How the Buy Nothing Movement Imploded

Kadafi's son was there. It was all really fun. I loved the promise of the sharing economy. Why should I own stuff I rarely used, like a vacation home or a lawnmower or a sex swing when I could just share them. The only thing that didn't work out for me was this site I used called Yurtle. The idea was that people would give and take items for free, and as a journalist, I sometimes get stuff for free, even though I tell people I'm not allowed to take it.

So I went on Yrtle, and I offered up this pair of really expensive genes that I would never wear, as well as this pair of goalie skates that the NHL gave me. No one took them, and they were free. So I saw how hard it is to give away stuff for free, and I was really impressed when two women figured it out, getting millions of people to share

free stuff through a group called by Nothing. What I didn't know was that even when you figure out a way to remove capitalism and create a community that really cares about each other, you can still piss people off, even when they're getting stuff for free, maybe especially then writing It's hard. Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to be Joe Stein until it turns on a mic mab it twiddles and knob because a journalist Frand has got in that jewal job of story.

Single story. Just listen to smart people speak conversation. Filming information is a story of Wahini Vara is a contributing writer at Wired and the author of the novel The Immortal King Rao. She followed the story of the two founders of Buying Nothing. It's a simple utopian concept, except that it's tethered to Facebook, which is more like an algorithmically controlled dystopian concept. Wahiny, thank you so much for coming on and teaching me about buying nothing. Now, explain,

how did your mom tell you about buying nothing? So I learned about buying nothing when my mom was living in West Seattle, in the Seattle area, which is where I grew up. It was around twenty fifteen, and my mom was like using it to get rid of all my old stuff and her old stuff and put it on buy Nothing. And I was like, buy nothing. What is this and she explained to me that it's this community.

At the time, it was like this community that was mostly popular in Washington, where people post in this Facebook group things that you wanted to get rid of, and then you could also post in the same Facebook group things that you needed, and people from your neighborhood would respond and say like, yeah, I've got that, or I

need Mom is like looking for old kombucha bottles. Yes, my mom had a phase, a big kombucha phase, and she would get like she got kombucha starter, I believe from they call them scobies, like the whatever that stuff is that you use. My wife had Jesus no, agreed, agreed. I was like, what is this? And you got up from a stranger. So she got us Scobee, I think

from buy nothing that is not fact checked. I know for a fact she got these old bottles and then she would fill them with kombucha and give those away. Do you think she was nuts or you thought this was cool? I thought she was nuts in the way that like you always like assume your mom is nuts, right, and like you learn about something new that your mom is doing awful, and then in retrospect objectively, I'm like, well that's a good way to be environmentally friendly. Okay.

So there are these two founders, Leesel Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller. They look to me like the women who run the Women and Women First bookstore in Portlandia. They're very idealistic women from Bambridge Island, which is this community to this island outside of Seattle, near where I grew up. And it's now like anything in Seattle, like it's now very bougie and expensive, but historically like it was thought of as this sort of granola community of like minded people,

like a lot of environmentalism. A lot of artists lived there, and they became friends actually through this other platform for giving things away, and they would like put things on this list, serve and then the moderator for that list Serve would be like, like, the things that you're giving away aren't really that great? Is a free cycle that

they were on? Yeah, they were on freecycle exactly, and Rockefeller had recently gotten divorced, she went, you said, from being working class to very poor, living on food stamps and medicaids. So she was using this list serve to get a lot of stuff and they were trying to give away stuff. At some point she tried to give away like twigs she had pruned, right, Rockefeller did yeah. Yeah, So she was giving away like all kinds of stuff.

They both were, and so she had she posted these twigs, and the moderator of the group wrote to her and was like, listen, lady, these twigs like this isn't a gift, can you not? And but it turned out somebody wanted the twigs, and the person who wanted the twigs was Leesela Clark, And so that's how these two women met. They both loved twigs. They love twigs, yes, And so lizel Clark then posts to Facebook to see if people would be interested in this idea of a less moderated

version of free cycle. They call it buy Nothing and people go nuts. They love this, right, yeah, So you know, within days they've got a hundreds of people in their town using this thing. Why do you think it works? Because there's already ways to give away free stuff, like

you said, like free cycle and other places. The founders talk a lot about how they feel that the reason it was so successful and really took off is that it was really community oriented and people like could give what they wanted and ask for what they wanted, and like it was so cozy. I believe there's another reason that it took off, which is that it was on Facebook.

