Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

196 pointsby rainysundayover 11 years ago

11 comments

whytakaover 11 years ago

This article really clears up for me the skepticism I felt about these new companies. I've heard the term the Sharing economy before but I didn't know these companies were trying to reappropriate the word. It takes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance to be convinced that what you're doing is sharing even when you're taking people's money.Back when I was a teenager, I dreamt up that the women's rights movement was ultimately a ploy by the capitalist class to dilute the value of labor in the market. Technology has done the same with our time by making us surrender the concept of off time. Now this sharing economy wants to take away our space and stuff. We retreat a little to bide time but it's easy to permanently lose ground.

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dualogyover 11 years ago

I remember when the web and later peer2peer was just taking off: "this is the death of the middleman".And here we are, as the "masses" joined in the fun, we're surrounded by not just middle-men but huge middleman-concerns, walled gardens, "siren servers".Turns out AoL and Yahoo had it about right, they were just 15 years too early and a tad too innocuous ;D(Only tangentially related but remember why Skype took off? It was (branded as) "fully peer-to-peer". Freeing millions from the shackles of the telcos, yay! Now flip it to eBay first, to MS next and here we are, the world's biggest NSA backdoor and botnet. Neat!)

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Joeboyover 11 years ago

Is this not a shameless land grab for the term "sharing economy"? I've always associated the term with actual grassroots things like Freecycle, LETS systems etc. Or maybe people have actually started to think AirBnB is part of the "sharing economy" and I just missed it.

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tvanantwerpover 11 years ago

Maybe it's because I work for a nonprofit, but this piece seems like speculation and paranoia. Oh, so this group Peers is actually funded by a handful of wealthy patrons? Guess what--all nonprofits make 90%+ of their revenues from the top 10% or less of donors. Some nonprofits only really have ONE donor. That's just how the nonprofit sector works. All of it. By the author's logic, the Red Cross is astroturf.I think it's a fair point that these companies aren't building a sharing economy. They're building companies that let people sell individual surplus of capital or time or skills through a convenient platform. That might not be sharing, but there's real economic value in that. They wouldn't be able to take a cut from these small transactions unless they genuinely offered some valuable service to the other parties. I just recently stayed in a wonderful AirBNB apartment while on a trip, and I know I wouldn't have managed that without the AirBNB service, and I know I would have paid more and gotten less for a hotel.The author assumes--wrongly, from my experience in public policy--that the status quo organizations and regulations exist for the common good. Some do, but many don't. Lots of bad laws and crooked organizations raise unjustifiable barriers to entry--not just for Silicon Valley start-ups, but for the mom-and-pop businesses too.I can't say for sure whether Peers is good, bad, or neutral. I can say with certainty that this article is heavily biased, ignorant of how most nonprofits work, and ignorant of the public policy process.

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jkaover 11 years ago

What would be ideal, I figure, would be if we could have the infrastructure to enable a sharing economy, but without centralized gatekeepers taking a cut and ultimately being a middle-man.Until then, there is certainly disruption happening (hotel chains, taxi firms, airport parking businesses are worried about all this), and that is a market positive - but it's certainly not the all-round-benevolent model that the name 'sharing economy' would suggest. There are winners and all you have to do is follow the money/data.As a side-note, I think the kind of naming used for new technologies and business models is increasingly manipulative - I certainly share a lot of the author's skepticism, and agree that the mere name 'sharing economy' will likely encourage people of genuine good intention to put their energy into it without seeing the full picture.

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octaveguinover 11 years ago

All platforms can be thought of as positioning themselves for rent seeking - that is app stores, linkedin, and yeah airbnb.Things that require a network effect, after they get it, are in a super leveraged position that they can cash in.That said, the platforms that choose not to cash in on this tend to not be as successful. Couchsurfing wasn't. Cash and the promise of cash for investors allows a company to spend a great deal to market and secure with insurance this sharing economy. These are important functions to make the public understand and get used to this new weird future.In the end, we need those rent-seeking-seeming fees to jumpstart this whatever-you-want-to-call-it sharing economy. We don't get an airbnb without a large commission on every renting agreement made.I believe that once the public is comfortable with 'sharing economy' as an integrated part of our lives, then the race to the bottom platforms might start happening - when companies are competing on price and features. Of course, those incumbents will fight tooth and nail to keep their monopolies and may well succeed. We'll see.Right now is the golden age for these types of companies.

