This is an extract from Lily Cole’s book, Who Cares Wins, where she describes the founding of the original Impossible, a platform designed to connect people to trade skills and services for free:

‘Could technology,’ we conjectured, ‘connect people to trade directly, without money in between?’ The idea seemed to bubble up through our conversation, like a gift, until it landed on the fairly anti-climactic suggestion of ‘a website’ – and then we sat in silence for a moment, pondering. Why does that not already exist?

The 2008 financial crash philosophically and politically stirred our society. Though people have been questioning ‘the system’ for many years, a whole generation of young thought-leaders – many of whom I have discussed in this book – make a claim to 2008 as a radical turning point in their thinking.

The crisis revealed the insecurities in our system: cracks begging to be filled with new visions. Although governments bailed out the banks, the Occupy tents were dismantled and business as usual was resumed; bolstered by harsh austerity, yet the crisis had planted seeds in the minds of many, now yielding wild flowers worldwide.

Crisis often provokes growth of a different kind. Necessity is the mother of reinvention. After the economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, widespread barter networks developed as a mechanism for survival. It is estimated that between 4 and 7 million people participated.

In a similar vein, in Spain in 2012, when unemployment averaged 25 per cent, there were 325 TimeBanks – allowing people to exchange their time – and alternative local currencies appeared in different towns. In Greece, when unemployment topped 20 per cent in 2011, the town of Volos turned a local vet’s office into an informal community centre, and launched an online barter network using a new currency.

The conditions under which these systems arose were deeply anxiety-inducing, and they were more a means of survival than an experiment in alternative ways of living. Nevertheless, they reflect the resourcefulness that people exhibited, and in different circumstances, we might learn from them how to build resilience into our own systems.

Now, more than a decade after the 2008 financial crash, in the midst of an environmental emergency and ever haunted by the possibility of recession, is it high time to question some of our deepest assumptions?

What would our world look like if money and the need to earn it played less central roles in our lives? If economic growth and GDP weren’t our countries’ primary metrics? Can we foster a shadow economy of gifts and favours? What could we learn about trust, community and sustainability from groups who are exploring these questions? Would these shifts make us happier? Would they better insulate us to deal with crisis? And which elements of this vision are already all around us, waiting to emerge and grow? 

Trust involves the delicate juxtaposition of people’s loftiest hopes and aspirations with their deepest worries and darkest fears.

Morton Deutsch, The Resolution of Conflict 

According to most anthropologists, the gift economy, dependent on mutual reciprocity and trust as a currency, is the most ancient way that Homo sapiens interacted with one another. From gatherer-hunter economies to the Kula ring exchanges in Papua New Guinea, this was the norm long before barter began, gold was mined from the earth, or silicon enabled numbers to appear on screens.

My imagination was gripped by the radically different alternatives to our society that [Marcel Mauss, The Gift] described. One of his investigations was of potlatches organized by indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest and US. ‘Potlatch’ means ‘to give away’. A potlatch would typically mark an important event, such as a birth, wedding, death or coming-of-age ceremony, involving communal feasting and reciprocal gift-giving. The potlatch was the tribes’ main economic activity, and social reputation was established according to who could give the most. There was also significance in receiving: chiefs would establish their power through gifts to visitors – by accepting the gifts, visitors would be showing their approval.

[Marcel] Mauss argued that these communities believed in an almost spiritual force that would bind the giver and the receiver. Gifts were always in motion, and an implicit trust in their being reciprocated kept the relationships among the community alive.

Gift economies required and offered a deep trust that one’s needs would be met. In the Sepik Coast area of Papua New Guinea, families would form alliances with other families through the practice of giving objects such as baskets, wooden bowls or tobacco. When they travelled between towns, they would bring gifts to their contact family who would house and care for them. Families might have up to seventy-five contacts cross-generationally, and through the vast quantity of gifts exchanged, their needs would generally be met.

My reading wound me back to the journey I had begun with Dr James Suzman all those years earlier in Botswana, trying to learn about and from the San. In twenty years of studying San communities and their histories and practices, James concludes that they offer the most sustainable model of human living ‘if the ultimate measure of sustainability is endurance over time’. Nine-tenths of human history was lived as gatherer-hunters.

James argues that the success of the San is rooted in ‘having few needs that are easily met’, a culture of sharing (i.e. the gift economy), a disdain of waste, a lack of hierarchy (practised through ‘insulting the meat’), and a deep trust in providence – that the environment always provides. (This sentiment is echoed in the contemporary gift economy experiment, Burning Man, where people often declare that ‘the playa provides’.)

