Who Owns the “Sharing Economy”?

“The Sharing Economy Gets Greedy” writes Salon on the launch of the new organizing group Peers. Is that really what’s happening?

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last month in Aspen; credit: Fortune Live Media

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Over on Salon, Andrew Leonard reminds us that there are a growing heap of for-profit ventures that stand to do well for themselves should the “sharing economy” take hold, especially should they be able to rewrite the regulatory landscape to ease the path of their particular business models. It’s in that light that he sees the launch of the new Peers that I covered yesterday.

Is this not just self-interested lobbying under a glossy new banner of individual empowerment? Here’s Leonard:

The distinction between platforms and consumers is important, because rosy-hued descriptions of how the sharing economy will lead to a better world where we consume less and trust our neighbors more tends to obscure the fact that venture-capital-funded, profit-seeking organizations are providing a significant amount of the impetus for the spread of sharing economy services. For the platforms, “trust” is just another marketing buzzword.

To start, that last bit is a pretty striking charge, because while trust is indeed a big part of modern-day “sharing,” what’s emerged over the last many years of the development of Internet culture are the mechanics of ‘trust but verify.’ Do you use Yelp reviews to pick a restaurant? Or recommendations on Facebook to pick a beach novel? Or mailing list discussions to pick the news stories on which to focus your attention? There’s some trust factoring in the mix.

But it’s not blind faith. We learn to run Yelp reviews through our own internal algorithms: “It’s got four stars, but only nine reviews, and it’s been open for year and a half. Hmm.” Those Facebook recommendations are first checked by the fact that they’re coming from your quote-unquote friends, and held up against what you know of their cultural tastes generally. If you actively chose to join a mailing list of one affinity group or another, topics that fizzle out there likely wouldn’t interest you anyway.

So accepting that “‘trust’ is just another marketing buzzword” seems to require that we question whether our Internet experiences more generally are based on an empty concept.

That said, there are billions of dollars worth of truth to the notion that the Ubers and Airbnbs and Etsys of the world stand to benefit should a populist vibe attach itself to their endeavors. But perhaps more interesting is the question of whether the “sharing economy” follows a trend we saw happen with social networking. There are plenty of people around the world for whom, as one analyst recently put it in the New York Times, “the Internet is Facebook.”

Certainly, in the United States, social networking is Facebook and Twitter and perhaps Instagram. That’s a bit crazy. The purpose of the World Wide Web was to connect people together for sharing information — that is, to network socially. In the same vein, in 10 years, we may well be reading that on our Times hologram that, for many people around the world, “the sharing economy is Airbnb.”

There’s a good chance that will happen. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it seems a bit early to throw North Portland’s Preserve and Serve lending library of canning equipment in with Uber and deem the whole thing the same-old self-serving business of the past.

One thing that Leonard’s critique does seem to strongly suggest is that our concept of “lobbying” is broken. It’s broadly accepted that advocating for the change you want to see is what people are supposed to do. In a distributed world, such as the one we find ourselves in here in the United States at least, that concept gets a little weird. A “shared” economy pretty much by definition suggests that stakeholders are somewhat less concentrated than they once were. So you see companies advocating for interests both, yes, as profit-seeking companies, but as proxies for the values of their users.

We saw that happen during the big debate a few winters back over a pair of digital copyright bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. Did bigfoots like Google and Wikipedia and Reddit (a Condé Nast company, for what it’s worth) lobby hard against SOPA/PIPA? They sure did. But so did scores of other folks “lobby” hard against those bills.

It’s one of the trickier aspects of where modern politics and modern technologies collide. The answer to the question, “is this corporate preservation or is this a grassroots thing” seems often to be yes.

A housekeeping note, given that we’re still in our early days of The Shared City: Please do feel encouraged to jump into the comments below. We very much want to hear from you, even — perhaps especially — when you think something’s off. Be respectful, of course, but otherwise fire away.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: shared cityuberairbnbsocial media

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