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clicksover 11 years ago

That is one interesting piece. I highly encourage reading it all, as well as the articles linked within.I had not been aware of this 'sharing movement', and how this perspective was being force-fed by some SV folks. And now that I've found about it I find this to be very off-putting, I was expecting better from SV.The BI article on TaskRabbit (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/confessions-of-a-task-rabbit-2011-12" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/confessions-of-a-task-rabbit-...</a>) I think nicely outlines the problems with this wave of 'sharing' startups:<pre><code> The whole thing about TaskRabbit, again it's "neighbors helping neighbors," as if my health and safety don't matter, as if I'm willing to put up with whatever you dish out no matter what. And it's required that TaskRabbits always have a smile on their faces. You know what, I'm not going to smile at you while you lie. It's a health factor, it's a safety risk. I don't want to get covered in cat shit and if I do, I should know about it and get paid for it. There really is an element of disregard for the Rabbits. Then the email I got from TaskRabbit about being unprofessional — my answer to that is, if you actively suppress what you actually foster, it is abuse. Then people will figure out that they can lie and manipulate the TaskRabbits to get what they want. BI: Do TaskRabbits ever meet? Not so much. I've met a couple of them because either I've posted tasks myself or I was assigned a task that involved another TaskRabbit. That's part of the strategy of TaskRabbit — to keep us apart from one another. We can't message each other on the website. The only way you get to meet another TaskRabbit is if you post a task, and I think they do this to keep us apart because they don't want us fixing the process. They don't want us unionizing. They don't want us to get together and say an Ikea run is $50 minimum. If it's a $25 job, how much will TaskRabbit take? Here's how it works. I wish I had access to their back end numbers. Certainly a task that costs, let's say, $30 or more, the markup is actually about 70%. At a lower price point the markup is smaller and it could be as low as 15%. For example, if I bid $20 on a grocery run, the poster will probably pay a price of $23. So that is fair. But as the price goes up, so does the cut. And I know once you hit about $30 for the task, the markup is 70%. </code></pre> Craigslist is more of a 'sharing economy' company than this -- it gives you the option to directly interact with people about jobs... and products... and apartments.. and so much more... for free. The rent-seeking-type sharing economy startups of <a href="http://peers.org" rel="nofollow">http://peers.org</a> are simply VC-funded, sophisticated, money-making schemes. At the end of the day, money is less fairly distributed in society because of these "sharing" startups, and I think the fact that they seemingly deny this is particularly shameful.

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wycxover 11 years ago

The internet makes rent-seeking massively scalable.

ThomPeteover 11 years ago

So great piece with a lot of valid criticism but I also feels like it keeps judging the speech on a claim it doesn't continue to make.The author continues judging the speech as a claim to counter capitalism when in fact the speaker comes clean early on. This is unfortunate because it muddles the argument.The way I understand the argument its more that instead of companies making money on individuals its individuals making money on each other. It's removing the middle man so to speak.For instance when he write"The laws that he is talking about are licensing laws and other laws put in place to protect employees, customers, and neighbourhoods. These laws are not all perfect. But the sharing economy has nothing to replace them beyond magical thinking about “trust” (with little accountability)."He is basically cherry picking. There is also quite a few laws that are actually hindering progress.Technology does move faster than legislation.

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loudinover 11 years ago

The 'sharing economy' described in the article is not so much about sharing as it is about making money. You don't share your apartment on AirBnb - you sell it.

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johnrobover 11 years ago

At some point, society needs to digest this 'sharing economy' and understand its pros/cons. On one hand, it provides a way to make money. On the other hand, the laborers are often putting themselves in situations where legally they should be covered with various forms of insurance as well as wage regulations (paying them as 'consultants' is the current method by which all of this is sidestepped).