Last May, I was invited to speak at
OuiShare Fest in Paris.
The night after a
talk I gave on sharing cities, I bumped into my friend
Mike Zuckerman of
Freespace at
BlaBlaCar’s reception.
He mentioned in passing that he was going into the
catacombs later that night. I responded, “don’t leave without me.”
After the reception, Mike and I headed to dinner with
Chelsea Rustrum,
Jason Fresco, and a couple others who would later opt-out of the
catacombs adventure. We enjoyed a leisurely late dinner, Jason bought
two bottles of wine to go, we said goodbye to the sensible folk, then
took a cab to southwest Paris to find an entrance to the catacombs.
After being dropped off on a quiet street corner around midnight,
Mike lifted the grate to a utility bunker underneath the sidewalk,
lowered himself in, and disappeared.
After reporting back, Jason,
Chelsea, and I descended one at a time following his instructions,
contorting our bodies to make it through a series of tight passages -
with cables, spider webs, and dust everywhere - only to discover that
the steel ladder Mike had used just two weeks earlier to descend to the
catacombs had been cut short by the “catacops,” a special police unit
that patrols the catacombs.
We climbed out. I thought that was it. We were milling on the corner
talking about what to do next when Mike struck up a conversation with a
passerby. Coincidentally, this stranger, Marcus, was headed to another
entrance to the catacombs.
We followed Marcus over a tall fence nearby, then down an abandoned
rail line. Half of the trip was through a pitch dark rail tunnel. After
about a mile, we stopped in front of a trench on the side of the
tunnel. This was an entrance to the catacombs. We prepped for a couple
minutes. Marcus shared a few sage words of advice and gave each of us a
candle. We descended, and began a long walk underground.
We spent the rest of night exploring the catacombs. We walked a few
miles, 30 feet underground, in a series of tunnels, caves, and passages
hewn from rock, some filled knee-high with water, some only passable by
sliding on your belly, some filled with human bones.
We saw a surprising
amount of art including sculpture, mosaics, graffiti, and Dadaesque
gestures. For instance, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to drag two
Velib bikeshares deep into the catacombs. I chuckled at that one.
Later
we discovered an ornate mosaic street sign at an intersection. It was
beautiful and useless. It mocked the rugged setting and the idea of
getting your bearings down there. There was a
situationist strain of humor in the art reminiscent of Burning Man. The irreverent, irrepressible creativity was surprisingly heart-opening.
After sharing some wine in the Ram Room, one of the many outlaw
social spaces in the catacombs, and exploring a bone-strewn cavern
adjacent to it, we headed out. Dawn was breaking when we made it to the
street again. I felt exhausted, overwhelmed, and extremely grateful. I
knew others felt similarly.
The five of us stood in a circle in the
middle of the street. We hugged all at once shoulder-to-shoulder, then
dispersed. I caught a cab back to the hostel for a couple hours of sleep
before day two of OuiShare Fest.
This experience had a profound impact on me. At first, I only knew
that I had experienced something important. I didn’t know what it meant.
Later, I began to understand.
We had explored a 200 mile underground
network of
temporary autonomous zones
together. The freedom and bonding found in that shared adventure was
electrifying. It made me feel like anything was possible. It made me
feel fully alive. And with that came a deep satisfaction, a deep
gratitude.
It got me thinking about my own struggle to become a fully-realized
human being and help create a sharing movement that I felt in my bones
was the best hope for humans to come into our own, and save ourselves. I
began to reframe this struggle through the lens of my experience in the
catacombs.
The next day I met David de Ugarte at OuiShare Fest. His reputation
preceded him. He is a well-know Spanish cyberpunk, activists, and
author. He is a self-described coop monk as well as a cofounder of Las
Indias Cooperative, of which he is an active worker-owner.
He made his
name in the early oughts with a
trilogy about network society
(highly recommended) that was a best-seller in Latin America. His
intellect is only matched by his joie de vivre, optimism, and sense of
humor. We hit it off.
In one exchange, I blurted out my new, though perhaps half-baked
formulation, the one brewing in my mind from the night before, of what I
thought the human experience (or maybe just mine) was all about - that
we long to be on a great adventure with people we love to explore or
create new worlds together.
Judging from David’s expression, that seemed to resonate. Later
during OuiShare Fest, I suggested we do a project together. I had no
idea what.
I was following an intuition about David, and also what I
thought was possible in the Latin world, a world where people and
quality of life seem to come first more often than in the United States,
where a different development path seems to be unfolding, where cities
are seen as temples of well-being rather engines than of economic
growth. I wanted to explore this.
