The Evolution of Sharing

I have an article up at Shareable.net. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:

Sharing isn’t unique to humans but we seem to do it a lot more than any other mammals. Some combination of intrinsic altruism, on-the-spot cost-benefit calculus, and perhaps the routine abstractions we subconsciously employ to reconfigure our internal reward systems has positioned us to be exceptional at sharing all manner of things.

So much so, it seems, that we’ve constructed a global web of technologies whose function seems to be primarily adapted to the simple, rapid, and non-local giving and receiving of ideas, emotions, experiences, templates, tools, and just about every other aspect of the human experience.

Indeed, the Information Age and all its wondrous gadgetry, heaved up by materials science and sustained by ridiculous amounts of energy, is the dawning realization of industrialism turned from hard goods to the exchange of dematerialized content.

Read the rest at Shareable.net