Do you think there are some issues that are genuinely impossible to solve?
That’s a good question! No, I genuinely believe anything is possible and that most of the things we consider “impossible” are just limits of our imagination. I think seemingly impossible problems are just harder and require an enormous amount of collaboration to achieve.
How did you come up with the name, Impossible.com?
I wrote my university thesis on the concept of possibility and utopias: arguing, in essence, that anything is possible. The first idea for Impossible—to connect people to share for free, in human kindness—seemed impossibly utopian and so it felt like a playful and accurate name.
In the end, we stopped investing in the technology to support the gift economy as it didn’t seem to make financial sense any longer, but in the journey we certainly proved it was possible—thousands of people gave freely to strangers, and made new relationships in the process. I formed my own community, too.
What’s next?
We just made a film about Mark Boyle, a friend of mine who lived without money for three years, and is now living without any technology or electricity for ecological reasons. We have also developed our own sunglasses line—Wires eyewear—that uses bio plastic and reduces waste through a modular design. We have lots of other projects, too, but those are the ones I am most involved in personally.