In my basement, amidst the mess that is my tool room, sits a yellow drill.
It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, the minimum viable drill. It has one speed (superfast), and one torque setting, which, if left to its own devices would gladly take a stab at reaching the centre of the earth.
I can, if I feather the trigger just so, actually manage to drill a hole or screw in a screw without going through the wall and out the other side.
My wife hates it. But with a need to drill a hole, maybe five to ten holes a year, and maybe twice that number of screws, there’s no need for me to own a better drill.
If you were to look at the world from the eyes of that drill, you would think it’s entire existence was to sit around in my basement, usually with the last drill bit needed stuck in it. The times that it actually functions as a drill is a rounding error. 99.99 percent of the time, it sits there. Unused and unloved (especially not by my wife.)
I bought the drill thinking I needed a drill.
I didn’t. What I needed was the occasional hole in the wall. The occasional screw installed.
I was so caught up in the society we live in, the consumerism inspired by neoliberalistic capitalism, that I assumed that I needed a drill, instead of the benefits the drill provided.
But those benefits can be found in other ways.
I could, for instance, hire someone who owns a really nice drill to come and drill the holes for me.
Or, I could borrow a drill from a friend.
Indeed, Doctorow imagines a world where instead of merely books, the library has a drill. It’s not just the minimum viable drill, it is The Drill. With variable speeds and torque settings. It would be wireless, with an LED light and capable of screwing in the most delicate screws as well as cranking a one-inch hole through a 6X6 with the greatest of ease. It would be the best drill in the world. And it would be mine for the afternoon so I could hang a couple pictures before returning it.
That one drill could replace 50, 60, 100 crappy drills like mine. It would free up space in my house, it would save me money, frustration and time as I struggle with my crappy drill to do what I want it to.
So much of our lives is this way. Do we really need a car? Or do we just need a ride to work. Do we need to own a lawnmower, or could we just let a swarm of kids loose on the town every summer, to trim the verge, as it were?
What we want is not a fancy ride-on lawn mower to keep that 20 by 30 patch of grass under control for the four and a half months of the year we need to here in Tumbler Ridge. We need to keep that grass under control. And owning a lawnmower? Is only one way that happens.
We choose the lawnmower because it appeals to our sense of independence.
We choose ownership, because we are told that it is better to own what we need than to pay some kid to cut our grass. And as we struggle to get the mower started after a cold winter in the shed, as the gasoline has gummed up the fuel line and we pull fruitlessly on the cord for ten minutes, twenty, let us remember this.
Someone else could be doing this.
At the very least, we could have let someone else keep the lawnmower in good repair. Again, what if the library, or Southpaw or someone else had a few lawnmowers that you could rent for an hour or two every couple of weeks to keep your lawn under control? What if we didn’t have to own the mower?
Because we don’t want a lawn mower, we want a nice lawn.
Sure, there are people out there who are fixated on their mowers. Who love their automobiles. But there’s a whole lot of people who just want their lawn to look nice. Who just need to get from point a to point b.
And we don’t have to keep doing it the way it’s already been done.
Anyone who knows me, or who has been paying attention to these editorials knows that I am really enamored with the idea of electrical vehicles. Yes, they offer some environmental benefits, but they are these magic devices that you can plug into the wall of your house and charge. You can plug into a generator, and charge. They run on water and solar and coal and gas and diesel and nuclear power.
From the cleanest and greenest energy to the dirtiest and nastiest, as long as you can convert it to electricity, you can use it to run your car. (I saw someone try to charge an electric vehicle using a bunch of lemons; it didn’t work, but props for trying.)
But if all we do is replace internal combustion engines with electrical engines, we haven’t really changed much, have we? We still live in a society where car ownership is king, where you have gridlock in the city because driving is so much more convenient than a bus or an e-bike. And that doesn’t change our future. That doesn’t help free us from the chains of rampant consumerism.
There are steps. When Tumbler Ridge started, everyone drove out to work at the mine. Even though everyone started and left at the same time, they would take their own cars. Nowadays, many, if not most, catch the bus. It’s easier. Better. You can nap on the ride to or from the mine.
But what if, instead of owning a vehicle or two (or in the case of some of you, ten), we had a carshare program? Instead of spending hundreds of dollars a month to let your vehicle sit 95+ percent of the time, there was a handful of cars that we could use when we needed them, and when we didn’t, someone else could use them? How would that change the world?
What happens when we get past the current solution and find new and innovative ways to look at the problems in order to find better, less wasteful, more responsible solutions?
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
