I’d love to be able to borrow a sewing machine, tools, etc. I live in a small flat and I don’t need permanent ownership of those things. They spend 99.5% of the time sat taking up space. What good is that? For a lot of machines it’s not good to leave them idle, or sat in a shed collecting mould and rust.
The quote you're referring to, or at least that interpretation of it, as I understand it, is about for-profit entities restricting ownership by only renting out their products, maximizing the amount of money they can extract.
Those seem like two almost polar opposites. I'd bet the "owning class" is not very happy about the existence of libraries. (See, for example, Hachette, Wiley, Harper Collins, Penguin Random House & Co.'s legal efforts to get rid of them.)
Yes, the quote is naive in expecting a world where those who own share with those who rent without nefarious motives. But sharing, particularly in this context when profit is out of the equation, is a great idea. I don't have the money nor space for my own 3D printer, but thanks to my local library I own objectively more 3D printed stuff than I would without them.
