Is the sharing economy killing the neighborhood?
Source: http://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/is-the-sharing-economy-killing-the-neighbourhood
By Neil Fogarty
Business writer & speaker
People who write on the subject of the sharing economy talk of it being a socio-economic system built around the sharing of ‘human and capital assets’.
You are reading an article in the Understanding the sharing economy series, to read more head over to the series homepage.
Doesn’t that just sum it up?
The fact that doing things for or with a neighbour should be referred to as a human or capital asset fills me with dread – applying business-speak to human relationships is pretty abhorrent at the best of times, but we are now seeing venture capitalists and start-ups pitching the emperor’s new clothes at us.
If we look at non-monetized sharing economies - such as third world countries, Amish communities in the US or rural economies pretty much everywhere, sharing is a social necessity. From the lending of a hammer to the offer of a bed for the night or the creation of a banking system based on mutual trust, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. So maybe the sharing economy is only something for first world cities, with fractured communities and people too lazy or busy to carry out simple tasks. Although it could of course be the pull of making a fast buck that is pulling in so many people.
Case in point: in a community, you leave a spare key to your house with your neighbour. If you lock yourself out, you go next door, have a coffee, have a chat, take the spare and let yourself back in. The sharing economy would suggest that we log onto an App and look for a locksmith instead.
I was born in the 1960s and, for the first 20 years of my life, I knew the names of all the neighbours – families rarely moved house, kids played together – we all did things for each other whether this was mowing a lawn, cleaning gutters, cleaning cars – all for free. Add to this, the community was aware of its elderly people. As Lilo & Stitch pointed out to us all in 2002, “’Ohana’ means ‘family’ – ‘family’ means ‘no one gets left behind’.”
Maybe the altruistic visions of Lilo & Stitch are old-fashioned and antiquated, that would be a very sad state of affairs as it seems that offering a bed for the night through Airbnb or giving someone a lift through BlaBlaCar can all be monetized, whilst other sharing economy ventures such as HomeAway or Lending Club are just same-old, same old.
If we have more money in our pocket, we should want to be more charitable, yet here we are talking about the monetization of favours and errands.
Added to the emperor’s wardrobe should be the word ‘crowdsourced’ – talking as if the concept of people acting together is a completely new thing. Fon refers to ‘crowdsourced Wi-Fi’ which feels pretty desperate, if we want to crowdsource WiFi, then we can do what we already do on a small scale but on a huge scale – everyone can do away with their passwords on their routers. When I lived in Cairo, everyone in our apartment block used the same single router. Oh hey, look at us ‘crowdsourcing’.
Do you see my point? There is nothing ‘new’ here apart from putting dollars and cents against the principles of common decency. Intuitively, if we have more money in our pocket, we should want to be more charitable yet here we are talking about the monetization of favours and errands.
In 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that there is a limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships (where we know who each person is and how each person relates to every other person). He suggested that this was a community of up to 148 people. Just as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter all artificially boost our ‘network’, sharing economy Apps grow our contacts but erode relationships.
Remember me mentioning that I’m a 60s kid? Well something else that I remember from my childhood was ‘bob-a-job’ – doing small tasks for people in exchange for 5 pence (equivalent at the time to c. $0.03 or €0.05) – yet we did it.
We didn’t ask for credit card details as we made our human and capital assets available to our community! It’s probably also worth pointing out that, in order to do work in the community, we didn’t need an App.
The simple fact is this: the monetization of community is wholly distasteful. I don’t disagree with sharing – but I do disagree with sharing ‘economy’ – if we took all the VC finance for these businesses and invested it into community projects, then I am sure the world would be a much better place. No App required.
Subversive comment:
Sharing Economy
This is not concept. It's a stage in the programmed capitalistic societies, where relying on your neighbor or close friend to do some labor with only the labor part, no capital, is the stage, societies don't wanna be.
First: because it means we don't have the means to sustain ourself, something strange, but in programmed capitalistic societies or post-Colonized ones the appearances are first rather than the rest.
Ask any third-world country preppy boy or girl about appearance and you'll find the answer.
Second; because the mentality is tribal, egalitarian and anything tribal or egalitarian was taken down by the monarchy and by that, this programmed neo colonialist capitalistic societies,are doing the impossible to take it down, again, in order to 'improve' the kingdoms mentality of those who went to colonize and are ruling over the majority, without giving them the right to live without something they, 'magically' need(money).
The capital, that thing one could easily 'trade' instead of 'working', without any skills.
That said, to have a skill is to have 'something', and that 'something' is the thing societies can trade without having the material but the 'thing'.
In capitalist mentality or central mentality, that 'thing(Money)' or tool, was created to control vast assets of that 'something(material)' and organize it so it could last more than the normal, but that also created speculation and corruption, a word integrated with human consumption of that 'something (Money>Material)' that it has a name and value.
The damn coin: gold, uranium, oil, the material we all want and know its use and importance, so money is not gonna change, or at least the middle tool that enables us to work and get something in return.
In oppressed societies money is a curse, not in well-developed ones, so the problem would always be, if those third world countries could one day evolve into something better than what they are doing right now, or they could just target the problem that made us be and are making us unaware of our potential, because after the storm one picks up the garbage and rebuilds the whole infrastructure from its foundation. And that could mean the very hated 'revolution', but if the revolutions can't coup with the changes of this universal economy or the different ways of dealing with that 'money' or trade tool, then its just the obstacle that drains progress and sinks countries to their ground. Something done often in third world countries, were corruption and megalomaniatic behaviors have just ravished the international perception of their knowledge in it (money and uses) when thinking about trades and business.
So in the micro-example of this 'sharing' economy in third world countries, i think that's a waste of time, and anything done in first world countries is always a novelty, a trend, as they don't need to do more than just what they are doing, more progressive, more green, that's the only thing needed. So this 'sharing' economy is just a trend or taken out of tribal concepts of what was to live back when there was no international perception of how and who controls this central banks and why some places had more credit than the ones asking the questions, and so on.
In conclusion: practical solutions are done by the pioneers of that thing they build, and the rest just follow, or obey their commands. But sadly, politics and corruption has always the first and last hand on our life's, so, sharing is not well perceived in the societies of the broken and greedy man.
Unless of course, just the few and alienated ones believe in themselves and work hard against their countries, their societies, the international perception, and provides examples of it, in the face of adversities, in order to change things around, but then again, we would be living the 94 or any other news about some remote land being taken by some subversive group of people, and then receiving names by the elite of those countries, because their world can be turned around and their greed and selfish acts of violence and corruption could be undercover*.
Something the Zapatistas have to live daily, when in the poorest part of Mexico, they rely on themselves, and no one else, and are attacked by the government and the whole Mexican society. And thats when this 'sharing' economy survives at its finest, not in some well-develop country, in a place were hippies live. no, that's just a style of living, no real change when the country one lives has the 'option' to do that.
in conclusion:
* If one shares, individually, one country can also do the same, in this sharing economy, socialist, anarquist and any other subject under the umbrella of socialism thinks that work is more important than the accumulation of time, worked. Which should be the case, no privileges nor inheritance.
* Yet power is accumulated by the central bank, same as the central state, leaving fanatics arguing about the perception of freedom through power, that one anyone has worked to achieve.
* A petty excuse capitalist, or anyone defending them, is lack of tittles, territories or prestige, if one wants to provide a more balanced example, one has to give everything equally to everyone and then criticize it by their doing, without the boarders of control and oppression created. Due to chance and a detailed plan to conquer the world, dividing it.
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