There’s nothing new here - the tools already exist. What I’m talking about is a difference in scope and priority. Our current society prioritizes the extraction of raw materials, the production of new items, and swiftly sweeps used items into landfills and incinerators so you can buy it again new. So it can be produced again. Some of it ends up on Buy Nothing -type groups, secondhand stores, eBay craigslist, etc. it gets caught and cycled around for a bit. But any given day you drive to a store to buy something there’s a decent chance someone is throwing it away because they’re tired of it taking up space in their home. The new one you buy is unnecessary if the older one still works.
The difference I’m talking about is that the hypothetical society isn’t extracting as much, it’s not producing as much. Reuse is the default, and almost nothing falls through the cracks.
I’m trying to figure out what that society looks like, and yeah, hopefully the answer, from an experience and convenience standpoint, is ‘very much the same.’
Edit: TBH, the criticism I expected was that this would be an impractical way to replace a huge chunk of manufacturing, mining, logging, and other industries in the world. That it’d be too big a change to get enough buy-in, or that the wealth of existing stuff wouldn’t be sufficient to meet even a reduced demand. I really didn’t expect to hear from someone who thinks we’re already doing it.
If craigslist etc (REstore would probably be the closest example to the kind of system I’m talking about IMHO) were already catching all of society’s unneeded working or fixable items, I suspect we wouldn’t be seeing landfills overfilling to their current extent, or crisis around what to do with ewaste and ‘recyclable’ materials. Heck our lives might have been less impacted when supply chains got disrupted since we’d already have a robust system for cycling around existing products.