Sam Liebeskind

So yes, Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do. When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard... See more

Again, to reference myself, while I do believe in individual agency, I also believe societies come with strong forces that shape expectations and even shape people’s understanding of a ‘good life.’ That is, society provides citizens playbooks that they are urged to follow which are supposed to end in happily ever after, and ours is that you can... See more

My own contribution to this has been to say that yes there is genuine and widespread despair in the US1, but the primary reason isn’t economic2, rather it is because human fulfillment requires more than material wealth, which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten. People need physical communities, and while the US excels at material... See more

I was struck by how natural the idea of serving the public felt inside libraries. I had spent much of my career pushing, prodding, arguing, fighting, pleading and even begging for community participation in journalism. And yet, despite claiming to be “the voice of the people,” many news organizations are incredibly hesitant or don’t actually want... See more

Group administrators promote their group through their real-life social networks. Since they have such a good understanding of the movement’s principles, these are relayed with enthusiasm and passion. This gets passed through friends and friends-of-friends like a wave. The enthusiasm and passion exchanged is just not comparable to receiving a link... See more

The group administrators are responsible for bringing the movement's principles from theory into action. Every group administrator who set up a Buy Nothing group was asked to complete the Buy Nothing training linked above. This included introducing ideas like: what is a gift economy; understanding the benefits of diversity; understanding the issues... See more