Welcome To the 'Sharing Economy' 153
An anonymous reader writes "Thomas Friedman writes in the NY Times about the economy that's grown around Airbnb, a company built on helping people rent out their unused rooms to other users. He writes, 'Airbnb has also spawned its own ecosystem — ordinary people who will now come clean your home, coordinate key exchanges, cook dinner for you and your guests, photograph rooms for rent, and through the ride-sharing business Lyft, turn their cars into taxis to drive you around. "It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust," added [CEO Brian Chesky], but now a total stranger, "can be trusted like a company and provide the services of a company. And once you unlock that idea, it is so much bigger than homes. ... There is a whole generation of people that don't want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal."' Friedman refers to this as the 'sharing economy,' but a 'trust economy' seems more apt. He points this out himself: 'Afterward, guests and hosts rate each other online, so there is a huge incentive to deliver a good experience because a series of bad reputational reviews and you're done. Airbnb also automatically provides $1 million in insurance against damage or theft to nearly all of its hosts (some countries have restrictions) and only rarely gets claims. This framework of trust has unlocked huge value from unused bedrooms.'"
Re:lasting awesomeness? (Score:3, Interesting)
Trust relies on people being trustworthy. If people as a whole were trustworthy, corporations wouldn't exist.
It's the same reason why communes work only on a very small scale.
At some scale, diverging views of "fairnes" set in and people will stop cooperating without reserve.
Unreported employment (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't this like unreported employment, where workers have no rights and the state gets nothing (for maintaining the infrastructures used). I know /. is US-centric and my little European country seems communist to most of you (I'm from France). But seriously unreported employment is a bad idea, although it might look better than unenployment. Firstly, it's a downhill to slavery, like the world was before the introduction of labour laws. And secondly, it's not sharing at all because there is no collectivity in such shemes. It's everyone is on its own without any place for a collective structure, which is obviously not the way humankind has eveloved for the last couple of thousands of years.
These deregulated systems are utopias that only work if people are equally smart and potent, which will definitely never be the case.
Ok (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a whole generation of people with no fucking job living in the same room.
The reason is because our government is forcing us to compete with manipulated currencies and our "employers" are lying cunts.
Re:If you're going to read that, read this as well (Score:5, Interesting)
So... I'm very far from what you'd call an unrepentent capitalist (by US standards I probably count as communist-light). But the thrust of his argument seems to be (correct me if I get it wrong):
* Consumers are much better informed and able to find the best combination of price and value than before;
* That hurts providers that are neither able to offer lower prices or better value. Or, in other words, those providers that previously managed to stay afloat only because their customers were poorly informed.
And from a consumer point of view, I have a hard time seeing what is immoral about that.
If I today have the choice of a chain coffee house with so-so cofee but good prices and generous laptop policies on one hand, and a gourmet shop run by an enthusiast with fifteen kinds of blow-your-mind taste sensation coffees on the other; why would I go to the old coffee shop in between where neither the coffee, service or price is anything special?
Re:lasting awesomeness? (Score:3, Interesting)
The state has no use for money if you think about it a bit longer. The reason the state has to take money as payment for tax, is to pay wages to other people performing work for the state. You could cut out the money middleman and take labor as payment directly.
Instead of paying a set percentage of your wages as tax, you could be required to clock a certain amount of hours in your field of expertise for the community. Of course, that would mean that the rich fat cats get off their arse and work (since fleecing people isn't a workable skill in that system), so in that sense it is a doomed idea. It illustrates an alternative nonetheless, and requires a change of mindset about how we work together.