Saccharine Trust
As with “authenticity,” any appeal to the ideal of “sharing” has been rendered either ironic or hypocritical. Both concepts are rooted in the fantasy of being able to transcend market relations to have "real" connection with others; they evoke the possibility of unmotivated, unpredictable spontaneity, of mutuality and presence that cuts across all calculation. In practice, using authenticity or sharing to exploit that fantasy makes them synonymous with cynical calculation.
Traditionally, capitalism worked this way: scale up, bring as many workers as you can support into your factory, rationalize their natural tendency to cooperate through a highly managed division of labor, and reap the surpluses. Because workers have an innate and irresistible tendency to cooperate — “when the laborer cooperates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species,” Marx declares in Capital Vol.1 — the capitalist gets the value of that cooperation for free.
If you value cooperation for its own sake, you might be inclined then to celebrate the further concentration of capital into the hands of a few megalithic companies, who could then subsume more masses of labor and generate more collaboration. Maybe Amazon has made for more "cooperation" than the world has ever seen before.
The "sharing economy" — it's sort of amazing, yet not, that this misnomer is still used — takes a different approach. Rather than profit from workers tendency to cooperate and collaborate, sharing platforms make their money acting as a broker between atomized workers pitted against each other, harvesting fees for facilitating their contracts. To do this, the platforms must convince everyone their mediation services are necessary to match buyers with sellers and teach them to "trust" one another.
Proponents of the “sharing economy” have long tended to recast its participants as consumers or “peers” rather than workers. Rather than engaging in a desperate scramble for subsistence wages (as were the proletarians of Marx’s analysis), participants in the sharing economy supposedly seek to move beyond basic material motivations to fulfill higher needs. Economist Yochai Benkler’s tract The Penguin and the Leviathan emphasizes the “intrinsic motivations” of greater autonomy and freedom from workplace discipline that “peer production” models are able to satisfy, positing economic incentives as threatening to “crowd out” the higher satisfaction of being able to do your own thing for a collective project.
But in practice, the sharing economy allows individuals to purse low-cost services on-demand from a depersonalized pool of service providers, while permitting them to put their own "spare capacity" similarly up for sale. As it grows, the sharing economy cannibalizes traditional jobs and their more stable wages and forces more and more people into the pit.
For sharing companies, common human decency proved a commons irresistibly ripe for enclosure, a resource to be commoditized and branded for sale (experience “community” by chatting with your Airbnb host!), or to be exploited to reduce labor costs and evade regulatory strictures. Rather than ameliorate urban anomie, the rhetoric shifted to libertarian matters of personal satisfaction and freedom. Why “crowd out” people’s ability to feel proud of what they do by paying them, and tainting them with sullying, self-interested economic incentives? And who needs regulation when users can contrive their own “self-regulating fair arrangements,” as Benkler puts it? Why should Airbnb or Uber have to follow laws designed to protect customers when their platforms purportedly allow norms of civil behavior to flourish without them? Don’t regulations create “moral hazard” that ultimately prevents people from being good?
So rather than solve the problem of disembeddness and depersonalization, the sharing economy has evolved to solve the opposite problem of overembeddedness, and the ways in which social relations limit personal enjoyment and the liberty to work on one’s own individual terms.
In its own rhetoric, the sharing economy promises individuals more convenience and autonomy simultaneously with the supposed rewards of self-abnegating cooperation and community participation. It says: Work when you want and how you want, and let technology solve the problems of coordination that can make such work truly cooperative. That way you can enjoy the pretense of collaboration or of being part of a "community" without having to surrender individual prerogative. The sharing economy invites users to enjoy the convenience of market relations while seeming to repudiate them. It lets us pretend to community while buying our way out of the need to have complicated negotiations or social interactions with "peers." This degrades our capacity for trust and for community: instead there is only the cash nexus and contract enforcement.
The ideological muddle around the ideas of sharing and community and trust helps disguise the nature of the sharing economy’s collective project, which is to subsume the collective resource of common human decency — the human ability to establish and follow social norms without having to be paid to do it; the inclination to cooperate rather than compete when the opportunity arises; the ability to build trust — to concentrated masses of capital in the form of sector-dominating sharing-economy companies in order to extract steady profit streams and rents from it.
China, a nation with an authoritarian capitalist economy that likes to pretend to communist ideals, is similarly muddled about "community," so it figures that it has made a strong push toward the sharing economy and its misleading rhetoric, as this essay by Brook Larmer in the New York Times Magazine discusses. It is no surprise to find Baidu CEO Robin Li claiming that "the idea of a sharing economy is quite similar to that of a communist society," while in practice it functions more like a centralized surveillance apparatus.
Larmer writes that "China’s sharing economy has veered sharply away from how the term was originally defined: as a peer-to-peer exchange of underutilized goods and services." But that original definition too was a smoke screen. Calling it "sharing" and referring to "peers" is supposed to put a happy face of the deepening encroachment of the market on everyday life and the conversion of all forms of social interaction and spare capacity into capital. The "sharing economy" was a nice name for a society in which every person is obliged to live as though they are sole proprietor of a branded company. Life itself is nothing other than growing the business of you.
The rhetoric of "sharing" and "community" isn't new; it dates back to the first stirrings of the internet and the ideal of a "virtual community." In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner describes an influential early online bulletin board called the WELL, which represented itself as a kind of communicative gift economy, in which information was traded freely among friends. He cites Howard Rheingold, a WELL contributor who would go on to become a prominent internet ideologist.
