A vibrant debate is beginning to question the meaning of sharing in relation to the big questions of our time.
In recent years, a new kind of economy based on the age-old practice of sharing is flourishing across North America and Europe, and is now rapidly spreading in popularity throughout the Middle East and other world regions. Human beings may have shared since time immemorial, but information technology
and peer-to-peer networks have given rise to an innovative trend in
modern societies – the sharing economy, which enables people to ‘share’
various goods and services with their peers in everything from cars and
bikes to food, office space, spare rooms, even time and expertise. Countless articles and reports have now evaluated the many social and economic benefits of accessing rather than owning resources, while many proponents of the sharing economy uphold the potential of sharing as a social change strategy and ‘a call to action for environmentalists’. Indeed a growing chorus of pioneers within this self-professed social movement hail it as an approaching transformation of society on a par with the industrial revolution, and ‘the defining economic story of the 21st century’.
The business community may be enthusing about the immense market size and profitabilityof
the big corporate players that espouse sharing as part of their brand
identity, but not everyone is convinced that the sharing economy is
living up to its visionary rhetoric and aspirations. Far from promoting
communitarian values, providing an answer to overconsumption or
increasing social equity, for example, a growing number of critics
attest that sharing-oriented business models are taking us in the
opposite direction – such as byundercutting unionised labour, benefitting from unfair competition, encouraging de-regulated and precarious employment, and even by robbing cities of vital public money.
Many people are also questioning whether these new business ventures
have co-opted or subverted the original conception of community-based
sharing, considering that they charge money for a service and are effectively renting skills or assets. So is the sharing economy really a ‘dumb term that deserves to die’,
or does this moment of hyperbole give us reason to pause and consider
what sharing actually means in relation to the big questions of our
time?
Rolling back the commercialisation of everything
A key critique of the sharing economy
concerns the question of whether sharing should or can be
commercialised. The essential dynamic of for-profit enterprise is to
marketise formerly non-economic spheres of life, which is no different
in the Internet-enabled sharing economy than in the dominant corporate
sector. Hence many progressives are questioning whether
the kind of ‘disruption’ that these new tech start-ups represent is
really providing a solution to social and economic problems, or rather
deepening a pernicious trend of ‘the commercialisation of everything’.
For example, is renting one’s apartment (on Airbnb), swapping designer
clothes (on ReFashioner), or loaning out your garden (on campinmygarden)
a way of extracting value from unused assets and enhancing social
relations, or is it a more efficient way for businesses to turn us into
self-interested consumers and commercially exploit us? By monetising our
skills, personal belongings and community activities, the line between
the market and non-market worlds is increasingly blurred and
intermeshed, in which case collaborative consumption and for-profit
sharing is arguablyreinforcing the values of consumer capitalist society.
At the very least, commercial sharing platforms cannot be fully
inclusive if they cater only to the more affluent consumers who can
afford to participate.
This debate is not black and white, of
course, as meaningful relationships can clearly still be formed in the
worlds of business and commerce, and there are obvious social benefits
to collaborative consumption and valuable economic gains to be made by
leveraging our unwanted or underused goods or so-called ‘non-product assets’.
But common experience demonstrates how the truly ‘sharing’ economy is
often free and not commercial, and has always included the unpaid care,
support and nurturing that bonds us as human beings – what Edgar Cahn,
the founding father of the TimeBanking movement, terms the core economythat
enables people to contribute to the welfare and well-being of each
other through acts of reciprocity. From this perspective, the
transformative social power of interpersonal sharing lies in scaling up
its non-economic dimensions through more formalised institutions, new
technologies or informal networks that can be accessed by anyone. Such
examples would include community gardens, open-source projects, clothing
and book swaps, the Really Really Free Markets, and countless other
social networks based on gift exchange or collective efforts to pool
skills and support. As writers such as Charles Eisenstein or‘Moneyless Man’ Mark Boyle attest,
living according to the spirit of the gift and sharing has benefits
that go beyond the quantifiable: it means to reclaim human relationships
from the market, to take a stand against a commodity world in which
everything exists for the primary goal of profit, and to reaffirm our
collective identities as interdependent, creative and joyful human
beings as opposed to mere consumers.
