One needn’t be a lawn-mowing, barbecue-throwing deep-cover Russian spy to harbor latent socialist tendencies. Not in today’s increasingly communalized New York, where the sharing of everything from cabs to clothes to child care is suddenly modish, promoted by city officials, exploited by entrepreneurs, and pursued by legions of everyday citizens. Granted, there is some idealism at work here—you don’t offer to repair a stranger’s ceiling fan or hand over your living-room couch to a passing traveler without possessing a strong communitarian streak. But the modern collective is more about pragmatism than altruism. You want to buy Greenmarket pork at a wholesale price: Join a pig CSA. Fantasize about owning a Harley, but don’t want to maintain, register, or park it: There’s a company in Gowanus that wants to loan you a shiny new hog. Need help with your sweater-knitting or bike-tuning or app-inventing project? There is a group of like-minded skill-sharers out there somewhere (more likely than not in Brooklyn). On the following pages, we provide details on these and dozens more group-oriented endeavors.

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