Tag: labour.

Photo by CCPA Monitor • Unifor President Jerry Dias at Social Forum rally outside Canadian War Museum. In his essay of October 17, 2016, “Big Three Bargaining: Different Ways of Making History,” Sam Gindin provides an intriguing analysis of current negotiations between Unifor and the Detroit Three automakers. Beyond agreeing

Photo by Ford Motor Company Canadian autoworkers have long been pace setters in the Canadian labour movement and as soon as its most recent agreement with General Motors was ratified, Unifor (the successor in 2013 after the merger of CAW and CEP) laid claim to that agreement’s ‘historic’ status. It

On January 13, 2015, around 70 of Portland’s 460 Taxi cabs protested fair taxi laws by parking in Pioneer square. Organizers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Photo by Aaron Parecki.

“Before the internet, renting a surfboard, a power tool or a parking
space from someone else was feasible, but was usually more trouble than it
was worth,” noted The Economist in a 2013 story about the rise of the socalled
Sharing Economy. But not so any longer, the piece continues, noting
that the sudden and widespread availability of online platforms that link
“peers” to one another has made any such trouble disappear, unleashing
undreamed of convenience and a new galaxy of consumer options. Today, it
seems like this interpretation of the Sharing Economy is everywhere, as
journalists, pundits and politicians have lined up to praise its “innovative”
promise. Yet is there something more sinister lurking behind the communitarian
facade that so often accompanies descriptions of the peer-to-peer
online sector? To consider this question, we connected with Tom Slee, author
of the new book What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy.

David Hugill: Let me begin with a basic question. What is the
Sharing Economy?

Tom Slee: It’s a new wave of Internet platforms that are
designed to facilitate exchanges between individuals.
Early on, it involved things things like tool-sharing
programs. Why does everybody need to have a
hand drill? You never really use it. It just sits there
on the shelf. Why not share it with others? The Sharing
Economy came about as a means of using Internet
platforms to solve problems like this one, initially
with a lot of egalitarian talk, a lot of community
focused talk. The idea was that the Internet
could facilitate person-to-person exchanges without
having to go through the big corporations. Today, it
is primarily a way of using Internet platforms to
facilitate transactions in the service economy, for
example by connecting people with car rides,
through Uber or Lyft, with places to stay, through
AirBnB, with personal loans, through Lending Club,
with places to work, through WeWork, and all those
kinds of things. As the money in the Sharing Economy
has grown, so has the driving ideology behind
it, and now it’s become basically a deregulation
movement, with companies like Uber and Airbnb
building business models that demand deregulation
of their industries in cities around the world.

DH: So you are dubious about the claim that these enterprises
are mostly about progressive forms of community
building. In fact, you’ve written quite critically
about the way in which proponents of the Sharing
Economy have adopted — even co-opted — the
communitarian language of social movements to
describe their work. Can you elaborate?

TS: I think co-opt is the right word. In fact, the only hesitancy
I have about using that word is that I think
some proponents of the Sharing Economy literally
believe the things they are saying. In many ways, this
is a product of what has been called the California
Ideology, which is a strange combination of beliefs
that have traditionally been both left and right wing,
a kind of anti-authoritarianism that has become a
full fledged techno-libertarianism. There is this
belief that there is no contradiction between having
sustainable, small scale exchanges and globe-straddling
corporations that will administer them. If there
is one thing that motivated me to do this work,
it is seeing progressive language used to promote
something completely antithetical. Sharing Economy
boosters use the language of non-commercial
exchange, but what’s mostly happening is that they
are promoting the extension of a harsh free-market
economics into places that it previously couldn’t
reach. So co-opt is absolutely the right word.

DH: *In your book, you hint at the way that Sharing Economy
corporations — especially Uber and AirBnB —
use the language of “livable” cities to describe the
implications of the services they provide. Rhetorically
at least, their ideas harken back to Jane Jacobs
and other liberal urbanists that valued lively, populated,
salubrious and co-operative urban spaces. I
get the sense that you share my incredulity about
their claims. Is that right?

TS: I think AirBnB has been the been the biggest in
terms of this. They’ve talked about the “shareable
city,” or, the “open city,” where you can find a home
wherever you go and so on. They celebrate the small
scale, individuals having people stay in their houses
and maybe fixing bikes on the side or something. In
this way, they promote a kind of Jacobsian vision of
the city, if you like. I just don’t know if the AirBnB
folks believe their own messages anymore. If they
do, they must be isolated. In the last few weeks, I
have been working with a journalist who writes for
Fusion and is doing some research on AirBnB’s
impact in Reykjavik. Here you have a city of a
120,000 people and a total of 22 apartments available
for long term rent. Essentially none, in other
words. At the same time, two-and-a-half thousand
apartments have been turned over to AirBnB listings.
So AirBnB might say “come and live like a
local,” but actual locals can’t even live like locals
anymore.

I think AirBnB has been the been the biggest in
terms of this. They’ve talked about the “shareable
city,” or, the “open city,” where you can find a home
wherever you go and so on. They celebrate the small
scale, individuals having people stay in their houses
and maybe fixing bikes on the side or something. In
this way, they promote a kind of Jacobsian vision of
the city, if you like. I just don’t know if the AirBnB
folks believe their own messages anymore. If they
do, they must be isolated. In the last few weeks, I
have been working with a journalist who writes for
Fusion and is doing some research on AirBnB’s
impact in Reykjavik. Here you have a city of a
120,000 people and a total of 22 apartments available
for long term rent. Essentially none, in other
words. At the same time, two-and-a-half thousand
apartments have been turned over to AirBnB listings.
So AirBnB might say “come and live like a
local,” but actual locals can’t even live like locals
anymore.