Fortunately, David took my suggestion seriously. We exchanged a few
e-mails after the conference. Las Indias developed an event concept
called Shareable Labs with my input. They shopped the idea around in
Northern Spain where they are headquartered.
They hit pay dirt in
Gijon,
the largest city in the autonomous community of Asturias. The city was
interested Shareable Labs, but a first step was a two day event, later
named Beyond the Sharing Economy, which the city would support.
Before I knew it I was off to Gijon
I landed in Oviedo on Saturday October 4th in the late afternoon.
Someone from Las Indias was to pick me up. I had a hunch I’d be greeted
differently. They didn’t disappoint. The entire event team came to
collect me - Natalia, Caro, Maria, and David. My travel fatigue was
instantly erased. It was a heartwarming welcome, typical of the way Las
Indias does things - people first. We crammed into their coop’s shared
car and headed to Gijon.
After dropping my luggage at the hotel, we went to a cideria in the
old Roman part of town for the first of many cider sessions. Cider is
Asturias’
distinctive regional beverage, a charming leftover of the area’s
ancient Celtic roots and a daily cultural experience.
The session began
as they always did. A server held a bottle above his head and poured a
small amount into a special glass held below his waist to “break” the
cider. While the dramatic pour was satisfying to watch, it also served a
practical purpose. It oxygenates the cider making it both more
flavorful and digestible. He passed a glass to me. I consumed the cider
quickly while still cold as instructed. It was delicious. I passed the
glass back to the server to be used again for the next person.
We shared
several rounds with plenty of time in between to chat and nosh. This
paced our intake while ensuring that everyone got equally, yet
moderately buzzed. We sailed into the night together in a co-created
ship of cheer. This was my first experience of an ancient ritual, with
sharing at its core, which binds Asturians to each other and the land in
a simple, yet powerful way. I loved it.
Indeed, it was the perfect way to begin my stay in Gijon and get to
know team Las Indias better. Over cider and tapas, they filled in some
details of the coming event and the story they told me before I arrived
and that I would hear many times over the course of my stay, their story
of the Anchovy League.
The Anchovy League
The story goes something like this. An innovator in seafood canning
emerged at the start of the last century among Italian immigrant
merchants who had moved to the
Cantabrian coast
decades earlier because of a shortage of fish back home.
These
immigrants were loved by the locals. For one thing, they created much
needed jobs. This innovator, Giovanni Vella Scatagliota, invented the
anchovy product as we know it today, which catalyzed a period of
industrial expansion along the Cantabrian coast including in Gijon.
Indiano Natalia Fernandez summed this up in a more interesting way,
“the incredible story of a Sicilian guy who traveled to the Cantabrian
looking for providers [of fish], fell in love with a girl from Santoña,
invented anchovies in oil, created hundreds of jobs, and ended up
changing the world’s diet.” Her longer history
here is a fantastic read.
The lesson she draws from history is that a new, post-industrial
cycle of development in the region is more likely if there’s links to
innovators from elsewhere. Thus, the rationale for the Anchovy League,
its inaugural event in Gijon, Beyond the Sharing Economy, and a global
group of participants.
The Anchovy League is an emerging innovation
network in the southern part of the
Atlantic Arc that hopes to catalyze a new round of development using a commons-based strategy similar to
FLOK Society’s
approach in Ecuador, but by linking small to medium-sized cities in a
multi-country region rather than through a single nation-state.
It’s
also a story of rebirth, and it’s likely no accident that a fish, a very
social one at that, is at the center of this history-backed,
future-forward myth as fish are an ancient symbol of transformation.
The Main Event
Las Indias had designed the program for Beyond the Sharing Economy as
a series of conversations among experts over two days. The discussions
formed a narrative arc that lead from first principles and the personal
scale to specific projects and the regional scale.
It was a well-thought
out design with Las Indias’ distinctive narrative approach to economic
discourse. The content went well beyond the typical sharing economy
talk, which usually centers on famous for-profit companies like Airbnb,
into familiar territory for Shareable - the commons. I was part of two
conversations, one per day.
The event was held in an auditorium at Universidad Laboral, a
gigantic Franco-era campus featuring monumental Neo-Herrerian
architecture. It’s the largest building in Spain according to Wikipedia.
Towering above the main courtyard is a huge stone eagle with Spain’s
coat of arms held in its claws, a potent symbol of Franco’s tight grip
on Spain during his 36 year dictatorship.
Laboral is underutilized due
to the region’s industrial decline, though it’s being leveraged to
revive the area. It houses a number of schools and an exhibition space
for science, technology, and cultural events. And is part of a larger
technology park that promises revival. Our event was a part of this mix.