Rheingold asserted that the success of the informational gift economy on the WELL depended not only on the expectation of ultimate reward, but also on an intangible feeling that one was working to construct a new sort of social collective. In a gift economy, “people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo.”
That anticipates Benkler's later enthusiasm for the supposed inner-directed autonomy of networked production. But online participation is not merely a matter of climbing Maslow's pyramid. Turner argues that this view of online communication was always in tension with a more mercenary assessment that recognized the value of blurring the lines between public and private communication to build various forms of social and cultural capital.
As [sociologist] David Stark saw it, the ability of an information giver to characterize his “gift” as a valuable piece of information (in the economic register), as a demonstration of personal style (in the interpersonal register), and as a contribution to the building of a community (in the social register) allowed the information exchange to go forward in the first place. Thus, the rhetoric of community provided the ideological cover necessary to transform a potentially stark and single-minded market transaction into a complex, multidimensional act. To the extent that they could describe themselves as the givers and receivers of informational gifts within a community, members of the WELL could simultaneously recognize and ignore the degree to which they were also exchanging financially valuable goods within a newly informational economy. As a result, they could increase their own social capital and their access to the informational and social resources on which their work offline depended.
In other words, participating in online forums felt like community participation and entrepreneurial self-promotion simultaneously, with each different "register" authorizing and legitimizing the other. Every selfless donation of information or organizational labor is also a form of résumé building. A humblebrag is also a gift that keeps giving.
Turner notes how companies were quick to exploit the idea of "virtual community":
If a company could sponsor an online “community,” and if it could convince its customers that they were engaging in social rather than economic activity (or if they could convince them that the social and the economic were always blurred in any “real” community), then they could increase customer allegiance and their own profits.
That is, of course, the business model for most of social media, but it pertains to the crypto-communities that the sharing economy sometimes appeals to as well.
"Sharing economy" platforms are mainly interested in maximizing the number of exchanges taking place. That requires formal reputation-building protocols (star ratings and so on) that serve as a simulacrum of trust between people who will likely never know each other. By behaving well, users build trust not in one another but the platform itself, and that "trust" becomes available off the shelf for any new user, immediately facilitating more economic exchanges. If anything, sharing companies’ rating schemes promote a climate of distrust that posits all individual agents as hostile schemers eager to exploit possible advantages. The goal is to make users loyal to the app and dependent on its authority (its ability to enforce sanctions on bad actors) at the expense of loyalty to one another. As a Deloitte consultant that Larmer quotes puts it, "collecting data is the first goal of the sharing economy" — not building trust or communities, let alone communism.
Online platforms for organizing cheap labor pools for one-off tasks, or the short-term rental of various pieces of equipment (bikes, umbrellas, etc.) are not the next evolution of socialism so much as what Shoshana Zuboff has described as "surveillance capitalism." Ryan Calo and Alex Rosenblat argue in "The Taking Economy" that sharing platforms are well-positioned to use the data they collect to coerce and mislead all the parties involved in transactions they facilitate. They can also sell that information to other companies to exploit in their own way. This makes for a Stasi world of informants and dossiers and blacklists, where snitching is incentivized and universal hypocrisy is assumed.
The "sharing economy," as Larmer points out, goes hand in hand with another Chinese initiative, the calculation of a "social credit score" for every Chinese citizen to monitor and incentivize their good behavior. Rachel Botsman, a onetime booster of "collaborative consumption," recently wrote a piece for Wired decrying social credit schemes as "big data meets Big Brother," calling reputation scoring a form of "gamified obedience." But this has always been true of collaborative consumption. Surveillance inevitably follows directly from the premises of the sharing economy.
A world where every interaction is economic is a caveat-emptor world that demands a maximum amount of skepticism, distrust, and cynicism — a world of dog-eat-dog ruthlessness, hidden behind masks of unctuous Uber-driver politesse. "Sharing" services make it plausible to believe that everyone is out to take advantage of situations at your expense (neighbors turning your quiet building into an Airbnb flophouse, for instance), and it requires us to think the same way and look for the same advantages. Larmer closes their essay with a good example: the agent of one bike-sharing company stashing the bikes of competing companies in an alley.
What goes for bike-sharing companies would eventually go for the micro-entrepreneurial individuals forced to compete to the death with one another in a world administered by "sharing" platforms. In that world, cooperation is for suckers, and no dirty trick is too underhanded, provided you find a way to circumvent the surveillance net. If it's not being captured in the data, and damaging your reputation, then it is not illegal.
I built a lot of this post from an old essay that I was asked to write but never got published. Some of it may have been on my old blog at some point. This was the conclusion, and I probably posted it before: Belonging to communities is more often than not hard. It is typically inefficient. It does not scale. It doesn’t respond predictably to incentives. It takes more work the more you feel you belong. It requires material sacrifice and compromise. It requires a faith in other people that exceeds their commercial reliability. It entails caring about people for no reason, with no promise of gain. In short, being a part of community is a total hassle but totally mandatory (like aging and dying), so that makes us susceptible to deceptive promises that claim to make it easy or avoidable, that claim to uniquely exempt us. That is the ruse of the “sharing economy”—the illusion it crates that everyone is willing to share with you, but all you have to do is download an app.