What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom
Slee review – the problem with Airbnb and Uber
The most significant examples of what used to be called the
‘sharing economy’ are giant corporations pursuing monopoly power – what exactly
is being shared?
Steven Poole
Sat 2 Apr 2016 07.30 BST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017
10.48 GMT
‘Sharing” is one of
the most rhetorically abused virtues of the age. First we had the euphemism
“file-sharing”, for duplicating and uploading copies of albums or films to the
internet. Well, you can’t share what isn’t yours in the first place. (If I
pilfer money from a bank and give it to my friends, I might plead that I was
just “money-sharing”, but I am more likely to be convicted of robbery.) And now
we supposedly have a “sharing economy”, the most-often cited two examples of
which – Uber and Airbnb – are giant corporations pursuing monopoly power and
fighting governments the world over. What exactly is being shared here, and in
whose interest?
The first “sharing economy” organisations allowed members to
timeshare things such as cars or power tools, rather than owning one each and
leaving it idle most of the time. In their purest form such groups were
“peer-to-peer”: self-organising, with no central authority. Once a for-profit
company is set up to handle the logistics – such as Zipcar – however, the
notion of “sharing” is arguably already out of the window. Still, there
remained the kernel of a communitarian idea in the origin of Airbnb, founded by
two tech workers who rented out airbeds in their spare rooms for a conference,
and thought there might be a market.
Airbnb’s marketing still plays on the feelings of virtuous
and adventurous sociability in the idea of a “guest” staying in a spare room of
the “host’s” home. Yet, as Tom Slee’s superbly argued book points out, the vast
majority of Airbnb’s business is now “entire home” rentals: self-contained
flats or villas. Long-term renters in cities such as San Francisco are being
forced out by landlords who see more profit in short-term Airbnb stays. Slee
performs some very clever data research and finds out that the most expensive
Airbnb apartment in Rome is one of several European luxury pads rented out by
an American tech entrepreneur, who bought them with the proceeds of the sale of
his last software company. The idea of “sharing” is as meaningless here as it
is in Uber’s made-up concept of “ride-sharing”, which sounds as ecologically
minded as “car-sharing” but actually describes a taxi service. Nor is any
“sharing” going on with companies such as TaskRabbit, in which people bid to
perform other people’s odd jobs.
What is explicitly not shared by any of the poster children
of the “sharing economy” is responsibility. When something goes horribly wrong
with an Airbnb or Uber transaction, the companies just say: “It wasn’t me.”
(The mega-corporation is purportedly neither buyer nor seller but innocent
middleman.) Slee has a brilliant chapter on how star-rating “reputation
systems” between users simply don’t work, because people feel bad about giving
low ratings even when they are amply deserved, so they all cluster between four
and five. Instead, trust has to be enforced by authoritarian surveillance and
discipline imposed by the company itself. Even so, the companies insist that
they are not even providing a service; the websites and apps are just a
“communications platform” to link buyers and sellers. (Even as they price-gouge
the sellers, with Uber taking increasingly large cuts of up to 30% of a fare.)
Nor, notoriously, does Uber consider its drivers to be employees to whom they
would owe responsibilities: they are instead “independent contractors”.
What all these artificial constructions amount to for Uber,
Airbnb and the like is an attempt to bypass laws enacted over decades precisely
in order to protect both renters and landlords, taxi drivers and passengers.
Impressed by their popularity and financial clout, most lawmakers bend over
backwards to accommodate them. Helpfully, California passed a special law
recognising Uber and its competitors as “Transportation Network Companies”. In
the face of complaints by London’s black-cab drivers, the high court ruled last
year that an Uber driver’s smartphone is not a “taximeter” because the
measurement of mileage through GPS signals and the calculation of the fare are
done over the internet. This might strike some as a perversely creative refusal
to acknowledge the plain meaning of the relevant legislation. The full
definition of “taximeter” in the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act of 1998
reads: “In this section ‘taximeter’ means a device for calculating the fare to
be charged in respect of any journey by reference to the distance travelled or
time elapsed since the start of the journey (or a combination of both).”
None of this is to say that profitable pseudo-“sharing”
operations cannot be set up to work in the best interests of everyone. The
introduction of Paris’s cycle-hire scheme Vélib’ in 2007 was a great boon for
residents of the city, and it now also has Autolib’, a very successful similar
operation for electric cars. In the meantime, lots of us will continue to use
Uber, too. To criticise it is not the sole preserve of people who are
unqualified admirers of London cabbies’ high fares and habit of driving past in
the rain. Slee points out, rightly, that his arguments are not about whether he
or his readers actually use these services. In modern times we have been
miseducated to believe that consumer choice is all-powerful, but the idea that
consumers exercising their sovereign right to choose will always lead to the
best outcomes is obviously in the interest of corporations seeking to escape
official regulation. So, Slee uses Airbnb himself but backs the city
authorities seeking to regulate it more tightly; and there is no contradiction
in taking an Uber home from a party while wishing the company were better
behaved. Only the law can force it to be so.
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