"You don't need to wait for permission. You don't need to wait for credentials." That statement from Jenna Brager, a 22-year old creator of socially-critical comics, seemed to resonate with the crowd gathered last week at Parsons New School in Manhattan for Share NY. Ms. Brager was a participant in the conference’s opening panel, “Share or Die: Youth in Recession,” which looked to address the obstacles and opportunities in the current economy.
Promising that participants would gain insight into a future that is more “affordable, sustainable, and connected within a new economy that thrives on sharing,” the two-day Share NY event brought together students, social innovators, designers, entrepreneurs, journalists and others to discuss the topic. With the aid of Web and mobile technologies, sharing of homes, cars, office space, purchasing power, skills or simply ideas on how to make the world a better place has become more feasible. A host of factors, from environmental consciousness to the need to save money, are fostering the growth of online marketplaces that enable participants to share resources in what has been dubbed collaborative consumption.
But organizers Shareable Magazine and the Parsons Design and Social Innovation for Sustainability Lab also sought the topic of the failing economy at the conference and it was clear that, amidst the Occupy Wall Street protests that were taking place in our midst, this was a topic of great concern. Can individuals today find the means to craft their own futures? And does sharing help?
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As an attendee of Share NY, I was looking for an answer to such questions not only dispassionately as a journalist but on a personal level. After many years in Europe, I have recently moved back to my native shores and am reorienting my life. I hoped the conference might give me some ideas on how to balance my roles as freelance writer and musician, make a living at it and yet put my creative talents towards something I believe in. The ethos of sharing is something I endorse, and I was hoping to meet other like-minded individuals.
No easy or pat answers to these questions emerged at the conference. Yet stories such as those told by Ms. Brager serve to frame this search. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a B.A. in American Studies, her nine applications to graduate school were rejected. Graduate school had perhaps seemed like a safe haven in a bad job market and that had now been denied to her, as had her access to research and academics in her area of interest. But she decided not to give up, a journey she illustrated with the comic “Who Needs an Ivory Tower.” There she demonstrated not only her frustration, but the revelation that she didn’t need to wait to study to explore what interested her.
“I decided to build a parallel network. I didn’t need to wait for permission to do that. I could produce whatever I wanted,” she noted. Ms. Brager made contact with people in her chosen field of American studies and continues to actively promote her ideas on her blog. She is now reapplying to graduate school, but has significantly raised her profile by pursuing what interests her, both on and offline, so that her chances of success are greater.
Panelist Eric Meltzer also told of his efforts to take his education into his own hands. In August 2008, he decided he wanted to study neurobiology at Peking University in Beijing, although he spoke no Chinese. When he looked around for a crash course immersion program in Mandarin, he couldn’t find one—apparently no one believed you could gain fluency in the language in such a short period of time. Meltzer decided to teach himself. He focused on only the absolute essentials by watching movies, speaking with as many people as possible and learning only those characters he encountered on street signs. “Anything you want to learn you can learn by going out and doing it,” said Meltzer. He passed all his courses in the first semester. (In spite of that, he has now decided to take life in another direction; he broke off his studies to learn interaction design.)
What do these stories have to do with sharing? For some such as Shareable editor Malcolm Harris, who edited the e-book “Share or Die: Youth in Recession,” and moderated the panel, collaboration is the best answer in the world of diminished opportunities described by these panelists. “We will have to build communities of cooperation rather than competition,” Harris notes in an essay entitled “The Get Lost Generation.” With the job market failing to accommodate young people, he believes a radical change in life style is required, away from lives focused on consumption and towards more cooperative living. “The modes of living devised by and for our parents will remain impossible for us,” he concludes.
That might sound radical to some ears, but from the start, there was an inherent tension within the conference as to how radical the solution is for what ails the economy and society. In his keynote speech at the event, for example, Cameron Tonkinwise, Ph.D of Design Thinking and Sustainability at Parsons, questioned whether collaborative consumption is just “another type of consumption or an alternative to capitalism.”
For some such as Drew Little, who describes himself as a social entrepreneur and economic activist, the answer is to work within the system. “Occupy needs to use purchasing power for social change. The ultimate occupation is occupying money for social good,” said Little at the conference. He is launching Producia, which he says combines features of a social network, bank, marketplace, and startup incubator. Among other things, Producia will seek to encourage local production & consumption and social good by utilizing a virtual digital currency between members.
But for writer, activist and punk singer Willie Osterweil, tinkering with the system is not the answer. An active participant both in the protest movement in Spain as well as the Occupy protests in New York, Osterweil doesn’t believe that real social change can come within our current economic system. “We’re not asking the people in power for permission, we’re teaching ourselves how to take what we need and make a better world without them,” he writes Osterweil in an essay entitled “Occupy Everything.”
Later in the day, we heard from a wide spectrum of people, from Tal Berry, a Brooklyn based activist, educator, and co-founder of the communal living project Orev House, to Campbell McKeller, founder & CEO of office sharing company Loosecubes. Although their views diverged in many ways, all the speakers were united by the concept of sharing in some way. Some promoted the activist aspect of sharing, while others were focused on how to build a great startup.
My takeaway from the conference: I learned about different aspects of the sharing economy, met like minded individuals and gained a better understanding of the economic forces on Generation Y. I admire the coping strategies that many young adults are employing, yet I believe we must work for political change to give them the opportunities they deserve. As for myself, I didn’t come away with an easy answer on the future, but I had a lot of food for thought.