Like it was one of these early communities to spring up on Facebook, and it made it so easy, and you would like come across people's buy nothing post when you were just surfing Facebook, and I think that played a big role plus compared to like Craigslist or freecycle.

When you don't see the person and learn something about them and know who their friends are, like you might feel much more comfortable and safe going to bring your twigs to someone's house if you saw their whole profile on Facebook exactly right, Like people will post on there, will comment in response to your posts saying like hey, I want those twigs. And if you can hover over their name and see that you know so and so in comment, or your kids go to the same school,

you're gonna feel uncomfortable. And so what sort of stuff is being given away? Because you list crazy things A used stick of deodorant that someone took, a half eaten

artichoke pizza that someone took. Absolutely yeah, and the list goes on, and then you have a crazy story about this couple who had a bunch of miscarriages that when I'm buying nothing, yes, so Liesel and Rebecca talk about this couple who had a bunch of miscarriages, and so they had some you know, some baby stuff that they had put on buy nothing and somebody said, yes, they wanted it, and they came over to pick it up.

And it turned out this person was coming over to pick up the stuff on behalf of a friend who was pregnant but didn't know if she wanted to keep the baby. And so eventually one thing led to another, and this family, this couple who had the miscarriages, ended up becoming the adoptive parents of this baby. No free baby. Yeah, that's amazing. As this thing is blowing up across the country.

How are Clark and rockefellerre managing this huge thing? Yeah, so they could They could have gone a bunch of ways, right, Like they started this thing in their community and it went really well, and then other people said, hey, we want to start this in our own community, and they

could have just been like, cool, go for it. But what they felt was that they had like a really strong sense of what they wanted by nothing to beat, and so they decided that every group would have to like sort of follow certain rules that they came up with. But these were all like sept individual Facebook groups that it wasn't a business, it wasn't a nonprofit. It was just like this network of Facebook groups, and they had to have all these administrators like read it almost who

are doing all the work? That's right, yes, because Facebook groups all have to be run by an administrator. They decided, Okay, each of these local Facebook groups will be run by an admin, and then we'll have another Facebook group that's like the hub, the admin hub, where all the local admins can belong to that and that's where worlds share information about what's new and help problem solve. And then they eventually had many, many, many thousands of groups in

the US and then internationally millions of members. And as that was happening, they started creating the system where they would have these like regional administrators to oversee the local ones and then global admins to oversee the regional ones.

And so it started looking a lot like some kind of corporate structure, right without any money exactly, And they had no money, and the moderators have to follow these ten rules of buying nothing, Yes, And the main one you talk about is that they have to keep it local through something called sprouting, because it's all about community exactly. So the idea is that when it reaches a certain size, like a thousand people, you have to break off into smaller,

geographical buy nothing groups, right, that's right. Yeah, So if the membership goes past a thousand, you're supposed to sprout into two or more smaller groups that are sort of geographically more compact. The idea is to like have a smaller environmental footprint and keep because you're driving not as far to drop off your twigs exactly exactly. Maybe you're walking, right,

maybe you don't have to drive. Because these groups are getting smaller and smaller, and they have this really what I think is a really kind of lovely, idealistic vision of these groups sprouting and becoming smaller and smaller and so small that eventually buy nothing doesn't have to exist anymore, because like your group is everybody on your block, and then you can just walk over to your neighs house and ask if they want a twig or whatever, right,

which is probably how it was for most of humanity. Right. And they're trying to re establish having people in a community, oh exactly, and that kind of politics of say twenty thirteen when they started bumps up against the politics of the Trump administration, you know, the time we're living we were living in twenty eighteen. And sprouting causes some trouble, yes,

very much. Though specifically in this place, Jamaica Plains, which is a suburb of Massachusetts that it's really liberal, right, Yeah, it's like a suburb or I think it's technically a

neighborhood of Boston. So in this community there were almost at five thousand people and they were getting pressure to sprout because that's what you're supposed to do, and they knew that their members would hate the idea because there would be worries about the process of sprouting sort of entrenching like the existing segregation and the legacy of redlining in their community, right, right, Because the idea of sprouting has a beautiful idea of community, but it means that

you're going to be with people of your exact same demographic because of real estate prices. So you know, if you're in a rich neighborhood, you're only going to be trading your super expensive twigs with your rich neighbors, whereas if you geographically expand it, poorer people can get your really sweet twigs. Yeah, and so what happened in this community is that members totally kind of revolted and we're like, this is horrible. We're worried about segregation, We're worried about redlining.

