If you’ve followed the technology world over the last five years, you know that the three buzziest trends in Silicon Valley have been “social media,” “mobile computing,” and the “sharing economy.”
On the off-chance you’ve never heard of the sharing economy, here’s a thumbnail definition, courtesy of Fast Company:
After pausing for a moment as the audience chuckled, she provided the obvious solution.
“Why don’t you rent the drill? Or rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it?
And that, my friends, is the sharing economy: A peer-to-peer network of people who find one another over the internet and monetize their wasting assets by renting out items–cars, power drills, ladders–to people who need them. Now, if you’ve never heard about the sharing economy, don’t worry—because it’s already dead. The companies which sprung up to take advantage of it have all gone bust.
The entire idea of the “sharing economy” is a nifty little look into how disconnected both Silicon Valley and the media can be from real life.
Let’s start with the media. In that great Fast Company piece, reporter Sarah Kessler does a fine bit of forensics chasing the idea of the sharing company through the press. Like, for instance, the way they mindlessly regurgitated the anecdote about the drill:
Even companies that weren’t renting power drills proselytized the theory. “There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told the New York Times in a 2013 column about the sharing economy. “Does everyone really need their own drill?”
Did anyone actually do a study determining how many minutes power drills are used either in their lifetimes or per year? Of course not. The media simply regurgitated something someone said at a TED talk–and then echoed one another. As Kessler points out, the press was so mindlessly infatuated with the sharing economy that “when it died, nobody seemed to notice (some publications continued to cite SnapGoods, for instance, a year after it shut down).” If you ever wanted to see how divorced from reality the media can be, this is exhibit #5,042.
But the entire idea for the “sharing economy” itself comes from a place of deep estrangement from the real world. Because in the real world, we already have an efficient system through which people share resources across a peer-to-peer network. It’s called a neighborhood.
In the real world, if you need a drill you walk next door to your neighbor, Jim, and ask if you can borrow his. Jim doesn’t charge you for the favor, though it’s understood that it would be nice if you brought him a beer when you return the drill. Similarly, if Jim’s wife runs out of sugar while she’s rushing to bake a cake, she can come over to your house and borrow a cup of sugar. This practice has such widespread acceptance the–such a huge installed-base, they’d say in Silicon Valley—that the phrase “borrow a cup of sugar” is actually shorthand for the analog sharing system.
It must sound crazy to the 25-year-old millionaires in San Francisco, but neighbors can coordinate these exchanges without the use of smartphones. Really. You just look out your front door to see if Jim is home. If he is, you walk over to his house, knock on the door, and communicate using the app God pre-installed in your throat. And if Jim isn’t there, and you really need that drill ASAP, you walk over to Rich’s place. Or maybe you knock on the door of the new neighbor you haven’t met before.
This analog sharing system has proven to be amazingly efficient over the centuries. And quite pleasant, too.
There is a strange assumption today that any task or interaction can be improved if it is conducted through an iPhone. The death of the sharing economy demonstrates that this is not always true.
