Why The Sharing Economy Isn’t

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.

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 (http://www.businessinsider.com/confessions-of-a-task-rabbit-...) I think nicely outlines the problems with this wave of 'sharing' startups:

    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%.

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 http://peers.org 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.

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.

I remember when dis-intermediation was the big buzz-word. Nowadays it seems to be all about business schemes with intermediaries at the core who make the process less efficient than it has to be in order to extract profits for themselves.

The internet makes rent-seeking massively scalable.