According to Mauss and James, these communities seem to harbour a sense of abundance, a trust that everyone’s needs will be met, and a measure of wealth in relationships. In London where I grew up, I was hungry for community, poor in connection in ways I didn’t even realize. I also felt this constant sense of fear surrounding our security: perhaps because my mum was poor, perhaps because fear is the natural offspring of the competitive nature of our system, perhaps because we were missing community. 

Reading Mauss, I found myself wondering, could a movement back towards community and sharing be replicated in our culture, in which we rely on vast anonymous networks of people to navigate our daily lives? Is it natural to pass tens, hundreds – some- times thousands – of people each day, and rarely say hello? Why are mental health issues so high in modern ‘affluent’ societies? Are sharing and mutual- ism our natural ways of being?

I wanted to see if technology could re-catalyse deep-rooted patterns of human behaviour in cities to help build bridges between individuals and encourage the social, community-rich behaviour you find in pre-capitalist tribes or smaller communities around the world.

I also wanted to see if we could grow the culture of sharing, which does already exist in our society, to coexist on a stronger footing with our monetary one – for reasons of social and psychological value, sustainability, and also as an insurance policy against the next economic crisis we might meet. As our climate crisis escalates, this seems more essential than ever.

Many people thought I was crazy and/or naive. But it was worth trying. 

Attempting the Impossible

Impossible was built by its own ideas. So many people loved the idea, and got on board, that I soon felt the responsibility of a captain sailing a ship that had already left the port. 

We decided to design Impossible as a social network because that felt like a natural home for building a community. I have never been particularly adept at using software tools, so I made a few attempts in hiring people to create ‘wireframes’ for me. Yet everytime they failed to realize the images I had in my head. 

I started to get frustrated, then I had a breakthrough moment: why don’t I just collage them?! Late one Sunday I stayed up through the night, cutting and glueing together a design for the website. But there was one thing I couldn’t figure out: what do you replace money with?

Conceptually I was clear in my mind that I didn’t want to replace it with money by a different name i.e. an alternative digital coin or token system. There were already plenty of experiments in that space, from TimeBanks, to local currencies, or cryptocurrencies. Whilst these initiatives offered interesting developments, they weren’t seeking to move away from an exchange system. I was looking to design a gift-based system that would release all those happy chemicals and make social bonds. 

That said, I could see it would be really difficult to establish trust and mutual reciprocity in this context. Research suggests that the human brain can manage to remember up to 150 people, and then it gets hard. How do you build reputation and trust in giant mega-cities of millions of people? I considered a rating system - like eBay - as a way to establish a reputation, but it hardly felt appropriate to rate someone after they had done a favour. 

Through a chain of mutual friends, I met with the ingenious Tea Uglow, who was running Google’s Creative Lab, and became a turning point of inspiration for the project. Tea and I were sitting in the Google Café in London - essentially a posh kindergarten - and I was telling her about the idea. I talked about the currency of gratitude I was trying to establish. At this point, I was thinking about an abundant currency: one that you could ever earn but not spend; that allowed users to see who was more active and generous on the network, and thereby potentially reward them. Tea’s mind buzzed around circles at hundred miles an hour, reaching out the cosmos and then back again. ‘Well, why don’t you call it Thanks?’ she ventured. And there, like that, so simply, was our solution. A thanks currency. 

My grandmother always enjoined our family 

to be forever practicing the discipline of gratitude. Impossible really is the giving tree, 

in practice, on a global scale and with constant regeneration.

Chelsea Clinton, at the US launch of Impossible

The other central concept in the platform we developed was that of wishing. I had long been drawn to the idea as a universal language: around the world are trees, ponds and walls that enshrine the idea of wish. I first encountered a wishing tree at a temple in a park in Tokyo: you write your wish on a wooden plaque and hang it on the tree for the cosmos to fulfil. I wanted to take this idea and ground it: by showing your wish to your community, it becomes a conversation, and it might just come true.

The other challenge to design was the legal structure to sit Impossible in: making it a charity felt instinctively cumbersome and disempowered, but a business wasn’t appropriate. In researching the possibilities for ‘social business’ I happened to meet Professor Muhammad Yunus - the ex-economics teacher who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for micro-finance. He is now dedicated to championing non-dividend social businesses that are set up to solve problems and reinvest 100 per cent of profits back into their purpose.

