Once upon a time, we used to know the people we bought from—the butcher, the baker, the blacksmith, the farmer. We used to know the people we sold to, the neighbors in our village. All that knowledge got lost a long time ago, when the Industrial Revolution ushered in the product era. But it’s coming back in a big way. And in the process, we’re getting rid of a lot of stuff we never really needed in the first place—planned obsolescence, the landfill economy, the whole concept of ownership itself.