David interviewed me for one of the opening talks. He asked about the
origins of Shareable, which is fitting since Shareable was founded five
years before almost to the day. I talked about what inspired me and
the five years I co-hosted the Abundance League, a now dormant San
Francisco salon about sharing that’s a precursor to Shareable.
My main
point was that social isolation is a kind of living death. Sharing
breaks it, unlocks our creative potential, and binds us in a cycle of
mutually assured self-actualization.
At the break, the indie band G.P.S. Project played a spine-tingling acoustic version of the Police’s “
So Lonely.”
That was the perfect song for the moment, at least for me. I felt
validated and grateful. The more I push for a life of uncompromised
humanity, the more the world seems to open up to me.
That moment was topped by an incredible after-party - one part
planned, one part improvised. The entire conference was bused to a
llagares (cider cellar) for an Asturian
espicha (feast) with plenty of cider, Asturian delicacies, and local organic wines curated by
Malena Fabregat. The outstanding local fare was only surpassed by the people I met.
After being bused back to Gijon, a group of us including commons activist Helene Finidori, Carlos Alcalde of
Open City Zaragoza,
Antonin Leonard and
Albert Cañigueral of
OuiShare, Nadia EL-Imam of
EdgeRyders, Julie Da Vara and Valentine Philipponneau of
Je Loue Mon Camping Car
went out on the town.
We stumbled into an empty bar playing 80s hits
and started a dance party. Somebody bought a round of shots, and the
party got a big second wind that took us well into the night.
Day two of the conference culminated in a lively, wide-ranging conversation facilitated by David between myself, Antonin,
Matthew Scales of ShareNSave, and economist
Juan Urrutia
in which Juan really shone. That said, I disagreed with a couple his
points, though I didn’t have the presence of mind to say so in the
moment.
When speaking about the region, he talked about a brotherhood
between cities forged in competition. It was poetic, but it’s an old
model. It’s worth exploring something different;
that cities learn together,
share on common needs, yet work separately to bring out their own
unique character.
Cities should not be fungible commodities. Each
should be a niche unto itself. In theory, there are no losers with this
strategy. In contrast, the race to the bottom to attract big
corporations or become the next Silicon Valley among thousands of
cities will result in mostly losers.
Then we spoke about the
Camino de Santiago,
the famous pilgrimage route that runs through the region and its
potential for spurring social change. Prior to the panel, David and I
had explored the idea of a new economy pilgrimage along the route with
stops at coworking spaces, coops, and fab labs to create
transformational experiences for “sharing pilgrims.”
I clumsily shared
the idea in its not ready for prime time state on stage. It was hard to
argue with Juan when he responded that nature was a better symbol of
rebirth than the camino. However, human beings need ritual to help us
leave one way of life and be born into another. Pilgrimage has long
served this purpose.
I believe that the massive social change needed
today can’t come about through technical means alone. There must be
social, cultural, and, yes, spiritual dimensions. I knew from American
history that the anti-slavery, women’s rights, and temperance movements
emerged out of a great spiritual awakening during the 19th century. Big
shifts require a level of commitment that can only be found in spirit.
After the panel, thanks to
Jacinto Santos of
PENSAR Consulting, I had the opportunity to keynote
Cabueñes,
an annual gathering of youth policy leaders in Asturias and beyond. I
opened my talk about the sharing economy describing a moment I had on
the beach in Gijon two mornings before.
Gijon is blessed with a large,
beautiful, crescent shaped beach, the Playa de San Lorenzo
, that’s
their equivalent of New York City’s Central Park. The promenade
bordering the beach is used at nearly all hours. Hundreds of people can
be seen playing on the broad, flat sand beach during the day, even in
the off season. There’s even an adult soccer league that plays on the
beach at low tide.
I made of point of walking the beach every day. And on this sunny
morning, the simple pleasure of this beach, and its centrality to the
way of life in Gijon, hit home. As I was walked barefoot on wet sand
along the surf, I heard the old church bell ring, construction work in
the city center, and a bag piper playing for change on the promenade.
Young and old were enjoying the beach with me - some in surf, some on
sand. A few feet away a municipal worker in an orange vest was taking
measurements in the water. There were a couple surfers near the point.
All of this registered at once. I felt part of this place. It was
beautifully alive. I felt alive.
What’s an economy good for unless it
frees us to enjoy nature and each other like this? I urged the group to
not mistake the means for the end. The end is well-being. An economy is a
tool that is only as good as its ability to foster it.
In the days following Beyond the Sharing Economy, I was fortunate to
be the guest of Natalia, Caro, Maria, and David of Las Indias who showed
me around Las Indias style, which means I was got the most fun,
hands-on crash course about the region as is possible.
