing the Future by Nick Pinkston. Agreed that ‘the truth lies somewhere in between’ for the tech and local/sustainability communities. The relationship? Collaborative Consumption product inspiration and scalable tools for human/economic efficiency, respectively.
Charles Taylor Patrick Gillespie:
Collaborative consumption is but one part, albeit a necessary part, of the recommoning of society. Where the first globalization movement tore apart precious social bonds, externalizing all the costs of “development” on society and the environment and diminishing social and natural capital in the name of financial capital thus denigrating true triple bottom line progress, the new networked commons can create an empathetic civilization transcending the fixation on quarterly profit statements, where bonds are restored and the natural resilience of social interaction, be it face to face or online, and ecosystem services will spillover into a truly sustainable societal ®evolution. Changing our consumption from conspicuous to collaborative makes sense in efficiency terms but it is but one piece, which may prove to re-catalyze, as the local food movement did, a new paradigm of humanity’s purpose, one that is in harmony with the fixed overarching ecosystems that enables out existence.