Are Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit Adulterating the Sharing Economy

Federico Guerrini

Innovation, it’s a bit like marriage, you know: after the initial wave of enthusiam, problems start.

Something similar is happening with the so-called “sharing” economy, popularized by the likes of Uber, AirBnb and Task Rabbit. While users still flock to these platforms, more and more people are starting to question the real benefits and the underlying motivations of the companies involved.

“I don’t even know why they call it ‘sharing economy’ at all,” the P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens recently said, “They should call it ‘selling economy’, instead, since what is being done by Uber and AirBnb, has nothing to do with mutualizing resources, but only with selling and renting. Actually it’s anti-sharing, because they are commodifying resources that before would have been shared for free. Like, if you had a spare room in your house you would invite some friends and now you say ‘why should I share it for free, if I can make some money out of that?’”

Bauwens was speaking at a panel about the new forms of economies of the future, one of many threads of discussion of NESTA’s Future Fest. Other panelists included cooperative development expert Dave Boyle, and TaskRabbit’s director of marketplace operations inEurope, Uma Subramanian.

Criticism to the sharing economy is not altogether new, but theLondondebate was interesting because it did not discuss practical issues, like Uber’s contrasts with existing national laws or problems with AirBnb’s users’ task evasion.

Rather, it was a critical examination of the kind of society the ‘sharing’ economy is creating withSilicon Valleycompanies acting, according to both Bauwens and Boyle, as poster child of the Venture Capitalists’ neoliberal vision around the world. Parasiting existing infrastructure (roads, and people cars and houses) and building services on top of that, giving only low wages and heavy workloads as compensation.

As a recent article from The Nation also shows, the idea that these corporations are just monetizing “the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy”, and evoking “a fantasy of community in an atomized population” is no longer so heretical.

Corporations, of course, reject this unflattering portrait and defend their own policies and regulations.

“Part of the reason why I took this job,” Subramanian said at Future Fest, “is that TaskRabbit is committed to helping people materially improve their conditions, and have a sense of agency on their life. TaskRabbit has the highest minimum wage policy as any organization. We do not allow our handyman to set their rates belowLondon’s minimum living wage of nine pounds an hour.”

Uber, in turn, as Europe’s regional co-manager Benedetta Arese Lucini said during the Crowdsourcing Week Summit held nearVeniceearlier this month, believes its service is actually a way of making urban mobility more effective, allowing for fewer vehicles on road, and reducing the number of hours private cars stay parked, uselessly occupying public spaces.

The real question, however, is: where does all the value created by those companies go? As Bauwens was keen to point out, “If you use Uber in your city, a significant percentage of the revenues go toSilicon Valley.” Not a big bargain, for some municipalities, that might be better off launching their own premium services.

LikeSeoul(which has a real sharing tradition) is planning to do in August.

And while many point out that widespread usage of AirBnb is making house prices soar in some cities, as people prefer to rent, rather than to sell, another aspect that is often overlooked is that the data accumulated by AirBnb’s investors could help them understand which are the most sought-after areas in town, an information they could later sell or use for buying entire blocks themselves, only to rent them on the very same platform.

It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise to find out this is already happening.