The first stop was a #MapJam with
Mar de Niebla,
a local nonprofit serving at risk youth in Gijon’s working-class La
Calzada neighborhood. Jaucinto Santos, who impressed me at every turn
with his creative dedication to the community, and Las Indias set up
this commons mapping exercise with Mar de Niebla to coincide with
Shareable’s Global #MapJam.
Before the #MapJam got underway, I got a tour of Mar de Niebla’s youth
center, converted from a defunct grocery store, in the first floor of a
no frills apartment block. It was rough going in La Calzada, but the
staff of Mar de Niebla radiated optimism and determination. There were
pooling their community’s resources - in every possible way including
labor, money, and all manner of in-kind donations - to give the most
disadvantaged neighborhood kids a leg up.
It was an inspiring setting
for a #MapJam, which had some surprising results. Gijon’s mapjammers
realized that much of the local commons is supported by the government.
This has its advantages. However, the commons is vulnerable to austerity
measures. The mapping exercise helped participants understand their
vulnerability and begin thinking about peer-to-peer alternatives.
The next day we spent exploring Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. The highlight for me was the
Museo Arqueologico de Asturias.
I’m not a big fan of museums, but this was an outstanding one made all
the better by visiting it with Las Indias for whom it has special
significance.
It’s the first place they encountered their wolf, an
ancient Hispano-Celtic symbol meant to keep people safe from death
(roughly, more on it
here), which they eventually adopted for their cooperative’s logo.
An exhibit showing the migration of the first people to the
Cantabrian coast also struck me. Humans first came to the area after
being literally pushed west by ice as the ice age progressed. The
coastal mountains and sea-warmed weather blocked the ice’s advance. The
abundant fish, game, and flora provided plenty of food. Humans have
lived in the area ever since.
Some think the area, along with parts of
Southern France, as a cradle of European civilization. It’s no wonder
given the stable weather and food supply. Gijon itself has been settled
almost continuously for around 2,000 years.
As we strolled the museum together, David explained that
geographically advantageous, secondary cities like Gijon offer a haven
from the disruptions of both global warming and global capital. As the
museum showed, the stable coastal climate, plentiful rain, and ample
food supply can sustain human life over many millennia.
In the case of
capital, small to medium-sized cities like Gijon aren’t big enough to
absorb the titanic sums institutional investors need to invest. The
businesses and real estate in major cities along with big swaths of
farmland in Africa and South America are prime targets. Speculators
drive ordinary people out of these places. This resonated.
This resonated. The tsunami of capital flowing into San Francisco where I
work has made it the most expensive place to live in the US with the
fastest growing wealth gap. It has forced many of my friends out.
On my last day, the Las Indias crew took us to La Isla, the beach
where their cooperative was conceived, followed by a hike along the sea
cliffs on part of the Camino de Santiago. It’s a stunningly beautiful
area.
The
Indiano
villas in the verdant hills overlook small villages dotting a rocky
coast with time-worn, crescent-shaped beaches in between. Nearly every
home features a horreo, a grain crib of ancient design, which adds a
distinctive touch to the landscape’s rustic beauty.
While this post is on the long side, it hardly does my experience in
Gijon justice. All the epic walks and meals with Las Indias, filled with
great conversation and connection, and all the history and culture I
took in but am yet to fully integrate, would be impossible to share
completely. It was indeed a crash course.
Despite this, I came home with valuable lessons about myself and the
sharing movement. Indeed, my trip to Gijon took me well beyond the
sharing economy. For one, I have little appetite for movement as they’re
generally understood.
If this movement isn’t an adventure with people I
love to create or explore a new world, I doubt I can contribute my best
or continue for long. I felt this spirt with Las Indias, and it
undoubtedly enables them to take on bold projects for social change year
after year.
Similarly, I doubt the sharing movement can fulfill its
transformative potential if it can’t somehow draw out the full-hearted
commitment of ordinary people in a way that love and an epic adventure
can.
I also came to see the world’s cities as a fleet of arks that has
carried our delicate species safely through the storms of time. I came
to see that our generation’s great adventure is to sail this fleet
through our century, which is shaping up to be the greatest storm of all
time, one of our own making, one that will kill or transform us.
Like all good lessons, I’m left with better questions. Will we rise
to the occasion? Who else is thrilled to their marrow for this
challenge? Who else can’t believe their good luck to be given such a
gift? Can we create a sharing movement that uplifts those who join,
models the change sought, and attracts a legion of indefatigable
contributors? And how should we prepare our urban arks to ensure that
our children make it safely through this century?
These are questions we’ll explore next summer at Shareable Labs in Gijon. More on this soon.
by Nina Misuraca Ignaczak, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/8-awesome-ways-cooperatives-strengthen-communities
