Airbnb and Uber’s sharing economy is one route to dotcommunism

Airbnb and Uber have nothing, 0.000%, to do with sharing. They have simply built a digital infrastructure for renting out rooms and selling taxi fares. Their success lies in the fact that digital communication systems are significantly lower cost and more flexible than pre-internet ones. They now own that infrastructure 100% and aim to become monopolies.

(Edit: Another good example of a digital infrastructure company is Amazon. That's what they are, not a retailer or anything else.)

This is asinine. There is already a free, federated gift economy for rides and places to stay -- hitchhiking and hospitality exchange, both of which existed, and made it to the internet[1][2][3], well before Airbnb or Uber.

[1]http://hitchwiki.org [2]http://couchsurfing.org [3]http://trustroots.org

The article suggests that such services don't really need a central company to make it all work. It could be much more distributed, or federated.

This should be even more true for social networks - what value does Facebook really add? Yet no one has a successful distributed social network. We used to have Usenet, but few use that any more. (It still works fine.) There's software for federated social networks, but nobody uses it.

The two main problems are lack of promotion, and asshole amplification. Without heavy promotion, a new networked service has trouble overcoming the noise level and getting enough users to be useful.

Can one jerk ruin it for a large number of people? If so, the system is vulnerable to asshole amplification. 80% of email spam is generated by only 100 spam operations, according to Spamhaus. Many approaches have been tried to fix this kind of problem, from crowdsourced reputation to proof of work. There's still nothing that works really well.

Solve those two problems, and we might have a non-exploitive sharing economy. What we have now is exploitation of the masses by the ruling class.

I dont think he is backing the argument he makes in the title well. People using these platforms are in the process of repurposing their assets (rooms and cars) to make them look more like hotels and cabs, rather than the other way around. Airbnb and uber are becoming like any other capitalist monopoly. Their effect is to de-regularize the market, which is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from "dotcommunism". It's not a free market utopia either. It's business as usual.

It's not sharing if one person is still paying another person for a good or service. It's just cutting out a middleman (or two or three). This has the potential to be a great thing, but it's still not sharing.

I'm not sure I really follow the line of reasoning in this article. It starts with the word "communism" in the title, probably because it's a tried and true way of getting people riled up with minor effort.

Then it seems to make the argument that these business models don't create new markets, but optimize existing ones.

But then the argument that would justify the title, as I understand it, is "if communists took over things, we would be living in a communist society". Indeed! And if martians took over, we would live in a martian society.

"Once the platforms to rent out things, services or time are stable, textbook economics states that the cost of using them should fall."

I'm not sure what textbooks say about economics these days, but the pure supply and demand economics assuming rational actors taught in economics 101 has never been a good model of real world behavior.

Marketplaces are valuable because they provide monopoly profits. They are real estate, and participating in them requires rent.

I imagine it would be so much better if one day the government could regulate such things.

I know many people would scream, but honestly there is a gray area when it comes to rights and damage insurances. I don't think all consumer trust those business models.

> But I can be a producer in this business as well as a consumer. I can rent my own flat or register my own car to provide cab rides.

Yes, and Airbnb and Uber, being the gatekeepers of the network, can extort you.

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dotFeudalism would probably be a better descriptor.

Sigh - the continued slide into awful "journalism" at the graniud continues. I know someone has to give all the "new media" graduates a job, but, at least supervise the output!