And then what happened was that some of the regional admins started jumping into the conversation and pushing back and saying, you know, this is what buy nothing is all about. You have to sprout, and tempers got heated and it all kind of blew up, and eventually Lisa Clark, one of the co founders, got pulled into the situation and

said something. She used some language about how she was quote unquote saddened by the behavior of this local group, and then everybody got really really mad because it felt like she wasn't understanding what the underlying problem was. And she eventually apologized, but a bunch of damage had already been done. But I mean, how do you fix that tension between wanting things to be hyperlocal and you to know your neighbors and wanting to connect people in disparate

socioeconomic and racial groups who don't live in the same neighborhood. Yeah, I mean, one thing they could have done is like loosen things a little and said, like, hey, we do want you to sprout, but you should figure out how to sprout on your own and make sure you come up with lines that don't reinforce segregation in the legacy of redlining, for example, Right, But that's not what they did.

We'll find out what Clark and Rockefeller are actually did soon, but first we have ad for things you actually have to buy because we're late capitalist pigs. Lizel Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller have this wildly popular group on Facebook called buy Nothing, which is like this utopic idea of a Facebook group for your hyperlocal neighborhood that shares free stuff. But in twenty eighteen, it's starting to splinter in Jamaica Planes Boston, this incredibly liberal area, and it's fighting about

really racial politics. So how did Clark and Rockefeller decide to handle this situation in Jamaica Planes? So they did this whole kind of rethinking of Buy Nothing, and when they came out of the other side of that rethinking, they decided that what they needed to do was like get rid of the requirement for sprouting altogether and let communities do it if they want, but not make it a requirement. So they form an equity team to figure out how to be actively anti racist and anti appression.

There was an argument about whether Buying Nothing's rules of enforced civility were kind of classist and racist too, right, Yeah, So there were all these things that got brought into it.

Buy Nothing had historically had this language about like being kind and being civil, and the argument was made that was sort of being deployed in a way that was shutting down people from non majority, non dominant backgrounds, right, like a person of color or a queer person or whatever, who would maybe have a complaint and like state it in a pissed off way about something that was happening in our local group, for example, like people offering Confederate

flags or people offering quote unquote Native American costumes right for Halloween. And then they would get accused of being unkind right because they're living now in a time where everything is political and they're on Facebook where everyone fights about politics now, which is not when they join Facebook what Facebook was like. So they're wondering if maybe Facebook is the problem. Plus everyone's turned on big tech, so

they start to think that Facebook's the problem, right exactly. Yeah, So they start to think, wait a minute, we created this idealistic community all about buying nothing, all about sort of like standing outside of capitalist structures. But oh no, the place where this exists is sort of like the most capitalists of structures of all. So they decide they

want to get off Facebook entirely. They want to make this a big move and divest themselves from it, and they're going to do it on Black Friday of twenty nineteen, which is celebrated as buy Nothing Day in buy nothing world. Yes, they post this announcement on buy Nothing Day, is saying they are starting a platform called soup Soop, which stands for share on our platform, and it is going to be this like independent platform, and they don't want it

to have anything to do with corporate interests. And so what they're doing is they're going to their community to tell them about it first, and they have a little website they've set up where they're going to take donations. And so what happens after they make this announcement is

there's a mini revolt in their community. And the reason is that another one of the rules of buy Nothing is that you don't go on buy Nothing and ask for money, which they have just done by saying, Hey, we're starting our own platform, can you give us money to fund it? Oh, then that's like the first rule of fight club. I mean, that's a serious rule. I mean it's called by nothing, and to be fair, some people feel that way, and other people think it's a

good idea and they donate. But at this point they have millions of people using buy Nothing, but they raise less than twenty thousand dollars, which in the world, as you know, Joel, the world of tech is like not a lot of money to build. I guess when people are giving each other twigs, twenty thousand is about right, ye, right,

twenty thousands actually a lot of money. So it should be noted that because they raised only twenty thousand dollars, when they tried to build their own platform, they ended up like just scrapping the idea and giving all the

money back and continuing to grow on Facebook. So while this fight is brewing, the pandemic happens and everyone is stuck at home and buy Nothing like so many other things, just blows up, right exactly, And so they went from like from nothing in twenty thirteen to four million members

