We have experienced the senseless production of waste in our economic system and how it is not sustainable. We have been living off the “waste” ourselves. We have experienced the material abundance of the affluent societies we live in. We have saved stuff that has been or was about to be thrown away, and we have shared these things among friends, family and also complete strangers. Things like food, clothes, bikes, furniture, electronics, etc. We have saved and shared resources not only as individuals, but most importantly collectively, as part of a group, organization or network.
We know that we need to find ways of reducing production and consumption of material goods, instead of finding more “sustainable” ways of producing and consuming even more stuff. We know that endless economic growth is antithetical to life on earth and we know that we urgently need to turn this abundance of waste into a tool for less consumption, more community-building and for promoting a culture of sharing and cooperation. And we need to bring this to the masses of the wasteful rich countries, not just the middle-class alternative young people.
That is why we are developing a digital tool for communities to save resources and share the abundance, and we are doing this together with existing movements on the ground, initiatives that are spread around the globe, actually practicing what this tool is meant to facilitate. What we want with this tool is to create the conditions for scalability of these initiatives, that is, to enable the growth and cooperation of self-organizing groups that save resources from waste and share them freely.
It is relatively easy for smaller groups to share resources and organize in a gift economy, but it becomes increasingly harder for people to dedicate their time and energy to keep the cohesion in larger groups and to avoid the disintegration of collective action. Having the right digital tools is an important and necessary component, although not sufficient, to increase the significance of the gift economy in relation to markets, and to reclaim the original idea of a sharing and gifting economy.
Some attempts in scaling this gift economy have been made in the past and have been relatively successful in what they sought to accomplish. Foodsharing.de in Germany for saving and sharing food, Couchsurfing (despite not being strictly non-commercial any longer) and Trustroots for sharing a place to sleep internationally, and Skjutsgruppen in Sweden for sharing rides are some examples. Karrot has started by serving many groups that are saving and sharing food around the globe, and will become the tool for local movements to organize and grow in their saving and sharing of different resources.
But we are not technology evangelists and therefore very aware that we cannot code into reality things like community, good governance, relations of trust, equality and so on. We can only help materialize these values through the platform where they are practiced by people working on the ground, to facilitate the saving and sharing of resources in a non-hierarchical, participative and democratic way. Development should continue to happen in tandem with these practices and the communities using Karrot.