When sharing isn’t fair

In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be far more profitable than renting out your own.

Over the past few years, companies like Airbnb and Uber have made a great deal of money by pioneering a business model of connecting consumers, who want to use things — such as apartments and cars with drivers — with other people, who want to provide them. For public relations reasons they promote this model as the ‘sharing economy’. And who could be against ‘sharing’?

But this isn’t the kind of sharing your mother taught you. The term entered the technology vernacular when Napster introduced ‘file-sharing’ — which many lawyers called ‘copyright infringement’, and a US court essentially ruled illegal. Today’s sharing economy involves physical goods, but it still revolves around technology companies that tend to view at least some legal regulations as outmoded, annoying barriers to their business plans.

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In What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, Tom Slee, an author and blogger who also works in the software business, delivers a smart and searing critique of a business that people are only just beginning to think about in a serious way. While some bloggers still treat the sharing economy as some kind of cause, Slee rightly analyses it as a business model masquerading as a movement.

What makes his book hit harder than the endless expanses of online commentary is that Slee realises it isn’t just a matter of theory. He points out that Peers, a self-described ‘grassroots organisation that supports the sharing economy movement’, actually ‘functioned in part as a front for Silicon Valley lobbying’. Indeed, sharing economy companies have been so successful at getting Uber users and Airbnb renters to fight taxi and hotel regulations that they’ve essentially outsourced their lobbying as much as they have their business operations.