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"Hub Culture founder Stan Stalnaker shares his thoughts in a Q&A with Rachel Botsman on sharing, the power of the commons, and peer-to-peer transaction.

Rachel Botsman is co-authoring a book with Roo Rogers entitled What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (being published by Harper Collins in 2010).

The book is about how people are collaborating together through organized sharing, bartering, trading, renting, swapping and collectives to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and burden -- and lower environmental impact.





RB: We look at how look how social networks and web technologies are giving new relevance to pre-industrial behaviors such as bartering, swapping, trading, social lending etc. that require marketplace structures. Essentially how we are going back to 'human to human transactions' between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, borrower and lender, neighbor to neighbor etc. What are your thoughts on this? What are your favorite examples of this in action?

SS: We see the world evolving into a complete peer-to-peer system, beyond just communications but in finance and eventually energy as well. This means that the ability for individuals to transact with each other, at the mass-micro level, will transform how we value our sense of worth and of selves. The explosion in virtual and digital communities is driving this, and layered over existing 'real-world' relationships, creates a transactional fabric that will soon dominate the economic system.

In the end, I think we will see an emergence of an economic relationship and fascination with networked efficiency that comes to dominate our worldview. This fits well with the sustainability model we need to develop to dovetail resource availability with demand; and not a moment too soon."