What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

209 Pages·2015·1.55 MB·English

by  Tom Slee

What’s Yours Is Mine

© 2015 Tom Slee
Published by OR Books, New York and London Visit our website at www.orbooks.com
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
First printing 2015
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-68219-022-7 paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-023-4 e-book
Text design by Bathcat Ltd. Typeset by AarkMany Media, Chennai, India.
Amongst the highly placed
It is considered low to talk about food.
The fact is: they have
Already eaten.
BERTOLT BRECHT, From a German War Primer
What’s yours is mine,
what’s mine is my own.
Traditional Yorkshire saying
To my mother, Audrey Slee
Contents
1 The Sharing Economy
2 The Sharing Economy Landscape
3 A Place to Stay with Airbnb
4 On the Move with Uber
5 Neighbors Helping Neighbors
6 Strangers Trusting Strangers
7 A Short History of Openness
8 Open Wide
9 What’s Yours Is Mine
Bibliography
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
1. The Sharing Economy
T he Sharing Economy is a wave of new businesses that use the Internet to
match customers with service providers for real-world exchanges such as
short-term apartment rentals, car rides, or household tasks. At the leading edge
of this wave are Uber and Airbnb, each showing eye-popping growth to bolster
their claim that they are disrupting traditional transit and tourism industries.
These two are followed by a flock of other companies vying to join them at the
top of the Sharing Economy world.
Supporters sometimes describe the Sharing Economy as a new type of
business and sometimes as a social movement. It’s a familiar mix of commerce
and cause in the digital world. Silicon Valley may have its share of the world’s
richest people, but it has always seen itself and presented itself as being about
more than money: it’s also about building a better future. The Internet is making
the world better, not just by giving us better gadgets and more information, but
by reshaping society, root and branch. We now have the technology to solve
problems that have plagued humanity for centuries, making old institutions and
old rules obsolete and replacing them with computation.
The buzz around the Sharing Economy began a few years ago, but it really
started to enter the mainstream in 2013 and 2014. It makes promises that appeal
to many people; they certainly appeal to me. Start with informal exchanges—
giving a friend a car ride or borrowing a power drill, or running a few errands for
neighbors—and use the connecting power of the Internet to scale them up, so
that we as individuals can rely more on each other and less on faceless, distant
corporations. Each exchange helps someone make a little money and helps
someone save a little time: what’s not to like? By taking part in the Sharing
Economy we help to build our community instead of being passive and
materialist consumers; we help to create a new era of openness, in which we can
find a welcome and a helping hand wherever we go.
The Sharing Economy promises to help previously powerless individuals
take more control of their lives by becoming “micro-entrepreneurs.” We can be
self-directed, dipping in and out of this new flexible mode of work, setting up
our own businesses on Sharing Economy web sites; we can become an Airbnb
host, a driver for Lyft, a handyperson for Handy, or an altruistic investor making
loans on Lending Club. The movement seems to threaten those who are already
powerful, like big hotel chains, fast food chains, and banks. It’s an egalitarian
vision built on peer-to-peer exchanges rather than hierarchical organizations, and
it’s brought about by the Internet’s ability to bring people together: the Sharing
Economy promises to “get Americans [and others] to trust each other.” 1
The Sharing Economy also promises to be a sustainable alternative to
mainstream commerce, helping us to make better use of under-utilized resources
—why does everyone need a power drill sitting on a basement shelf when we
could share? We can buy less and so lighten our footprint on the planet—maybe
use Uber rather than buy a car? We can choose access over ownership, and move
away from a consumerism in which many of us feel trapped. We can be less
materialistic, looking to experiences rather than possessions to give meaning to
our lives.
Well, that was the promise.
Unfortunately, something different and altogether darker is happening: the
Sharing Economy is extending a harsh and deregulated free market into
previously protected areas of our lives. The leading companies are now
corporate juggernauts themselves, and are taking a more and more intrusive role
in the exchanges they support to make their money and to maintain their brand.
As the Sharing Economy grows, it is reshaping cities without regard to those
things that make them livable. Rather than bringing a new openness and personal
trust to our interactions, it is bringing a new form of surveillance where service
workers must live in fear of being snitched on, and while the company CEOs
talk benevolently of their communities of users, the reality has a harder edge of
centralized control. Sharing Economy marketplaces are generating new and
ever-more-entitled forms of consumption. The language of “a little extra money”
turns out to be the same as that used about women’s jobs forty years ago, when
they were not seen as “real” jobs that demanded a living wage, and so did not
need to be treated the same, or paid as much, as men’s jobs. Instead of freeing
individuals to take control over their own lives, many Sharing Economy
companies are making big money for their investors and executives, and making
good jobs for their software engineers and marketers, by removing the
protections and assurances won by decades of struggle, by creating riskier and
more precarious forms of low-paid work for those who actually work in the