One of the key ideas in a resource based economy, shared with Natural Capitalism, is access to the service provided by a product, rather than ownership of the product. The obvious example is public transport, but the idea is spreading.
Spending some time recently de-cluttering has made me think about the value of things. In one or two cases I have mad a few £ selling something on e-bay. These £ do not have any value until I redeeem them on some other good or service, and they disguise the true value of the item, which is of course in its use.
Some of the decluttering has been of a shed. It is so ingrained in us that the value of something is in its physical presence in our home (or shed) that many of us have got stuff there which we never use and perhaps will never use, but it is ours and we keep it, because we somehow believe the value of it accrues to us because we possess it. If anything though, it is of negative value. It possibly takes up precious space, and it nags at our conscience, especially if we've paid £ for it and never got value for that £. We wasted the money, we tell ourselves.
But what if we give these items away to someone who will make use of them. Immediately the value of them - which is their use, not how much the cost in £, is released. OK their value doesn't directly accrue to us, but it can't, so why waste it even more by stowing it away? Let someone else have it if they'll use it. Not only does this stop waste, but you'll probably feel good by helping someone.
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Some of the items we dont really use often, we keep for sentimental reasons(we love the person/situation its associated with and its a memento), others we keep "in case" we might need them, or like many other topics because we havent had the time to ponder on whether we really need it and are too busy with other occupations to get rid of it. If you dispose of an item, and then find you need it, it may be difficult to obtain it, and instead of using it you will be spending time to re-acquire it (which might be difficult to various degrees). If its something that is easy to obtain at anytime, then the psychological barrier to be without it will be easier to overcome. If you are cleaning up you library and find a rare book you cant find at the public library odds are you will keep it, but the book next to if you know they have several of these at the library and you can access it anytime no problem then odds are this will be the book that will clear up space.
ReplyDeleteDecluttering books suggest taking a photo of an item one can't bear to part with, but separating the sentimental value of a thing from the physical thing itself is likely to be tricky. Let's hope people won't want to have too many sentimental items in an RBE, but surely it ust be possible to create items that invoke the memory we wish to cherish but wich like the photo take up negligible room. We could easily now capture audio and video of a loved one, and in the future - what - holograms? These things would not clutter our physical space, but our cyberspace space could be threatened!
ReplyDeleteKeeping things in case we might need them or while we decide if we need them is very closely interlocked with the concept you next mention - things that are difficult / time consuming to acquire at the point of need.
Of course one reason for owning things is that it gives the owner unlimited exclusive use of that thing. Any replacement system has to rival this level of accessibility.
I'm sure you will agree that we have lots of things we hardly need at all. Certain tools spring to mind - one that you would only use for jobs that you's planned and where the acquiring of the tool would not add significantly to the project. For example, if you were going to build a shed next weekend, you would hire/borrow any special tools when you bought the shed, but with other tools you probably would have exclusive - or nearly exclusive - use.
We already do this to some extent now, especially if we have space constraints. Wer just need to extend the system.
I don't think your rare book analogy works too well, even setting aside the fact that most people don't have many rare books.
A rare book is two distinct things. If you discovered some ancient text, never before seen, one of the first things that would (or should) happen is that the text would be reproduced - these days scanned - and thus the text itself would be available to all and no longer rare.
But if we are talking about the physicality of the book - perhaps som extraordinary craftsmanshio, or graphic design, or the author's autograph / MS notes in his/her hand, then we are esentially talking about sentimental value or something similar. Yes the book may fetch a high price, but if you're selling it then you won't have it, just like if it were in the library.
With a traditional library books can be reserved, so whilst you amy not in every case be able to exactly specify a period for which you had exclusive use of a book, you would nevertheless be able to in some cases, and in others you would still get exclusive use for a period, even if not exactly when. I don't know how much of an issue this would be.
But a traditional library is old technology. A text can be reproduced infinitely and rendered on an e-reader. There is no physical linit to the number of copies. And information can be looked up on the internet, it is increasingly rare to refer to a book for information, and rarer still to need that information right now such that having your own copy of the book were necessary.