This is to announce that next month we are launching a new Net-based
marketplace, the Evolver Exchange.
It may seem strange that the team behind Reality Sandwich
would build a platform for the buying and selling of goods and services.
Considering that our magazine explores edge-culture topics ranging from gift
economies to Tantric anarchy, synchromystics to Xenolinguistics, why would we
possibly turn our attention to the mundane commercial realm? And how can we hope
to convince anyone — you or your grandma — that buying stuff from us is the
best idea ever?
First, a sardonic hipster response: If life is revolutionary
performance art, it should be properly accessorized. After all, the Burning Man
festival and movies like The Matrix and Road Warrior make clear that apocalypse
comes with a style guide, a set of "do's and don'ts" for fitting in, even when
the climate crashes or the oil runs out, or as we practice psychic kung fu
against robot overlords. If the devil wears Prada while the Grim Reaper
special-orders his wrap-around shmatas at Dolce&Gabbana,
the neo-tribal underground deserves an outlet to refine its own signature style
for the end-times, while stocking up on tools for brute survival and cultural
reinvention.
Joking aside, we believe it is time for the counterculture
to use some of the tools of the business culture to change the nature of the
game. We do not see the Evolver Exchange as cynical surrender or escapist
sell-out. Quite the opposite: We intend it to be a step toward realizing ideas
and ideals that many of us have nurtured for a long time. We feel no shame or
guilt about our retail aims, as long as the project supports our deeper
mission.
Like Reality Sandwich and the Evolver social network we plan
to launch later this summer, the Evolver Exchange is meant to help shift
people's priorities and attitudes. The website will connect users with goods
and services that have real value for them, expressing the skills and loving
care of a larger community of craftspeople, artists, ecological designers,
fashion mavens, technology maestros, and so on. As it develops, the Evolver
Exchange will help us find what actually improves our lives, while avoiding
stuff that gets dumped into landfill. It will build deeper relationships
between artists and the communities who support them.
As with the magazine, we hope that
you — the community that cares about and supports this endeavor — will boldly
step forward and contribute your works and ideas to this site. We are currently
looking for artisanal products ranging from fashion to nutrition, alternative
energy to abstract art. Please send suggestions for the Exchange to us through
the RS contact page, and choose "Evolver
Exchange" from the category list.
Web projects are collaborative enterprises. Personally, I
was inspired to assist in developing this project in order to fill a gap and
satisfy an old desire. I have always been an idealist with an anti-consumerist
ethos, and a terribly impatient shopper. Yet, like almost everyone I know, I
still find myself buying things all the time. In unconscious lapses, I
sometimes get caught in the clutches of the corporate octopus, spending money
on goods I don't really want, then finding myself appalled when these products
wear out or don't satisfy as I had hoped.
In my closet and cabinets, you can find about ten pairs of
old sneakers and shoes and five laptops that I have kept out of bemused
wonderment at such massive waste and inefficiency. Obviously, modern science
could design a rubber sole that doesn't wear out in two months, or a laptop
with modular and reusable components. When one examines an old boot,
typewriter, or Singer sewing machine from the 1920s, beautifully designed and
built to survive the test of time, it becomes obvious that "planned
obsolescence" has reached a kind of fever pitch, a terminal stage of addiction.
Over the last decades, faster, cheaper, and more out of control has been our
collective mantra. Mismanagement of resources is now ushering in a world
without glaciers, honeybees, or tropical forests. As energy becomes more
expensive and precious, we can no longer afford a disposable culture.
For me personally, another motivation for creating this site
was the memory of my father, Peter Pinchbeck, an abstract painter who worked
for decades without a public audience for his work. Passed over by the
hyper-ironic post-Pop art world, he never found a way to reach the community
who might have supported his efforts and seen the beauty in them. The Internet
potentially provides an amazing medium for matching visionaries with those who
connect with their vision, eliminating the need for cultural brokers and
critical authorities that get their power from deciding what is right for
everyone. We hope the Evolver Exchange, as one example of what's possible, will
support the democratizing of culture and the fine-tuning of individual
preference.
A medium designed for people to connect with goods that have
been made with intention, by people who care about what they are doing, could
be an antidote to mindless consumerism, helping to reduce our ecological
footprint and energy use, over time. In a sense, we might "reverse engineer"
our culture to recover the artisan ethos that was lost way back when, with the
Industrial Revolution. My circle of friends includes a large number of people
who produce beautiful and brilliant expressions of art and craft, but lack a
proper platform for reaching the public with their vision. Some of them make
stuff for themselves and their friends, not even aware that they could find a
larger market, and convert their passion into a livelihood.
The Evolver Exchange builds on the success of Reality
Sandwich, which has exceeded our wildest expectations in the quality of contributions
that arrive from around the world, and the enthusiasm of readers. At Reality
Sandwich, the editors provide a filter that is lacking from most blog sites,
keeping the discourse at a high level. Our discovery of this format — between
user-generated content and professional forum — is reflected in the design of
the Evolver Exchange, in which curators decide which products and services
should be presented to the community. As
with the magazine, users will be able to comment on the makers and their products.
Where Reality Sandwich provides a medium for ideas, Evolver
Exchange is a platform for tangible objects and services that could be
considered ideas expressed in usable forms. We hope that the Evolver Exchange
will develop in a similar "open source" manner to the magazine. In other words,
the growth of the project will require our community to tell us what it wants,
and for people to step forward with their creations and inventions.
Almost anything that can be retailed can, conceivably, be
put up on the site. In the future, we plan to introduce other mechanisms for
trading value that can supplement or substitute for cash-based transactions.
However, this requires a level of complexity that was not possible at this
phase of our development.
We look forward to learning from you as we launch the
Evolver Exchange. We are sure we will make mistakes in the early phases, as we
set up our system and learn what works for us. We hope you will be forgiving,
and supportive, as we enter into this next exciting phase of our
development.