Exactly. I would also like the Neighbourhood Makita toolbox. But then, who has the incentives to make this work? Who tracks down the person that keeps it for two months? Who sources this stuff? Who sets the budget? What else is there? A community gym? Well, top quality stuff is thousands, and there are many kinds of gym - weightlifting, gymnastics, boxing... What other resources would you want?
There's no way any of this could happen and actually be good. It's just... thermodynamically going to end up crap. There are so many ways for a commons system to be shit, and only one way for it to be good.
I have the "Neighbourhood Makita toolbox" today: Max across the street is into woodworking and lends his tools freely & happily rents you his time for the price of a beer or two. David will let you pull your car into his garage for an oil change because he has a nice car lift. I'm less useful, but lift my share of heavy things & set my share of fence posts and am always around when their computers act up.
When I was younger I grew up in a rural area with decent poverty, and this went even deeper. Farmers knew they could each get a small mower that takes forever to clear their field, or could pool their cash and share one big PTO-driven Bush Hog that did the job better & faster. There wasn't any worry about "who keeps it nice": you washed it and sharpened the blades if needed when you were done because you know your neighbor washed it and sharpened the blades when he was.
Is the rub that Cory talks about "the library" being the source, giving a vision of some faceless Other going to a big building downtown and renting the drill in exchange for their library card, nothing else, with no incentive to keep it nice for the next person? Maybe that's it; I'd argue, however, that a 15-minute city implies more libraries serving fewer people, so the Other isn't faceless, it's Max or Dave.
Maybe "the library" concept reeks too much of socialism for the average individualistic American.
But the tool library near me is a group of old guys who volunteer to run it out of a church basement. No faceless Other, just a community of people who want to work with others and put in the work to keep it going.
If not you, then some of us somewhere will be sharing the tools with him. He'll dump our community's tools in the quarry, or set them on fire with thermite. You know, so it will go viral.
He'll be ordered to do restitution, but that won't help me when it takes 12+ months to replace them (if indeed he ever does pay the restitution). Some communities will institute laws to prohibit such people from the tool libraries for life, but that will be struck down because now that no one can have their own tools, prohibiting him from the library leaves him tool-less and it violates his human rights. I mean, even I can't argue against that logic. It'd be true, my arguments would only amount to that it would still be just.
It's not a weird train of thought. It's the correct train of thought. It's how I do my work. I imagine the various things that can go wrong, and then I design solutions to prevent those.
Apparently you work in a completely different tech field where you just imagine scenarios where nothing ever goes wrong, and "poof" they appear in reality in a puff of smoke like magic.
See, this is where you're just inventing an entire hypothetical oppressive regime to support your meandering train of thought. You've decided you don't like tool libraries. That's fine, you do you. I'll enjoy my tool library that continues to be great, despite your protests that reality can't be real.
Also, that's not correct thinking. Like, apolitically, I hope your work isn't paying you for that. Thinking of ways things can go wrong is great. Skipping the part where you weigh the odds of things going wrong and how to mitigate that and then declaring "there's no way this can possibly work" is not something you should be admitting to publicly.
I did in my time. Survived it just fine.
Neal Stephenson did a whole thing about the Hole Hawg, you'd think Cory Doctorow of all people would have read it.
I doubt either exists now, but I'm sure the buses do. They don't smell. The cleaning contract for the buses will have been outsourced to the lowest bidder, but they still do the job.
Actually, the tool library probably still exists. I found one is Glasgow easily https://glasgowtoollibrary.com/borrow-tools/
But being cleaner than your perfect car isn't the requirement.
I also live in a city with one of the highest-rated public transit systems in the US. The buses don't smell and they're affordable and provide great jobs to thousands of city residents while making it possible to cross the city for $2.50 (or $5 for the entire day.)
And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. You're welcome to own your own set of tools if you don't want to use the libraries (I own a set of my own, but it can be much smaller because I can always pop by the library for something I don't own.) The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
We're not talking about a tool club with limited membership and everyone that wants to be part of it (and therefor quite likely behaves themselves). We're talking about doing that to an entire country, and dismantling some or all of the infrastructure that would allow others to "opt out" of such nonsense.
It's great that your public transit system is awesome and as clean as a hospital operating room with butt-massaging warmed-seat seating. I don't give a shit about the best public transit system... I'm worried about the worst. Personal experience shows me that in such cases, I'm much more likely to have to deal with the worst of X, than I ever am to deal with the best of X.
> And lastly, no one is talking about "forcing" you to do anything. Y
Yeh, they are. No one who's not a gullible cretin believes otherwise. That's just your propaganda strategy early on. But if we get to a point a few years from now where one of the advocates is frustrated in public and loses his cool, or where you've managed to neutralize some of the opposition, then the truth will come out. You just can't afford to be honest right now.
I even allow that you personally know nothing of the agenda, but that you're just parroting the party line, as a loyalist would. True believer, you can't even imagine that it would be anything other than the truth. That's even more pathetic.
> The commons are opt-in, aside from the rare cases where they need to be protected from people who refuse to be a part of the community that cares for the commons.
These commons are meant to crowd out the non-commons until nothing else exists. And no one with any sense believes otherwise.
Tool libraries work great. They can even utilize the free market so you don't have to get icky poor germs and can touch only tools used by other upstanding freedom-loving Libertarian tools, or whatever floats your boat.
He would love this if the drill he were to borrow was (more or less) in as good of shape as his own is now. But why would that be so? Do you want to ride around in a bus that has the odor and cleanliness of the worst car you've ever seen on those gross-out subreddits?
If book lending libraries don't have to deal with this (and I concede that they mostly don't have to), then it is down to the fact that the vast majority of people are semi-illiterate quarterwits who wouldn't be caught near a book if they thought there were hundred dollar bills hidden between the pages.
It seems to me sometimes that the same people who have always used the "tragedy of the commons" as a counter-argument to any libertarianish comment I made are now turning around and wanting to force me to live that same tragedy of the commons. The pro-"you'll own nothing and like it" aren't very convincing to me, not even his "neighborhood drill" version. He's playing good cop to their bad cop, but the grift's still the same.