Something has gone lost in our society. To be honest, a few things are lost. We can not trust the so-called sustainable products, definitely not after the Volkswagen scandal. But also, our individual self-determination erodes bit by bit.
It’s time to create a sequel to sustainability 1.0. It’s is a one-way approach going from expert to producer to consumer. In this approach, sustainability is mostly determined on an explicit level. Link this to the increasing standardisations and all solutions start to look like each other. Besides this, we have also forgotten how we can make our own household self-supportive. We don’t know how to fix our cloths, we don’t know the taste of black salsify or that the most effective production location for eggs is our own garden.
Building up
It’s time for sustainability 2.0. In 2.0, the users shape the sustainability characters of the new solution. The traditional ‘consumer’ are also the ‘producers’ of the solutions in their own household. In this, there is space for more tacit aspects like happiness or tranquillity. If something gets faulty or it has a design error, you can easily repair or adapt it yourself. By sharing ideas and designs with others, a huge diversity of solutions comes to the surface. If you haven’t got a lot of means (time, material, space, etc.) then you can already come to workable solutions. If you have a lot of means, you can build the optimal solutions for your household, instead of selecting it as a consumer.
Blockchain
We believe that what has gone lost we can collectively and creatively bring back to life! We’re #HackingBugs in our personal life! And you may take it quite literally. With Domestic Bugs, we make a combination excellence, playfulness, cleverness and exploration to inspire and activate the people of Ghent to rear and eat edible insects at home. This peer-to-peer initiative started with limited means and we let it grow organically. We could make our big dream to make this approach globally mainstream reality with the help of The Blockchain.
And #HackingBugs can be even more grandiose! “Bugs” can also be interpreted as errors or limitations of the system. So #HackingBugs can have a lot of applications, like the tiny house movement or the Sugru community. Creativity and autonomy are central and on top of that, in this approach, an ideas can very quickly become a reality.
Will you just like us #HackingBugs?
This blogpost was originally published in Dutch on zeronaut.be
Merel Claes 