Thread by @Medium

1/ The sharing economy is dead. read.medium.com/KNDOA9K

2/ To understand how we got here, let’s take a step back and travel to the early aughts. It was around this time that the concept of the sharing economy burst onto the scene.

3/ According to its proponents, sharing was going to be an altruistic form of capitalism, an answer to consumption run amok. It was going to change our world for the better by allowing us—all of us—to shed our obsession with ownership in preference for community.

4/ But the sharing economy quickly turned into a multibillion dollar economic model. The term “sharing” began to lose its meaning, but remained buoyed by its promise of decentralizing wealth.

5/ The bottom 99 percent—anxious, frustrated, and dissatisfied by the contemporary American middle-class in the wake of the Great Recession—could earn money by essentially allowing them to freelance part-time as a handyman, innkeeper, or taxi driver.

6/ By the mid-2010s, though, even that concept of the sharing economy had begun to sour when we learned that the ideas pitched as novelties were really just the same things we already had—only cheaper, and unregulated.

7/ Would-be drivers started buying cars with subprime loans, or renting directly from the ride-hailing platform. Vacation rentals began encouraging speculative real estate investments, exacerbating the housing crisis by turning once-livable apartments into off-the-books hotels.

8/ Sharing didn’t deliver broad financial stability—it increased contract labor, pushing down already low wages for freelancers and employees alike.

9/ And that leads us to today.

Sharing, as we once knew it, is dead. But tech companies have cleverly rebranded it to juice whatever profit the ever-changing concept has left. Read more about it in @susie_c’s eulogy for the sharing economy. read.medium.com/KNDOA9K