What went wrong with Freecycle in the UK?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on October 2, 2009 at 10:43

I notice Haringey hasn't joined the splitters? Good on Freegle, in the end big corporate nonsense always spoils the ethics of such ventures.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on October 2, 2009 at 12:36

So what's new? Go up a mountain or into the desert, talk to yourself for a night or two, chisel out a list of rules on a couple of slabs of ecologically sourced rock, or find them on a few scrolls in a dried-up wadi, bring them back to your messy warring tribe, tell them to stop screwing around and give up worshipping their golden calves or camels because you have a new revealed religion you'd like them to follow and spread around to their neighbours. Don't even bother giving it a name - your disciples will get around to calling it something like Fundamentalism or Environmentalism and set up local variants such as Haleyism in honour of some obscurely departed prophet or holy man.
Don't be surprised when your good news for the world gets tidied up and centralised by some pope or grand mufti or televangelist in his vatican mecca in the Arizona desert. In next to no time he'll update your old vision through his regular freeencyclicals which even the remotest corners of haringey will revere and recycle.
Eventually the corruption of infallibility will set in. He'll start selling freecycle indulgences but only to his theological cronies. Someone somewhere will nail up 95 theses on environmentally friendly papyrus on, of course, an ecologically sourced mahogany door freecycled from the Church of Malaysia. Next, the Freecycle Bishop of Brighton will shout 'Non serviam!' and Anglican Freegle will be born.

As Brendan Behan might have said, 'The first item on the agenda of the first meeting of any fundamentalism should be The Split'. So let's see how many denominations Freegle will split into, and how soon.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Liz on October 13, 2009 at 12:08

More on this story from Guardian enviroment

• ▶ Reply