Borrow a Drill, Save the World

The high leverage point for systemwide change is not an idea, but a behavior

Man borrowing a drill from his neighbor, in an AI universe. This could happen here.

I’ve been telling this one story a lot in my talks, but realize I never shared it right here at home. If you’ve heard it, cool - here’s an easy way to share it with those who you think might benefit or get a kick out of it. And if you haven’t, well, it’s become core to my approach to life, politics, activism, economics, and taking this world back from the systems devised to disconnect us from one another, and reality itself.

Let’s do it as a thought experiment - change the names so we can protect the innocent.

When my kid graduated middle school, we got this big portrait of her for me to hang in the living room. But we have these old plaster walls, so I needed to drill a hole to hang it. Problem is, I don’t have a drill. So, what to do? Like any middle class American, the first impulse is to go to Home Depot and get the cheapest available drill for $39.97 plus tax. Some rechargeable piece of crap that I’ll use this once, then put it in the garage and never use again. Or maybe I’ll eventually take it out in two years, find it won’t take a charge, and then just throw it out.

So to make one hole in the wall, I send kids into mines at gunpoint to get the rare earth metals to fabricate the thing; I spend God knows how much fuel to ship the finished product from China to the US, creating a huge carbon footprint in the process; then I throw it out so it can be shipped to Brazil, dumped on a mountain of industrial waste, and scavenged by one of a legion of impoverished children looking for toxic garbage to sell, who takes it apart to find the single renewable element and receive a couple of pennies from a reseller who delivers it to a Chinese smartphone plant so some Silicon Valley company can claim it does green manufacturing. Great. I’m part of the problem.

Or, I could summon the courage to walk down the street to my neighbor Bob’s house, knock on the door, and say “Bob, can I borrow your drill?” Bob has a drill. He’s got maybe three of them. He’s that guy. His garage door is open all weekend, and he’s got table saws and saw horses with doors that he’s routing and bannisters he’s lathing. This is what he does.

But no. Most of us, like me, are afraid to knock on Bob’s door. Not that he’s going to hit us or anything, but if I ask Bob to borrow his drill, I will unleash a chain of events I may not be prepared for. He will not only lend me his drill, he’ll say “Doug, I’m coming over with my drill and doing this for you.” He’s knows I’m a a writer. A nerd. “You don’t know how to find a stud, or set a sinker. It’s a plaster wall, Doug, you can’t just drill a hole. The picture’ll come down.”

So he’ll come over with his drill and his bits and his anchors and his stud finder. He will find the stud, and pull out his drill. It’ll a big, metal drill that plugs into the wall as God intended. He’ll drill the hole, set the anchor, screw in the thing, and hang the picture. Done. He’ll smile, tell me he likes the way we faced the couch in our identical house toward the living room window, and go home.

Why don’t I want that? Because that next weekend I’m going to have a graduation party for my daughter in the backyard. I’ll be barbecuing chicken and ribs for our friends and family, and the smoke is going to go over to Bob’s house, and he’ll think, “what the fuck? I went over and hung the graduation portrait of Rushkoff’s daughter and he couldn’t even invite me to her party? Are his ribs that fancy? Fucking liberals.”

So I invite Bob. And his wife, and his daughter. And his mother-in-law who lives with them and likes to sing. And they enjoy the ribs with us. But then some other neighbors are going to see Bob and his family over at our house eating ribs, and wonder why we invited Bob and not them. So I invite the whole block, and before long they’re bringing Cole slaw and brownies and a Sonos speaker and a spin art set…. and my daughter’s graduation barbecue has turned into a block party with everyone.

And that’s the nightmare! That’s what we’re afraid of!

Because now they’re in our backyard, and I find out Bob’s kid is having trouble in algebra, which my daughter could really help him with if she has any spare time. And his mother-in-law sees our piano and wonders if we want to do a sing-a-long. What are we doing next weekend? Christmas is coming right up. If we’re not careful, we’ll have the whole block over for Christmas, singing songs in the living room, exchanging presents, have a big meal together…maybe our kids will like each other even though they’re in different “friend groups” at the prison yard otherwise known as the school cafeteria.

This supposed nightmare is really the community ideal. This is the good life. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America meets Norman Rockwell tradition meets Diego Rivera solidarity. It’s not just social; it’s political and economic.

Maybe someone else at the party hears about how this all started — with me borrowing a drill — and gets the idea that we create a little tool library for the block. “Why does every house need its own lawnmower?” she asks. “What if we got just two lawnmowers and two snowblowers for the whole block, and we share them?” No one uses a lawnmower all the time. We could each take an afternoon… And we only pull out the snowblowers two or three times a year.

