Expand Consciousness: A New and Recent History of Sharing

Sharing is a well-forgotten old thing: the first short-term car rental appeared shortly after their invention, and taking dresses and tuxedos for one day was fashionable back in the XNUMXth century.

Citizens nostalgic for the USSR laugh at the culture of “conscious consumption” popular in the West: when people who are not indifferent to environmental problems do not throw away plastic bags, but wash them for repeated use, they remember that their grandmother washed the bags in the same way, and no pathos is everyday did not accompany the lesson. Others object: in the Soviet Union it was from poverty, but abroad, and even here now, it was from consciousness.

Oddly enough, the former are right, not the latter: the point is not at all that the Soviet polymer industry could not produce polyethylene in the quantities necessary to throw them into the oceans. It’s just that in the USSR, fenced off from the world by an iron curtain, the paradigm of a thrifty attitude to things was preserved for a long time, because of which, back in the middle of the 1970th century in Europe, newlyweds did not buy furniture, but received wardrobes and beds as gifts from their parents that belonged to their great-grandfathers (deadly this tradition struck after World War II IKEA). The rest of the world, on the other hand, has experienced a rapid rise in consumerism since about the XNUMXs – people changed cars like gloves, littered the oceans of the planet with plastic cups. Now this invasion of disposable things is beginning to be perceived as madness – which, in fact, it was: why buy new equipment every year if the old one works great? Sharing is a similar story.

In our country, sharing things was the key to survival – even the simplest agricultural equipment (plow and harrow) was shared by several yards, and poor peasants rented horses to plow their fields from wealthier ones. In a word, the principle that was once put by the apostles as the basis of Christian communities – “And no one called anything from his estate his own, but they had everything in common” – was caused by a completely rational desire for economy long before the Bolsheviks tried to make it the basis of life in the whole state.

Short-term car rentals are as old as cars themselves: the first such service appeared in Minneapolis in 1904, when the owner of a bicycle shop realized that many townspeople would like to surprise friends or loved ones with a sudden appearance on a wagon spewing gasoline smoke. And in 1918, such a rental was put on stream – the Yellow Driv-Ur-Self System service appeared in Chicago, whose owner bought a dozen of the famous Model T, which was produced by the Ford plant, and began to rent them out. By the 1920s, such “car sharing” was in many cities in America – the representatives of the middle class willingly took them, for example, to get on business to neighboring towns. The Model T itself cost $300 and was beyond the reach of most of them, and it was cheaper to rent it for a day for less than a dollar, not counting the gas fee. Car rental was so profitable that three years later the Yellow Driv-Ur-Self System was acquired by General Motors, who continued to own it until 1953. Why not a success story in the spirit of Uber?

The same flourishing industry even earlier, in the XNUMXth century, was the rental of dresses and suits. Until the drastic reduction in prices in ready-to-wear shops (which did not occur in Europe until the end of the century mentioned), the possession of several sets of tailor-made clothes was a luxury available only to the most affluent. Representatives of the middle stratum of the townspeople, who needed an elegant suit for a special occasion, and fashionistas who did not have free money, turned to shopkeepers for clothes. For them, rental was not a separate business – they successfully sold outfits that were no longer in the same hands, and neither they nor their customers most often saw anything shameful in the fact that others had already tried on clothes more than once.

Two reasons put an end to the prosperity of such “sharing” – the growth of the wealth of the middle class and the greed of corporations. In 1955, business scholar Victor Lebow wrote a line that has since been quoted countless times by critics of consumerism: “Our highly productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, make the purchase of goods a ritual, seek spiritual solutions in consumption. Social status, social acceptability of actions, authority will be measured by consumption patterns <…> It is necessary that people eat, dress, travel, live in the most complex and, as a result, more and more expensive way. Through advertising, corporations relentlessly created the image of a successful person who is rich enough to drive his own car and live in his own home. It is curious that at the same time it was not considered shameful if a citizen takes money for all this in one of the most ancient “sharing” – in a bank.

The October Revolution was carried out under bold slogans, one of which was the abolition of money. It took a little time to abandon such utopian ideas, but the “socialization of the means of production” really happened. Another thing is that many of the forms that collectivization took were suspiciously reminiscent of those that the Russian village knew well. For example, motor-tractor stations (MTS), which played a significant role in the development of agriculture in the country, handed over tractors and combines to collective farms according to the quite familiar scheme “one plow for several yards”.

Public transport was widely developed in the USSR, the fare in which was almost symbolic (the most expensive monthly ticket for all types of transport in the Brezhnev era cost only 6 rubles). At the same time, the possession of personal transport in the eyes of the townsfolk looked suspicious: this is evidenced, for example, by the film “Beware of the Car”, the hero of which steals the Volga, bought with non-labor funds.

An important factor in social life in the state, which suffered from a constant shortage of consumer goods, were rental points. For a wedding or other family celebration, they rented dishes there. Going on a hike, tourists turned there for tents and sleeping bags. Rental points saved the family budget – for example, parents could take skates of a new size for their children for each season. When a child was born, mom and dad went to the rental shop for baby scales and strollers.

The desire to shake off Soviet poverty in our country led to an explosion of conspicuous consumption – crimson jackets remained in the nineties, but huge cars that farmers buy somewhere in Canada to transport goats and sheep, even in Moscow, are still considered an indicator owner’s success.

But in the West, consumer psychology began to lose ground at the end of the last decade, when, after the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, the purchasing power of citizens fell sharply. In her book Third World America: How Our Politicians Abandoned the Middle Class and Betrayed the American Dream, renowned publisher and publicist Arianna Huffington mentions a few nails in the coffin of consumerism – income stagnation, rising mortgage burdens, unemployment, and a general sense that economic you have to say goodbye to stability.

It was during this era that, first in the United States and Western Europe, and then in our country, numerous aggregator platforms began to appear: Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Yandex.Taxi, etc. Their main task is to provide the population with the usual services, but at a much more affordable price. Dr. Maury Cohen of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who wrote a monograph on the future of the consumer society, emphasizes that the platform economy and sharing services as its most important segment are not limited to the benefits that mobile technologies have made possible. Sharing has an important social meaning – in fact, it helps to preserve the middle class itself, whose existence in the XNUMXst century is under threat.