Illustration By Stan Squires.

When they’re not shaving their genitals, updating their Facebook status, or shopping for designer labels, the kids of today occupy themselves by exchanging celebrity gossip in screechy American accents. At least that’s the impression you might have if you’re across media stereotypes about a selfish, narcissistic, fame-obsessed “Generation Me”. While these labels are based on legitimate studies and observable trends they tend to be exaggerated and they don’t come close to telling the full story.

A more complete picture of Gen Y acknowledges that they are also inclined to be family-centric, tech-savvy, achievement-focused, team-orientated and engaged about environmental and social issues. Some sociologists go much further, arguing Gen Y are powerful agents of change who are using technology to radically improve the world.

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers are in the corner for the Millennials. In their book What’s Mine Is Yours (The Rise of Collaborative Consumption) they argue that young people are moving us away from an ownership-based society towards a far healthier collaborative model. Sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping instead of owning, in simple terms. While the planet will benefit as a result, the driving force behind the touted change is not eco responsibility but simply because it’s hell smarter.

Free access to digitised music is where the collaborative trend is likely to have begun. The Napster lesson was clear: you don’t need to own music (or movies or books or power tools, etc) so long as you can access them. Just as you don’t necessarily need to own a car if you’ve got access to transport. A little bit of stuff is good, too much is a drag.“The young are leading the way toward collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them,” Time magazine enthused recently.

Botsman and Rogers have filled their book with scores of growing collaborative trends: the open software movement, crowd sourcing, Netflix, Zipcar, Snapgoods, Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Flicker, and Freecycling to name just a few. The internet is the linking factor in all of these enterprises. Botsman and Rogers see the net as a genuine community builder and a far more powerful agent of change than the activist movements of the sixties and seventies. “Social networking is probably the most inclusive and culturally disruptive development of our time,” they argue.

Where do surfers fit into this brave new world? Given that we were firmly entrenched in the counter culture revolution of the sixties and seventies it would be nice to think that we are early adopters of what is likely to be a far more profound game changer. And we sort of are. The internet is increasingly where we gather to discuss surf issues, dissect surf contests or just to take a lazy, anonymous swing at the ASP/the surf industry/the surf media. In addition, some Gen Y pro surfers are becoming their own media outlets. Dane Reynolds’ wildly popular Marine Layer Productions website is the perfect example. Reynolds himself is a surf star unlike any other and one who could take surfing in any number of directions.

But you won’t find leaders of the collaborative movement in surfing, or anywhere else for that matter, because it’s not really a movement at all. The most promising aspect of the shift away from excessive acquisition is that it seems to be happening independently in a thousand different places and a hundred different forms. There’s a sense that it’s evolving all by itself.

Gen Y may be at the centre of many of these changes but they aren’t a collective of righteous do-gooders. Statistics suggest they are as competitive, commercial and ambitious as any other generation in history. Maybe more so. But they are not valueless nihilists either. Many of them are smart enough to realise the planet cannot support our current levels of consumption for much longer. And when it comes to existential threats like global warming they simply have more skin in the game.

Says Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and creator of philanthropy social networking site, Jumo: “It’s not that we’re more responsible, it’s that we make smarter choices. We know, and I mean really know, that money doesn’t equal happiness. We know what’s important and what’s not. We still buy a lot but we don’t buy needlessly.”

– Kirk Owers

Note: This article first appeared in Tracks magazines June 2011 edition