Share and Share Alike

  From our earliest days of pre-school and kindergarten we learn the importance of sharing. Yet somehow, along the way, sharing is replaced by "mine." Ownership and consumption finally rule the day. Even through our recent period of hyper-consumption we still checked books out of the library, we rented video, used Netflix and shopped on Ebay. Arguably, all of these things are forerunners of a whole new collaborative way of looking at our culture. Former Clinton Foundation board member and Oxford and Harvard educated consultant Rachel Botsman, in her book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, looks at revolutions in what she call Collaborate Consumption. My conversation with Rachel Botsman: