Getting Connected: Why sharing electrons, local produce and Radiohead makes for better communities.
Nice little piece in this month's Solar Today by Bill McKibben. He offers comparison between the budding technologies of sharing resources- power via home photovoltaics and wind generation, food via farmers' markets and CSAs, and media via filesharing- and how they all function to help build up visceral communities around the resources being shared. The average food shopper at a farmer's market has ten times as many conversations per visit as the grocery store shopper. As filesharing of music has ballooned, the portion of the music industry that is expanding is live shows and festivals. These represent a more communitarian, interactive experience of resources that corporate capitalism tends to render into bare commodities without life or vitality- compare a stand at the Farmers' Market downtown to a shelf of heavily processed white bread at the grocery store.
Now McKibben ralizes that we'll need that mass produced stuff for a good while yet, but he argues simply enough that we should expand the spaces open to these experiences of commons by legislative and regulative reforms.
Sounds good to me.
PS. We carry Solar Today at Monkeywrench, and it's a great magazine.