Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

So a cou­ple of months ago Dou­glas Atkin, head of Com­mu­nity and E-staff Mem­ber at AirBnB, took to the stage of the Le Web con­fer­ence in Lon­don (video) to announce the for­ma­tion of Peers: “a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports the shar­ing econ­omy move­ment.” I like grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions and I like the co-operative impulse, but this… Well here is his speech in its entirety (in ital­ics) with com­ments from yours truly.

I joined AirBnB about four months ago, but I’m going to talk about a dif­fer­ent organization.

He means Peers.

In fact I’d like to talk about a move­ment for the shar­ing econ­omy. By “a move­ment” I mean exactly that. I mean huge num­bers of peo­ple, with a shared iden­tity, mobi­lized to take action to do two things: to grow the peer shar­ing econ­omy, and to fight for their col­lec­tive inter­ests against unfair and unrea­son­able obstacles.

A grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion with 40 cor­po­rate “part­ners”, with unspec­i­fied but sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing, formed with guid­ance from a set of high-profile “thought lead­ers”, with­out local chap­ters, and with noth­ing much for the grass­roots to do, but with an Exec­u­tive Direc­tor on day one.

Andrew Leonard from Salon has been fol­low­ing the story, and tells us that fund­ing comes from “mission-aligned inde­pen­dent donors”. So that’s wealthy back­ers with a finan­cial inter­est in the shar­ing econ­omy. This is not grass­roots, it’s astroturf.

If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is peo­ple appro­pri­at­ing the lan­guage of col­lec­tive and pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics for finan­cial gain. And that’s one thread of what’s going on here. As we shall see. It does seem that Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Natalie Foster’s heart is in the right place, but that’s one of the tragedies of the shar­ing econ­omy: well-intentioned peo­ple end up con­tribut­ing to immis­er­a­tion and injus­tice when they think they are doing the opposite.

So what we’re talk­ing about here is not just peo­ple shar­ing their skills, or their apart­ment, or their car, but also their col­lec­tive power to expand the shar­ing econ­omy together, and to stand up against entrenched inter­ests who stand unfairly in their way. So “peo­ple power” if you like, or more accu­rately “peer power”.

And what we’re not talk­ing about here is ven­ture cap­i­tal. Going through Crunch­base tells me that the total fund­ing for the 40 part­ners is over $600M. AirBnB has received $120M, includ­ing fund­ing from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Ash­ton Kucher. You know, peo­ple stand­ing up against entrenched interests.

At the end of this post I’ve added a table of what I could find. It tells us that almost all the fund­ing is going to the Bay Area or New York. The non-profits in this orga­ni­za­tion are being taken for a ride by the appeal­ing anti-establishment lan­guage of Sil­i­con Val­ley . They need to take a look at who their bed­fel­lows are and what the real agenda is.

Ven­ture Cap­i­tal funds are not inter­ested in peo­ple power, they are inter­ested in an invest­ment with a good return. The fact that Dou­glas Atkin doesn’t once men­tion the finan­cial moti­va­tions of the forces behind the shar­ing econ­omy is either dis­hon­est or unbe­liev­ably self-deceiving.

Now why would there be a need for such a thing? The shar­ing econ­omy seems to be bar­relling along pretty hap­pily. Why do we need another orga­ni­za­tion? Well, firstly the oppor­tu­nity. This was brought home to me a week ago in San Fran­cisco where I attended a meet­ing of shar­ing econ­omy par­tic­i­pants. So there were dri­vers, pas­sen­gers, hosts, guests, and tour guides from RelayRides, Lyft, AirBnB, Vayable and Side­car, and they were lit­er­ally bounc­ing up and down with enthu­si­asm about the oppor­tu­nity to col­lab­o­rate together — with each other. 

So they were devel­op­ing ideas — bril­liant ideas actu­ally — to share cus­tomers with each other, across ver­ti­cals. One per­son even sug­gested that there could be a peer econ­omy cur­rency — maybe Bit­coin. Or even points to encour­age peo­ple to cross ver­ti­cals and recruit new peo­ple into this new economy.

The lan­guage changes, the mask slips. Par­tic­i­pants become cus­tomers, shar­ing becomes buy­ing. The phrase “across ver­ti­cals” reminds us that Dou­glas Atkin is an adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive. Now the shar­ing econ­omy is about loy­alty pro­grams and cross mar­ket­ing? Not the kind of shar­ing I want to be part of. I don’t have a prob­lem with com­merce, but what I do object to is com­merce wrapped up in, and appro­pri­at­ing, the lan­guage of solidarity.

by Tom Slee, Whimsley |  Read more:

Image: FastCompany