Aligning business models with the principle of sharing
This is not to argue that entrepreneurship
and commerce has no place in a sharing economy, as money-free sharing
activities are mainly suited to a local level where physical interaction
and proximity is necessary. The growing success of many sophisticated
commercial sharing platforms (most of which boast a strong social
dimension) also suggests that millions of people are choosing to
participate in collaborative sharing activities, and new business
start-ups that are oriented towards sharing are set to make up an ever
greater proportion of economic activity. The question is what kind of
business models these enterprises adopt if they want to remain genuinely
aligned with the ethic and practice of sharing. Already,criticisms abound that venture capital is pouring in to promising sharing economy start-ups and turning them into large corporations whose raison d’être is
revenue growth, shareholder value maximisation and the monopolization
of markets – which makes them incapable of bringing us closer to a more
equitable, fair or truly sharing society. Who can deny that those who
run the sharing economy along these lines are not sharing the wealth it creates for them?
In this era of multiple and converging crises
caused in large part by monolithic and mercilessly profit-seeking
corporations, progressives are increasingly calling for new business
ownership models that are aligned with the principle of sharing. This is
most often discussed in terms of cooperatives, in which no single
individual or group drives the company for their own profit and
financial redistribution is built into the business structure. The
‘sharing lawyer’ Janelle Orsi in California is a prominent advocate of converting sharing economy companies into cooperatives, and even argues that these two concepts should
be regarded as synonymous. But there are many other business models
that reflect an ‘emerging ownership revolution’ (in the words of Marjorie Kelly)
and adhere to principles that promote inherently fair and ecologically
sustainable outcomes – such as community land trusts,
community-supported agriculture, credit unions and locally-owned
community banks, as well as not-for-profit enterprises in their different guises.
The institutionalisation of sharing by governments
If this real sharing economy is
going to resist co-optation and embody the common good in place of
growth and profit imperatives, it is going to need such widespread
public backing that eventually governments will commit to scaling it up
through national policies and regulations. And on the surface, there are
promising signs that this process is underway: 15 mayors from across
the United States have now officially declared their municipalities as Shareable Cities,
and committed to reviewing and addressing regulations that may hinder
participation in the sharing economy. Seoul in South Korea has also
adopted a project called Sharing City that aims to promote existing sharing enterprises and incubate sharing economy start-ups, whileEcuador and Amsterdam are also embracing a new tech-driven sharing culture.
But the concept of economic sharing per se is
not beholden to consumer-oriented, peer-to-peer or Internet-mediated
forms of collaboration, and must also be reflected in government
policies – especially if inequality and other long-term, systemic issues
like climate changeand unsustainable food systems are
ever to be tackled. Government can be understood as the most
fundamental expression of economic sharing in which we practice
“collaborative consumption through societal organisation of public
services”, to quote Jonathan Schifferes of The RSA. A truly sharing society,
in this sense, is underpinned by systems of universal social protection
and requires a strong interventionist role for governments and strictly
regulated markets, which would then necessitate, for example, the
removal of profit-maximising companies out of certain sectors like
healthcare, education
and utilities. The concept of sharing also applies to democratic forms
of governance in terms of how equally power is distributed throughout
society, which has potentially dramatic implications for participatory
politics. In fact, there is a long list of the kind of economic and
social policies that align with the principle of sharing on a national
level, from land value taxation and other tax reforms that can encourage a fairer distribution of wealth and income, to the laws and regulations that can support the extension of common property rather than its enclosure and privatisation.
In the end, however, the true possibilities
of economic sharing will only be seen when governments, acting
cooperatively in the interests of all nations, commit to the policies
that can institutionalise sharing on a global basis. In a world of
interlinked and interdependent economies, nothing less than a more
equitable distribution of wealth and income between as well as within countries can ensure the sustainability, peace and security of present and future generations – which more and more people
within the local sharing movement are coming to realise. When
collaborative ideals and social solidarity is finally translated into a
global call to share the world’s resources, we may finally bear witness
to the ultimate Sharing Spring.
Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources,
(STWR), a London-based civil society organisation campaigning for a
fairer sharing of wealth, power and resources within and between
nations. He can be contacted at adam@sharing.org
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