Peer2Politics

There’s a debate going on about what a “sharing economy” actually constitutes – and that’s a good thing. The fact that there’ll be no end to this debate will be stressful to those who’d like some tidy answers to parrot.  From our point of view, the mutulization of resources and the decrease of “consumerism for its own sake” are good things, but we have to ask ourselves … what happens to the mutualization of the value created? To keep the conversation going, we present this article by Anthony Kalamar and originally published at Opednews.com.

In the beginning, there was sharing. That, at least, is the story according to Dominik Wind, a German environmental activist with a genial smile and a cycling cap whom I met in Paris while attending a conference earlier this month about the sharing economy. Years ago, out of curiosity, Wind visited Samoa for half a year; he found that people shared tools, provisions and even sexual partners with their neighbors. Less encumbered by industrial civilization, they appeared to share with an ease and forthrightness long forgotten in the world Wind knew back home.

Crowdfunding implies a whole new paradigm of the network and Internet possibilities to create new socioeconomic models. Summarizing  its recent history, it appeared first as sporadic cases (between the nineties and the new century) with calls for financial support from music band fans and promoters of films, and it  began to replicate in a little over two years with more and more platforms. They bring together many ideas, projects and initiatives of third parties, gradually adding small economic amounts given by the maximum possible users, and allow to raise enough money for initiatives to take place.