#radical sharing

[sykobee]

Hannah

[theemotionmachine]

Radical Sharing: Honesty and Openness During the Healing Process

"Radical sharing" is being willing to reveal your complete self to another person, including your deepest thoughts, feelings, memories, and ambitions. Do you have someone in your life you can do that with?

Click here to learn more!

[autolysis]

my epic OP talent

my secret Scam is to Give stuff to ppl. Giving is the most OP incredible Spell to cast. I am more powerful than any boss can possibly imagine. Checkmate. Ppl never trust anything if its free?? It's not free. I worked to create it. My work is giving. Human work is real work. Fuck every tycoon bigot selling the lie that work is only what makes them Get Monetary Value. MY scam is an aggressive dodge of their influence, I am the anti marketing, I am the anti tax paying. I am the Gift radical. My hack is to build us, by living outside of the employment - rent - taxes - debt - addictions - malnutrition traps.

[autolysis]

thxgiving thought

I am sick and tired of being told by the elite profit mongerers running this world that we can’t include everyone. That we can’t feed everyone and shelter them

That we can’t fight the bullies that want to criticize and minimize and erase them.

KNOW THIS

WE WILL NOT BE ERASED

[zachhiggins]

Radical Sharing and the Internet

By now, you might've seen this picture floating around the internet:

If you're unfamiliar with the above image, a man by the name of Jonathan Stark has given the world access to his Starbucks card.

The premise is pretty simple: after downloading the picture to your smartphone, you can scan it at any Starbucks location (within the US) to get a free drink. Anyone can use it, and if they want, anyone can put money on the card. It's gotten fairly significant coverage, so if you're interested in reading more about the history of this project, I'll direct you to GOOD's write-up.

After coming across this story earlier today, I was intrigued. It's a bold concept, and one that raises an interesting question: what will people do when given the opportunity to take something for free, with nothing expected in return?

When I went into my local Starbucks after work today, I tried it out. My drink came to $4.35. I held up my phone to the scanner — nothing. It wasn't too unexpected. A quick check of the Jonathan's Card twitter account revealed that the card had been emptied just minutes before. Oh well, it's no big deal really. When the barista asked if I wanted to add money to my card, I explained to her that it wasn't actually mine, but was part of an experiment. Surprisingly, she knew exactly what I was referring to.

I say "surprisingly," when in all honesty I shouldn't have been that surprised. I don't exactly live in a small town, and I shouldn't expect something that, as I said before, has gotten so much press to not be well-known. It was a reminder though, of how far the reach of the internet has become. Remember when the dancing baby was on that episode of Ally McBeal? The internet was still fairly young, and very few people even had access to it. When the dancing baby showed up on TV, internet culture was suddenly thrust into the mainstream. (Incidentally, I believe it's the first meme to go viral like it did.)

So, here we are today: "the internet" is a household term. Some have denounced the internet for ruining social interaction. What was once done face-to-face (or at least by phone) has been reduced to communicating behind the veil of the computer screen. I submit that this experience today is a small example of the internet bringing people together.

The Starbucks I visited isn't one that I frequent very often, so I wasn't on any first-name basis with the baristas or anything. But, because of the power of the internet (which totally sounds like a phrase straight out of the 90s), we briefly found a connection in the shared knowledge of Jonathan Stark's social experiment. As it turned out, they had loaded a few dollars onto the card earlier that day, and we discussed just how much and how quickly the card value fluctuates.

Which brings me back to my original point: what will people do when given the opportunity to take something for free, with nothing expected in return? Actually, the results have been pretty positive: as GOOD points out, about half of the people that had used it (at the time of writing) had given back. So while there are a fair share of moochers, there's roughly an equal, if not more, number of people donating. (Hoping for some good karma, I put $10 on the card once I got home.)

In a way, I see a parallel between this and texting the Red Cross relief number during times of crisis. Dubbed "impulse philanthropy" by Robert McGarvey, the idea is that when the act of donating is made so simple, people are more inclined to help out. People can then feel they contributed without actually having to do much (and every donation really does help). I think it's this kind of mentality that affects people even when it comes to something as simple as buying a total stranger a cup of coffee. "Do something nice with little to no effort on my part? Sure!"

One more thing: apparently Stark's experiment is a 21st century adaptation of the Italian custom known as "caffe' pagato," or "paid coffee." In Italian cafes, a patron may order a caffe' pagato (or x number of caffe' pagati) in addition to their order. Later, if a customer short on cash comes in, they can have request one of the pre-paid drinks.

Think of it as paying it forward, but with a lot less Haley Joel Osment.