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
Saturday
2 April 2016 07.30 BST
‘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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