By Nathan Schneider

In the beginning, there was sharing. That, at least, is the story according to Dominik Wind, a German environmental activist with a genial smile and a cycling cap whom I met in Paris while attending a conference earlier this month about the sharing economy. Years ago, out of curiosity, Wind visited Samoa for half a year; he found that people shared tools, provisions and even sexual partners with their neighbors. Less encumbered by industrial civilization, they appeared to share with an ease and forthrightness long forgotten in the world Wind knew back home.

Wind and I got to know each other while splitting a stranger’s apartment that we found through Airbnb. Thanks to platforms like this, sharing is on the rise in urban centers. Capitalism’s creative destruction may have ravaged our communities over the centuries with salvos of individualism, competition and mistrust, but now it wants to sell a sense of community back to us.