So now, instead of just me sending fewer kids into the mines for rare earth metals by borrowing a drill instead of ordering up a new one, a whole block of people is buying fewer machines, sharing things, doing favors for each other. We’re replacing economic activity with social activity, learning each other’s names and needs. Creating a web of interactions and interdependencies instead of more personal expenses and corporate profit.

And the more we all do this for each other down here on the local level, the more resilient we are. The less dependent we are on tortuously long, convoluted supply chains for our stuff. The less stuff we need, the less money we have to earn and the less we have to work. The more we know our neighbors, the safer our neighborhood, the less environmental toll we take living in the separate little homes of suburban neighborhoods designed to promote individual consumption. And the more we know each other, the less easily we can be divided by ideological fictions and media-created factions.

But when I tell this story at a conference, invariably some business person gets up and says “Yeah, but with everybody sharing their tools, what happens to the drill company?” Before I can even say fuck the drill company, he says “they will have to lay people off. Their stock will go down. And the old lady who is depending on the dividends of a lawnmower company stock for her fixed retirement income? She won’t be able to support herself. If everybody does this, the whole economy will contract.

That’s logical, maybe, but since when are human beings here to serve the economy? The economy is here to serve us. If people don’t have to work as much or create as much toxic waste in order to meet everyone’s needs, that’s not a bad thing but a good thing. The five-day workweek is an artifact of the early Industrial Age. An arbitrary assignment of time, not some law of nature.

And the old lady who is depending on stock dividends to survive in retirement? What kind of society requires people to earn enough money during their working years to support themselves completely independently in their later years? Besides, as we develop the bonds of community and sharing, that woman becomes part of the fabric of our interactions. Not some obligation, but a privilege. We find out how useful she is, as someone to watch our kids, give us advice, provide us with an opportunity to serve. She’s not a liability but an asset. We should be competing for the privilege of inviting her to lunch or mowing her lawn or walking her to the grocery store. We’re putting the social back into socialism. It was never about the “ism,” but about the truly social nature of local transaction.

If it’s not the businessman criticizing the negative impact of community on the economy, it’s the progressive activist arguing that such small actions never create systemwide change. Reviewers often critique the endings of my books where I offer such solutions, saying they are “unsatisfactory” because they’re too small to make a difference. They don’t involve big policy changes or a macro-economic rethink, or sweeping regulation. These solutions don’t fix the big stuff, and don’t do anything to address economic inequality.

So which is it? Is sharing too much of a threat to the global economy, or too small to make a difference? Both critiques are trapped in the mindset of scale. As if everything has to or is going to happen all at once. It doesn’t. Because unlike big top-down solutions, making these kinds of changes to our behavior slowly impacts systems from the bottom up. We have time to adjust. They’re incremental, and full spectrum. Companies don’t simply fail all at once, but gradually lose their influence and dominance over our society and the ways in which we interact.

We can still be activists and march and call general strikes. But in the meantime, we become more resilient communities in the face of the inevitable shocks ahead. A neighborhood that knows how to work together and come to each other’s aid is going to be in a lot better position when the next extreme weather event happens — particularly when FEMA has been defunded. If it takes three months instead of three days for government help to come, the community will have the means to hold out together instead of fighting over generators in the Home Depot parking lot in an every-man-for-himself battle for survival. We don’t fortify our bunkers against each other but find ways of sheltering one another. We identify more with our block than our house, running extension cords to those without generators and taking in the elderly.

So yeah, borrowing a drill instead of buying a new one initiates a chain of events that really can change the world. A single act of heroic courage. Of being willing to knock on someone’s door and ask for something. To put yourself in someone else’s debt, and be able to tolerate a feeling of owing someone something, which used to be understood as good thing.

It’s why we bring brownies to someone when they move into the neighborhood. They don’t need a plate of brownies. They just moved in. Their kids are sleeping in a strange place for the first time, and they don’t need to be jacked up on Duncan Hines Double Fudge. We give them the brownies because it weaves them into the fabric of obligations. It’s not the brownies, it’s the plate that invites them to knock on our door and return it — maybe with something on it, or a story. The gift is the invitation for them to do something for us. To be grateful. Indebted. Neighbors.

In his Prison Notebooks, written under the repression of Italian Fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci said politics is downstream of culture. Nationalist extremists like Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon understood this one way — that we can use cultural fears and beliefs to shape the political landscape. But while politics may be downstream of culture, culture is downstream of rapport. If you don’t have rapport, then culture ends up being about difference.

The high leverage point for systemwide change is not some big idea or belief, but a behavior. A way of interacting that assumes each of our welfares are mutually dependent. That understands it’s not just more prosperous but more fulfilling, more fun, to do this thing together.

That to be truly human, means to be on team human.