The Sharing Economy Is Bullsh!t. Here’s How We Can Take It Back

Author: Sam Bliss (Grist) · Published: March 9, 2015 · URL: https://grist.org/politics/the-sharing-economy-is-bullsht-heres-how-we-can-take-it-back/

One-line: The platforms called “sharing” are rental brokers and cab services; real sharing means people making a good or service together and splitting the results, and it is the practical road to degrowth.

Summary

Bliss opens with the charge sheet: “Airbnb is a rental broker. Uber and Lyft are unregulated cab services,” and TaskRabbit-style “servant economy” apps let well-off people pay less well-off people to do chores without the security of a job. “Sharing,” he argues, has been co-opted by marketers the way “sustainability” was — “share-washing is the new greenwashing.” He leans on a piece in The Nation describing the sharing economy as a way to “monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous.”

He does credit the platforms with proving one thing: people are willing to share, even with strangers. And real sharing matters because it lets people consume less. Resource use has so far grown in step with the economy, so sharing is a way to get degrowth — less consumption, production and waste — without a worse life, and maybe a better one through stronger community ties. He likes the word “degrowth” partly because it is unlikely to be co-opted, since companies are “mostly forced to grow or die.”

His definition, which the rest of the piece hangs on: a real sharing entity lets a group of people collectively create a good or service and then share the results equitably, driven by sharing resources, knowledge and decisions rather than shareholder profit. He then widens it — sharing wealth is the only way to reduce inequality, and sharing power the only way to fix a political system he sees as bought. He cites a Share the World’s Resources report proposing sharing as the idea that could unite social, economic and ecological movements.

Two academics anchor the second half. Josh Farley, an ecological economist at the University of Vermont: climate change, pandemics and new energy sources “have to be solved cooperatively… There is no competitive solution,” and cooperative models have to “start locally” and then scale. Barbara Muraca, a degrowth advocate at Oregon State, calls small sharing projects “laboratories of social innovation,” where “people learn to live differently because they do it.” Bliss points to Buy Nothing groups and tool-lending libraries as examples that make money matter less.

The article introduces a Grist series on “degrowth in action” in Seattle — a bike cooperative, an urban food forest and a community solar programme — aimed at climate activists who still accept “the myth” that endless growth fits with a stable climate.

Full text

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Connections

• Sharing Economy — the direct critique: access brokered by a for-profit platform is renting, not sharing, and Bliss offers a stricter definition in its place.
• Degrowth — the piece’s main idea: real sharing as the way to shrink consumption without lowering quality of life, framed here as “the real sharing economy.”
• Social Innovation — Muraca’s phrase for community sharing projects: “laboratories of social innovation.”
• Airbnb / Uber — the headline examples of “share-washing.”