Yet despite the tainted name that sharing has garnered over the past 90 or so years, the new internet culture has overflowed into the physical world and spawned a range of sharing-based entities, some based online, some on mobile phone services, but others wholly physical and outside the technology sector. It's as if getting so much free on the web and sharing the detail of their lives on social networking sites has hardwired into a generation the idea — the assumption, indeed — that as much as possible should be free-to-user, pooled communally, yet never sullied by even a hint of socialist ethic. There's no business class on the internet, no private version of Google, this post-socialist, post-capitalist generation appears to feel, so why shouldn't a measure, at least, of old-fashioned, nanny-ish, healthy public-spiritedness, egalitarianism and altruism be given its head in "real" as well as virtual life? 

So while previously the only tradition of sharing at a municipal level was the public library and the (occasionally) free city art gallery, now nobody even stops to think how remarkable it is that, for example, the US military's GPS system is available free-to-user to everyone in the world, even America's enemies. No one in Japan thinks it remarkable that novels, manga comic strips and even made-for-mobile TV soaps are distributed free or near-free to consumers' handsets. 

An increasing number of cities, meanwhile, have burgeoning car and cycle sharing schemes, some successful, others that have a habit of being sabotaged by non-communally-minded people who steal the bikes. Free charging posts for electric vehicles are springing up. Local councils around the world are busy creating congestion-charging schemes and painting bus, taxi, pool car and cycle lanes to ensure that streets are shared equitably between people of different types and incomes. Some cities — the central business district of Perth in Australia is one — have adopted free public transport. 

Worldwide, businesses such as shops, restaurants, bars and clubs that can't afford city rents are taking a route which the hippies would have approved of when sharing was last around, in the 1960s. Entrepreneurs brought up in the internet era have invented pop-ups: businesses which legally squat for a limited period in prestigious but unoccupied premises, thus effectively sharing both real estate and the opportunity to create a viable brand for minimum investment. 

The pop-up — even the name is a web borrowing — has turned being unable to afford to lease property long-term into an opportunity to create a chic factor. The fashion brand Comme des Garçons began the trend in 2004 with an outbreak of "guerrilla stores". Now pop-ups of all sorts abound — restaurants, shops, galleries and more — all physical places, but with the temporary, non-physical feel of a website. 

Then there's the widespread movement to reduce the footprint of our possessions, to rent and share more of what we need and thereby, symbolically at least, to live more ethically. The Freecycle network operates in many countries to offer free goods of all sorts online to anyone prepared to pick up the stuff. A swathe of websites such as Zilock.com, which originated in France when the founder wanted to use a drill and realised that buying one for a few minutes' use was absurd, now offer peer-to-peer renting of tools along with such items as cameras, child car seats and camping equipment. And, of course, there are eBay, Craigslist and the multiplicity of websites which encourage us to sell unwanted items. Even this vast boom in second-hand can be seen as part of a mass movement towards a more sharing, but never remotely socialist, ethic.