What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

For the most part, the people and places are not vetted, inspected, or interviewed by Airbnb. It’s up to users to determine if they want to host a guest or if they want to stay with someone based on kaleidoscopic photos of the property, detailed profiles, and other users’ reviews.

There are four big forces that have played a critical role in manipulating and feeding hyper-consumption: the power of persuasion; the buy now, pay later culture; the law of life cycles; and the “just one more” factor.

Ezio Manzini is a professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano and a thought leader on strategic design for sustainability. He breaks down the process of designing what he calls collaborative service systems into four critical design components: fluidity of use, replication, diversified access, and enhanced communications support.8 Manzi

Once users have reached a certain amount of points, they receive a star indicating their trustworthiness. The “Red Shooting Star” is the very highest, for 100,000 points or more, and the “Yellow Star” is the starting point, for 10 to 49 points. Just as we rate songs on iTunes or films on Netflix or write reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon, these ind

Newmark explained to Jarvis, “If you make a great platform that people really want to use, then the worst thing you could do is to put yourself in the middle, getting in the way of what people want to do with it.”

Beyond its community features that include “discussion forums,” “lost and found,” and “job postings,” craigslist functions like Freecycle, where members form local “hubs” and post what they need or what they want to sell or give away. The

As John Thackara says in Inside the Bubble, “It’s the accumulation of such tiny, unnecessary acts that weigh so heavily on the planet.”24

Other projects with similar intentions are emerging. They include NeighBorrow, Bright Neighbor, NeighborGoods, rBlock, GoGoVerde, Share Some Sugar, DaveZillion, and Skillshare, all of which help build a reciprocal and more sustainable community.

Today reputation serves not only as a psychological reward or currency, but also as an actual currency—called reputation capital. We