We travelled to Bangladesh, where a group of other enthusiasts and I followed Professor Yunus through the villages with wicker huts designated ‘banks’; and examples of social businesses that his work had inspired. I left clear about why I had come: gifted with a vision of capitalism that could be evolved to become an agent of positive change. When we returned to London, with the generous help of our lawyers we made Impossible the first ‘Yunus Social Business’ in the UK. 

You give but little when you give of your 

possessions. It is when you give of yourself 

that you truly give.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Over the course of the next year, Impossible managed to attract more than 100,000 users in 120 countries worldwide. Meaningful connections were made between individuals who would never otherwise have found each other, and I received more messages and emails from users to thank me for the people they have met through the platform than for the gifts they received. The community was eclectic and diverse, with active members from Ghana and Australia, to the US and UK. The ages ranged from teenage to octogenerian, and it was roughly equal in terms of gender split. 

Personally, I received cooking, piano, driving and French lessons, and even hosted a train enthusiast from Scotland to help me build a model train set. I let people borrow my flat when I was away, gave advice on sustainable fashion, provided the voice for an arthouse film and played the role of witness to two Italian women’s wedding in Cambridge.

We developed an editorial platform capturing some of the stories: a heartbroken girl who had lost her camera was sent one from a sympathetic user; a hard-up couple got a free haircut before their wedding day; a tent was donated for a homeless man in winter; Christmas and Thanksgiving lunches were hosted for strangers in others’ homes. Small, simple and human gestures. Most of the actions through Impossible were difficult to trace, and I would just catch ripples of what had happened when I met a member who would say anecdotally, oh, yes, I have been giving English or piano lessons through Impossible for years.

There was an emotional element to the wishes that I hadn't anticipated. One of our most popular posts, for example, was wishing for the war in Ukraine to end, whilst others wished for family members to get well. Of course, these weren’t actionable posts, but they created empathy and communal storytelling. Sometimes someone just needed to feel heard, receive advice or have their pain acknowledged. 

Our biggest community was in London, where we held regular events to bring people together. Usually, they would take a form of a workshop with someone sharing their skills with a group of people: such as Super 8 film-making or choral singing. Paul McCartney heard about what we were doing and offered a free music workshop to a group of thirty musicians, and my writer-director friend Joss Whedon gave an impromptu screenwriting session. We recorded some of these workshops and posted the content online and in a magazine, Impossible to Print. Impossible became very popular in Brazil and our tiny team had to hustle to add language filters to the platform. A postal gift economy developed where people posted letters and physical - often handmade - gifts to one another. 

Looking back, there was a real magic to these moments. Impossible wasn’t achieving the show-stopping, world-changing, level of success I had been hoping for - it wasn’t making a dent in the global economy - but it was demonstrating the promise was correct. People were showing with their words, actions and especially their time, that they wanted to be part of a community. That kindness is a currency of sorts. 

Difficult will be done immediately. Impossible takes time.

Road sign in Ladakh, India

Our attempt at the Impossible was in many ways about reclaiming the only thing we ever really own: time. Yet something that quickly became self-evident is that time is a luxury that some people simply cannot afford to give. People could manage one hour here or there, but generally we are very time poor. 

Our societies are working on average, two to three times longer hours than our gatherer-hunter ancestors  The gadgets and devices that promised to save us time - washing machines, cars, phones - are expensive to maintain; and many of us have been caught working hard in Charlie Chaplin’s wheels of Modern Times. 

When the world is wealthier than it’s ever been, and when time is such a precious resource, why are we so poor in it? Where did we go wrong? Can we get some of it back? Could working less save the planet, and our sanity alongside?

After struggling to find a way to financially sustain the gifting platform, in 2017, we stopped investing in it, and released the code we had built under an open-source licence. It has since been used by several communities - from a creative community in London to share favours to a refugee organization seeking to connect grass-roots organizations with volunteers. We pivoted Impossible as an organization to start working on other products and services under the guiding principle of ‘planet-centric’ design.

Impossible was created by the ideals it was conceived to promote. The gift economy wasn’t the app - it was a spirit to be tapped into. And the journey was proof of concept: most people like to give, are inherently kind, and want to be part of a kinder world.

The hard-won truth is that you don’t need a fancy piece of technology to enable community. It is created through sharing, kindness, and realizing our mutual interdependence.