14 march 2015, mend not make

As manufacturing apparently surges back in the locality (or at least politics surges to make that the narrative despite pesky statistics), to try and perhaps awkwardly bolt together several things: the social economy, the circular economy and the perennial sharing economy (see 23 december 2010, collaborative consumerism). The social is hard to define, but is essentially not for profit companies whose rationale is not to create monetary profit but forms of common good. The circular is the conceptual evolution of recycling, driven by the continual upgrade of consumer products like phones, even as their manufacture drains ever more expensive natural resource. The logic becomes to design products so their parts can be extracted at end of life and reused. As for collaborative consumerism, the great wave towards sharing not owning, despite the internet's ubiquity making it now feasible, seems stubbornly slow. The link between the 3 is trust, communication and common commitment within a community, for mutual benefit. Which perhaps explains why all are still very much minority interests, despite the effective tools for them to be mainstream. We are still in the age of the individual. We like owning things, like cars and houses, and we don't like reliance on others or sharing our needs and desires with communities beyond our family, friends or households. The communities we do like, like facebook friends (or I live on 20th century email lists), are those we selfishly define ourselves and they are rarely big enough or appropriately suited to share cars with or make peer-to-peer loans - so back we go to citroen or citi (my personal automotive and financial sponsors). I still don't need that drill in the garden shed, but I'm not yet ready to make it available to anyone outside my immediate circle of trust, even if it would pay me a morsel to do so, or in return someone a mile away would lend me a cable detector for the once a year I need it, rather than me having to buy one at b&q or call the handyman. Or, perhaps I am ready, and perhaps we are many and we're waiting for that tipping point and the apps and economies that will trigger it, making peer more fulfilling than profit, taking apart and sending back better than throwing away and access better than ownership. A different world, but perhaps not so radical a change as might at first appear.