{"id":1304,"date":"2026-02-09T19:02:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T19:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/?p=1304"},"modified":"2026-05-18T22:44:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:44:46","slug":"bunz-2013-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/bunz-2013-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Bunz , 2013-18"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Bunz , 2013-18<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The story begins with a woman named Emily and her pasta. She had no sauce, but she had some Art. She posted on Facebook, ‘in search of (ISO) pasta sauce. Will trade art. Improbably, her inbox exploded with offers of sauce. Within minutes, she was sauce rich, and down one painting. Bunz was born, and Toronto was never the same after that fateful exchange. The next day, Emily started the “bunz trading zone” (a riff on ‘buds’) as a group on Facebook. The only rule: no cash in the zone! In no time, a beautiful micro-economy blossomed, fueled largely by people trading tall cans of beer, TTC (transit) tokens and weed. The group’s population exploded from a couple dozen of Emily’s friends to over 10,000 Bunz members by the end of the first year. To call it a phenomenon would be a vast understatement. It took over the millennial mindset in Toronto so deeply that cash became temporarily passe in the 20-35 demo. As it grew, the community began to repurpose it’s own mandate across a bunch of interests, Like Bunz Planting Zone, devoted to trading succulents, seedlings and garden tools . Bunz pet zone was strictly against trading animals But often supplied independent rescuers with tools they needed and supplied poor pet owners with food and gear. Bunz Baking Zone traded recipes, flours, ingredients and tips. Art, music and writing all found communities and grew rapidly. around year 2, I ran into Emily at a party; we knew each other tangentially through the music scene; she played in several psych bands . She had an Iconic rock and roll look: platinum blonde bob haircut, straight out of a 60s girl group, denim jacket and skirt, something chic and vintage on top, always. I largely reject the term “hipster’ (having suffered it hurled at me as an insult for years), but Emily was Toronto’s queen bee of the hipsters. She earned it and wore it well.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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We got to talking about bunz, naturally, and I expressed interest in getting involved in some capacity. We reconnected the following week on Facebook, and she asked if I had any experience moderating Internet groups. The truth was I didn’t but I was heavily involved in a punk community online called indecline (shout out to my boy scooter) for many years and cut my teeth with internet bullies back then. She asked if I’d like to come aboard as a community manager. I hesitantly accepted, not knowing quite what I was getting myself into . What followed was some of the most fast paced and exciting years of my life, full of travel and parties, hobnobbing with rich tech bros and building my own little corner of empire on the Internet. The dark side came from the internet itself, as it always does. The demographic in question was having a Zeitgeist moment with Social Justice, and every microaggression got called out, every misplaced pronoun got a spotlight, and I played witness to some of the first instances of what later became known as ‘cancel culture”, where people are made into social pariahs, treated as “the other” and forced into self -isolation . Bunz became known as the ultimate “safe space” online for sensitive millenials , and I was the top cop, for better or for worse. This immediately put a target orr my back, and I’d often spend my evenings dismantling some petty cat fight in some Zone. It wasn’t Long before we had Tech Bros sniffing around at the business, eventually leading to a proposition to Emily about selling part of the company to another parent corporation. Emily accepted and we became the ultimate millennial Tech start-up workspace, in an old warehouse in downtown Toronto, with a skateboard ramp and basketball hoop. In my time as community manager, I oversaw the establishment of physical, “official<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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trading zones in cafes, libraries, subway stations and galleries, safe places where people could meet up to make trades. This network of partnerships lasted for years, through the end of my time there. In the end, we also produced a comedic TV show (called ‘Fare Trade ‘), and a feature-length documentary about Bunz. I also transitioned into a role as the company’s publicist, earning us ink in Wired magazine, the Huffington Post, the Globe &Mail , and Toronto’s weeklies, NOW and Eye., among others. The company that bought Bunz ended up spinning it off into a mobile app of the same name\/function , which unfortunately just \u2026 never took off . It had it’s plug pulled after a year or so and we were all quietly let go. So it goes.
If you’re wondering, my best trade ever was an Elvis record and Jean jacket (both value village finds) that I traded for two bottles of wine and a bucket of fried chicken. Big win.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story begins with a woman named Emily and her pasta. She had no sauce, but she had some Art. She posted on Facebook, ‘in search of (ISO) pasta sauce. Will trade art. Improbably, her inbox exploded with offers of sauce. Within minutes, she was sauce rich, and down one painting. Bunz was born, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1900,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions\/1900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}