during the pandemic. They added about a million members during that first period of the pandemic because people were staying home and not going to stores and going on Facebook and trading things on Buy Nothing because they realized that could keep them from from having to shop, and probably they wanted social interaction, yeah, absolutely, And people were sharing like you know, masks and over the counter medications and

pandemic related things too, and supporting each other. And there were places where it became a kind of like mutual aid that was happening as part of the pandemic, with you know, neighbors just like coming together in informal ways supporting one another, and then at some point they decide that they really need to get off Facebook, and they need to do it by starting their own company, which

they must know is going to piss people off. Yeah, so what was happening during the pandemic was there were just these two women who were working these really you know, nine hour days on top of having other jobs, having families. They're literally they have millions of people doing this and they're not making anything, right, yeah, exactly, and so they really start to feel like they're reaching some kind of

breaking point. And then they get this message from a man named Tunji Williams, a former lawyer who had started a tech company fairly successfully. This is when a man finally enters the scene. This is when trouble is going to start. I'm very sure that's the first man in this story, right. So they get a message from this man, Tenji Williams. They get on the phone and they decide that they this time are really going to start something together.

And unlike the previous time where they really were idealistic about it and thought they would just raise money from their community and be scrappy about it, this time they realize that that didn't work and they're just going to start a company and raise money in a more traditional way at first through family and friends, and so this time they raised one hundred thousand dollars. So they decide to start this company, which they must know is going

to annoy people, but they proceed anyway they do. I mean, I think they have a sense that there could be tension. I don't think they realize at the outset how hard it is to do what they're trying to do, how hard it is to take this like thriving Facebook based community, which thrives in part because of all of these things Facebook has built into its platform to get all of us to keep coming back to Facebook, right, and you know,

all these things that you don't even think about. It's not just like it's not just the programmers who build Facebook and provide the platform or the computing power. It's also it's also like an aspect of the marketing. Right. It's the fact that if you're on Facebook, buy nothing is going to pop up because you're in the buy

nothing group, and so you'll see people's posts. Whereas if you need to use an independent app to be on buy Nothing, you have to remember to open that app and you know, you can't see whether you have friends in common with the other people on the app. You can't see where they went to college. Right, Yeah, there's just something about seeing everyone's face and their life that makes this a more welcoming kind of warm community. Like as much as you want to hate Facebook, the original

idea of Facebook still works in that way. Yeah, yeah, that's right, And so their app just sucks. Right, I've tried the app obviously, while reporting on the story, I spent a lot of time on the app, and it is a little more maybe even less free cycle than like a Craigslist or something, Right, So that was one issue. But then as you said, also they had one hundred thousand dollars at first, that still not that much money.

They eventually raised another like four hundred thousand dollars also in the world of tech, not a lot of money. And so they subcontracted the building of this app to this like development shop in Poland, which made a version of the app that's especially at first like kind of clunky, kind of buggy in general, like it wasn't a very robust experience, and they are the rules of the app that you have to sprout, like is it about having a local community or is it about rich import trading

their couch duffing. So through that Jamaica plane experience, the founders became so convinced that this idea of sprouting that they built into the original idea was wrong and misguided that they decided that in the app there shouldn't be any boundaries at all. So what you do is, if you have the app, you open the app and you say, I'm interested in giving things to and getting things from people within either like a point five mile radius or

a twenty mile radius. And then they try to figure out how they're going to make money in this company that they've launched, and they're screwed because it's called buy Nothing. So what can they possibly do? It's so hard, Yeah, I mean, they just keep coming up against the fact that they're buying nothing, right, and so they have kind of made a promise that they're not gonna like run targeted ads, and they're also not going to mind people's

personal data. The idea that is the most straightforward and logical that they had was to allow people to post on buy Nothing that they would help with things like delivery or fixing things. So yeah, so like if I have a couch and usual want a couch, but neither of us have trucks, somebody can offer to drive my couch to you, and then we have to pay that person and buy nothing. Takes a cut. Okay, so it's a pay to pay for labor because you're still not

buying anything. And so people don't dig that. I assume people don't love these ideas. No um. But then furthermore, they're running out of money, right, So they're going out to Silicon Valley and they're they're paying for this out of their own pockets. They're in the red, right, Yeah, and lisl Clark is covering the business expenses, which are about five thousand dollars a month, which isn't nothing at all.

