Economy | The Wild Wide Weblog

The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

by Muizing1 | Mar 24, 2011 | Bits of Gold, Community, Economy, Environment, Science, Technology, The Recession

In a talk for the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, Social innovator Rachel Botsman charts the growth of a movement that is transforming the way we consume and contribute.

She starts by talking about the Global Village and the Digital Sharing Revolution and Collaborative Consumption that takes many forms – traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping, which are all being redefined through technology and peer communities.

Rather than creating a world in which people only interact remotely, and lose touch with the "real world", we are starting to “use the internet to get off the internet to form a stronger, bigger society", which is opening up all kinds of creative ways of interacting such as land sharing, bike sharing, car sharing:
"Car companies have to realise they are no longer in the business of just selling cars, they are in mobility services and BMW, Peugeot and Daimler and have launched car-sharing service in the last 18 months."

"A new generation is growing up not wanting to own "stuff" it wants the needs or experiences it fulfils. Usage is proving "better than possession, access is better than ownership"
She quotes Mark Levine, of the New York Times:
“Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the eight-track, what the solar panel is to the coal mine. Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward."

She talks about different types of new interaction:
Redistribution markets, such as EBay, "like for like trading" (swapping) that is now powered by technology, and the enabling of free-giving on sites such as Freecycle, saying this is creating a new kind of wealth which is giving people a bit more control over their life and creating a renewed belief in the importance of community.

These changes have been powered by:
A torrent of social technologies,
Pressing unresolved environmental concerns
A global recession that has shocked consumer behaviours and forced us to re-evaluate all our value systems.

"If the last generation – the Baby Boomers was all about keeping up with the Joneses, our generation is going to be all about getting to know the Joneses."

"Twentieth Century consumer behaviours were very much driven by our credit history.
Now we leave a replication trail as we interact across the web, of how well we can or can’t be trusted."

"The 20th Century was defined by Credit, Advertising, Individual Ownership and Hyper consumption, the 21st Century will be defined by Reputation, Community, Shared Access and Collaborative Consumption."

"If you look back in history, every financial crisis marked the beginning of a paradigm shift, and a way of game-changing innovation."

"I believe we’re going to look back and we’re going to see this period as a momentous turning point, when we use the incredible technology we have to re-shape the kind of society we want. "

"I think it’s going to be called a revolution, when society facing very great challenges woke up from a humongous hangover of emptiness and waste and made a seismic leap to being defined not by what we consume, but by what we contribute, and along the way empowers millions of people, including us to play a larger role in building a stronger, healthier system…"

There is a “Plan B” … and it needs our attention.

by Muizing1 | Feb 19, 2011 | Bits of Blue, Economy

If you disagree with the severity of any of the “Spending Cuts” then there is a Plan B that is worth investigating. You may not yet realise how much you disagree with the planned cuts.

We are being asked to give up libraries, NHS facilities, care for the elderly, care for the young, care for the disabled, essential services are being cut…funding for almost every worthwhile cause has been cut or is to be withdrawn, students are being asked to get into a huge amount of debt in order to be able to afford the privilege of studying, we were even being told we had to give up our forests… …

The only people that seem to have escaped the effects of this global shake up, strangely enough, are the banks. Barclay’s Chief Executive, Bob Diamond stated that the period of "remorse and apology" for banks was over and to prove the point they are back to paying out annual bonuses to themselves that would take 75% of the world’s population 600 or more years to earn.

Something doesn’t sound quite right with this equation.

Politicians and tax campaigners have been stunned by the (forced) admission this week by Barclays Bank that in 2009 it only paid !% tax – just £113m in UK corporation tax in a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn of profits.

The current rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%

Most of the bank’s taxes are avoided through loopholes in the system… Barclays admitted it has 30 subsidiary companies in the Isle of Man, 38 in Jersey and 181 in the Cayman Islands, so there is no shortage of ways in which money can be siphoned out of the system.

Max Lawson, of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, said: "This is proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us, paying billions in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax.

"If banks paid their fair share we could avoid the worst of the cuts and help those hit hardest by the financial crisis they did nothing to cause."

On Tuesday – when Barclays announced 2010 profits of £6.1bn and a 23% rise in average pay in its investment banking arm, Barclays Capital – the tax campaigners turned a London branch of the bank into a library

The banks are holding us to ransom, threatening to leave us high and dry if we so much as slap them across the wrist… and what are they actually providing us with?

Plan B is explained in a video that gives good food for thought, especially in the light of the latest Banking scandal…