Hey, FastCoExist, Paying for it, it’s not being shared

This kind of stuff pisses me off: It’s Time For The Sharing Economy To Become The Sharing Society Hey FastCoExist: when you pay for a good or service, it’s not sharing, its buying.  You throw around the term “sharing economy” to denote anything that is not clearly the historic, formal economy we have known for decades or centuries. AirBnB: Paying to sleep in someone’s apartment? not sharing. Uber, Sidecar, Lyft: Paying someone to give you a ride? not sharing. Fiverr, 99Designs, eLance, oDesk: Paying someone to redesign your business cards? not sharing. TaskRabbit: Paying someone to build your Ikea shelf? not sharing. What this may be a sign of is the rise of the informal economy, the disintermediation of service delivery, or the harnessing of excess supply or even cognitive surplus as Clay Shirky would refer to it in the case of the creative freelancers. If you want to talk about the sharing economy, talk about couchsurfing, freecycle, craigslistfree and other trends that don’t involve the exchange of money. You debase the notion of sharing...

Leveraging art and artists for social change

I wrote this article, Leveraging art and artists for social change for the Resource Media blog, but I am copying it here for you, dear reader. In October I traveled to Austin, Texas for SXSWEco expecting to learn about plenty of green and clean technology, policies and activist campaigns to advance sustainability in the face of climate change.  The most important idea I came away with was quite unexpected: Art and artists have an important role to play in the environmental movement, and other movements. The topic came up more than once: Ron Finley, the urban gardener from Los Angeles who rose to internet fame after giving a TED talk earlier this year opened the conference touching upon the beauty of the edible gardens he plants in South Central LA. The Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus urged the audience toharness culture to save the planet by deeply engaging with artists, not simply inviting one to sing a song at a rally. He urged the planners of SXSWEco to engage artists to create original works to be presented alongside other programming. And in the most direct example of art — specifically visual art — and the role it can play in activism, Shepard Fairey gave a keynote address in the form of a slideshow of his work over the years that had either been commissioned or offered free to organizations and movements. While Fairey is perhaps most well known for the Obama Hope portrait of 2008, and the Obey Giant apparel, he has a long history of working with environmental organizations going back to his days in...