Even though it wasn’t premeditated, a narrative does emerge in Share Or Die. There’s a common anxiety in the pieces in this collection, a well-informed fear that life will be different for young people just starting to come of age. The promises of the 90’s and the early 00’s, that society could only be improved, that shopping was patriotic, that the earth knew no boundaries for the determined, have turned out to be worth about as much as a tranch of sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. There’s a sense of generational betrayal, a knowledge that those who came before weren’t planning for a future with consequences. In the face of the unknown, these writers have come to understand they’re responsible for making something new, even if they don’t know what it looks like yet. Or, as Sid Vicious put it: “We don’t know what we want/But we know how to get it.”

“Share Or Die” isn’t a threat, it’s a reality. The title comes from a conversation between Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo and a homeless man. Neal is the kind of guy who would just as well hand his business cards to panhandlers as venture capitalists, and as he started to explain the site, the man spoke up: “Oh I know about all that, it’s share or die.” When he told me this story we had just started working on the collection, and as I jokingly suggested the phrase would make a good title, neither of us expected it to stick. But stick it did. We couldn’t manage to call it anything else, even if we had wanted to try. The title doesn’t just refer to the existential state of life with resource depletion, disappearing jobs, and stagnating wages. This young generation is going to have consume less as individuals (even if our only goal is to avoid drowning ourselves in melted icecaps), that much is clear. But there are kinds of social death too, and they’re forms to which we’ve become accustomed and for which we’ve been groomed. In a world where homes and education have become tools for the financial violence of debt, where to begin? We need commensal ideas and practices in order to merely survive, but also to build a place where it’s worth living.

After starting, the disbelief soon gave way to misery. The day-to-day experience left me feeling utterly crushed. I wasn’t creating anything, I wasn’t even really doing anything of any consequence at all. I got on the bus every morning, exhausted, with all the other people who worked in offices downtown. I walked into the office every day, sat at the same desk, in the same chair, did the same things. I adopted the same bubbly, pleasant attitude as my coworkers, with whom I felt no connection at all. It made no sense to see them as real people I might connect with, since after all, I felt like this was not where I belonged: an office in an industry that had nothing to do with my life, in a job in which I had no real interest. I had nothing invested in my job or my employer, I did what I had to do: hammer out the work, play nice. But I felt all day long that I was inhabiting a strange bubble, separate from where I really lived my life, removed from anything that affected me or that I cared about.

Welcome to casarobino, or as most people simply call it ‘casa’, a small apartment in a central neighborhood of Amsterdam that has hosted more than a thousand people over the past three years. They came to “be a host” and share the place, to join in for the weekly vegan open dinner or for some tea. A map of the world on the wall is filled with pins, people leave them to mark their places of birth.

The house is an apartment I rent that, as long as I’ve lived here, I’ve shared with people who are lifestyle travelers – nomads. When I began, I described it as a hospitality-house, then a shared travelers’ home and later as a (perhaps edgier) nomad-base. The house is a shared space in the truest sense, visitors are encouraged to see it as their shared place, and hence to care for it as if it were not just their own, but one that belongs to everyone present, as well as to the people yet to come.

There are, however, still plenty who reject this attitude and approach, suffering from the combined malaise of “proprietariness,” “materialism,” and “consumerism.”

But — I shit you not — as the world turns, things are changing. Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity.

To transcend is to become transparent, clear, open.