“Yesterday I was thinking about how we have this convention that it’s acceptable to lend and borrow certain things, like books, that we don’t question—like that’s a really normal thing, but if you start extending it to different things, people sometimes think it’s weird. Things that have issues around hygiene I can understand, but we could probably extend this sharing economy, utility-based kind of borrowing system to so many different things in our lives. In the last little while we’ve accepted that it’s okay to share bicycles and cars. It’s okay to share your living space with strangers when you’re going on vacation, but for some reason we’re still attached to our things, so this is kind of trying to get people away from the idea of ownership by just using something when you need it. I think there’s a bunch of varying anecdotes about this, but they say that the average drill is used between ten and twenty minutes in its lifetime. When you think about it—in and out of the wall—it really doesn’t take much time, so this idea that we could have a hundred people using one drill instead of a hundred people using a hundred drills is pretty potent environmentally too. It takes a lot of effort to mine and manufacture a hundred drills.”