And they've tried to raise money from Silicon Valley. They send some emails, you know, they send some messages through the website's of venture capital firms. They have no connections, they have no idea like how to reach these people, but they try and it's nothing. You know, they get some responses but no money. But also they have a company, which is where people don't spend money. It's a tough sell. Yeah, it's tough, Yes, absolutely, and they're still on Facebook, right. Yeah.

They posted information on their website that you could use to start your own Facebook group if you wanted, but they weren't deeply involved in that formally at all. They were focused on this app that really not a ton of people were using, and Facebook. The Facebook groups were really continuing to grow and grow, and by last year they were up past seven million people. Meanwhile, there's this one woman is particularly pissed off, Andrea Schwalb. Where is

she and why is she? Some hat? So? Andrea Schwalb is a long time buy Nothing admin and she has been getting gradually more and more pissed off at the various changes that are taking place at buy Nothing. She starts her own like rogue buy Nothing group. It's called

Gifting with Integrity og Buy Nothing Support Group. Yeah, yeah, no absolutely, Andreas started like including all these old buy nothing documents that harken back to the kind of earlier way of doing things at buy Nothing, including sprouting and not talking about money. But this has to piss them off. They've tried to start this company and instead everyone's still doing the free thing on Facebook, and so eventually they try and stop them, Right, they go to war with

their own people. Yes, so they trademarked the phrase buy nothing. Actually, that's got to be hard, actually, yeah right, it's I mean, it's it's ironic, it's really interesting. But they're a business now, right, So it's also it's both like kind of like what they did? What? How could you do that? And so they trademark this phrase, and they filed a complaint to Facebook about the OG group, saying this OG group has

nothing to do with us. They're a totally separate thing, but they have buy Nothing in their name, and they're making people think that they're representatives of buy Nothing and they're not. So that OG group what they did was they scrubbed everything buy Nothing related from their Facebook groups, from their documents, from their website, and they kind of like re emerged as something called just Gifting with Integrity. So how big is Gifting with Integrity versus the original

Buy Nothing? To be fair, the original Buy Nothing is still orders of magnitude larger than Gifting with Integrity, But Gifting with Integrity does have thousands of admin members, and in fact, my local group in Fort Collins is one of these groups. And my local group in Fort Collins is now called something else. It's now called the Northeast Fort Collins Gifting Community. No integrity, no integrity, interesting thing. Yeah, what do you think is going to happen here? I

hate to speculate. I'm a reporter. I hate to speculate. This could go either way, right or third way? Yeah, I really and I should I should say that as I was, you know, all this drama was unfolding, and I thought the story was finished, and I thought I'd written the last sentences. I had a draft where I'd written the last sentences that were like, Okay, you know, it doesn't look like doesn't look good for Buy Nothing.

But then I had a last couple of phone calls with the founders and they told me that actually, and maybe it was because they were re engaging with Facebook. I don't know why, but the numbers of users of the app had recently gone up. Maybe they now have all the ingredients in place to figure out how to make this out work, or maybe not. Who knows. Wahini Vara, you wrote the Battle for the soul of Buy Nothing for Wired Magazine. Thank you for telling us about it.

Thank you for having me. This was fun. I signed up for my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook. It's been almost six days and it hasn't accepted my request. So because I wasn't admitted, I turned to the second best thing. There's an Instagram account that posts the best

of buy nothing, or at least the weirdest. I found a Tommy Chung autographed thong, toilet paper roll, binoculars, an iPhone three G still in its packaging, a chandelier made out of Barbie dolls, Chrissy Teagan's Cravings cookbook, and a life size cutout of George Clooney, which I will be inquiring about. Get Ready los velis buy Nothing group. I am coming in hot. At the end of the show, what's next for joel Stein? Maybe he'll take a never poke around online. Our show today was produced by Mola

Board and Nisha Bencutt. It was edited by Lydia Gencott. Our engineer is Amanda kay Way and our executive producer is Katherine Girado. And our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton. And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer laurenz Alaska. To find more Pushkin podcast, listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein, and this is the story of the week.

What's the last thing you got off? If you're buy Nothing group? My son was in a summer theater production and I'm in the group, but I'm not that active, So I asked my mom to post it. I was like, mom, can you post something ask for like something that could be part of a leopard cut costume. And she posted in like within hours somebody had offered a leopard tail and leopards. That's really specific. That's amazing, it's great. I highly recommend it.