AirBnB is very effective at promoting their narrative.
They regularly put out these studies on the
benefits that their service provides to the cities
where they operate. They say “we bring a lot of
money to this city.” They compare the full number of
AirBnB bookings to what it would be like if all those
people had decided to stay at home and they say
“look, here’s all the money we’ve brought in.” Then
they take the power consumption of people staying
in hotels and compare it to people staying in AirBnbs
and say “see, we saved you all this energy.” But you
could also do it the other way around. You could say,
look, “we took all this money away because people
weren’t staying in hotels.” Or “we added environmental
problems” if you compare their impact to
what it would have been if people had stayed at
home. That’s why I say that if, they still believe their
own rhetoric at this point, I have no idea how they
square the circle.

DH: I don’t know if you’ve had the misfortune of reading
Zipcar founder Robin Chase’s book, *Peers Inc.,
which is a Sharing Economy manifesto of sorts. In
any case, it really pushes this idea that Sharing
Economy enterprises are topplers of entrenched
power, that they are the builders of horizontal networks
that supersede and overwhelm centralized
forms of power. There may be an element of truth in
this, but what interests me is how hard it is to square
this claim to decentralization with the new forms of
stratification that these businesses have created. I
mean how can a “movement” that has created so
many new billionaires be about anti-hierarchical
decentralization? Isn’t there a perverse irony at the
core of these claims?*

TS: It is remarkable, isn’t it? You have the image of the
network as very decentralized, but the end result
has been that the internet in many of its manifestations
is a winner-take-all environment. The Sharing
Economy has become an environment where the biggest
players are as big as ever and to some extent
you have a long tail of people making a few bucks.
What we have is what some political scientists have
called the “missing middle.” I don’t think AirBnB is a
threat to Marriott or other big hotel chains. It is a
threat to bed-and-breakfasts and small independent
hotels. What we’ve seen is that these new platforms
don’t end up challenging the biggest companies but
independent operators who get stuck in the middle
and have a hard time making it.

DH: So is this claim that Internet platforms are providing
new opportunities for people to connect in a decentralized
way simply a ruse, or are there Internet
innovations that are capable of providing genuinely
progressive opportunities to move beyond concentrated
forms of corporate power?

TS: You can go back to the ’90s and you’ll find that a lot
of the early Internet culture movements — Indymedia,
things like that — were very big on the potential
of disintermediated communication forms to remove
hierarchies, get rid of gatekeepers in publishing and
so on. But my feeling is that they got completely outflanked
by the big platforms. You don’t have to
worry about publishers stopping you from getting
your message out, but you do have to deal with
Amazon. There are still groups of people who still
very firmly believe that the Internet has some inherent
counter-cultural value to it, but I see that as a
moment in time that has come and gone.

DH: It does seem like the counter-cultural possibilities of
the Internet are less abundant than they were even a
few years ago. Are there particular technological
shifts that have accelerated the corporatization of
the online world?

TS: I think there are a couple of things. One is the rise of
cloud computing and the platforms built upon it. We
don’t have networked architectures any longer.
Instead, everything is going through the same set of
servers. Yes, you might have a network of friends on
Facebook, but all that information is on Facebook’s
servers. So we’ve seen that kind of evolution of
different platforms. I also think that the rise of mobile
technology — including apps — has created a much
more segregated experience. It takes away what
Jonathan Zittrain calls the “generative” nature of
the technology. The phone is essentially, if not
purely, a consumption device. It’s not a device you
can do stuff with; it’s not a general purpose computer
in the same way.

In addition to those two changes, I think that, by
2006 or 2007, a lot of people who could no longer
get jobs on Wall Street were coming across to Silicon
Valley instead. I think that changed the culture as
well. There was a time when banks could offer the
smartest computer science and math students a big
bag of money to come and work on ever more complex
financial instruments, but as the 2008 crash
approached and then happened, that opportunity
went away. Now it’s the Silicon Valley giants and
the startups called “unicorns” (companies with over
$1B in venture capital) that can offer the biggest
bags of money. And money, as they say, changes
everything.

DH: One of the things that’s really interesting in your
book is the way you challenge the idea the Sharing
Economy is mostly about giving people a little extra
money on the side. a describes itself as a platform
that allows people to make a supplementary income,
maybe to pay for the cost of playing golf or some
other activity. AirBnB describes itself as a platform
that allows people to offset the cost of urban living
by renting out part of their space. But your research
suggests we should be wary about taking these
clams at face value.

TS: For AirBnB, this kind of arrangement might represent
half their business, but the other half is business
people running multiple properties, doing it on
a professional basis. I know somebody that went to
one of these AirBnB events in Paris where they get
all the hosts together. These events are all about
training hosts to make more money. How do you do
that? How do you professionalize? Maybe you get a
cleaning service. Maybe you get a key handling service.
They are going down that route of professionalization
very quickly. Uber is an interesting case
because they kind of came at it sideways. Two years
ago, Uber was not talking about people working for
four hours a week. They were saying you can make
$90,000 driving for Uber. People were talking about
the end of the poorly paid taxi driver. But that vision
turned out to be a mirage. Now they are saying, “we
don’t have to worry about things like decent pay
because it is just a bit of extra money.” I think
they’ve found that that is more effective public message.
You know, don’t worry, it’s not a real job.

DH: There is a way in which champions of the Sharing
Economy — whether they are actual Silicon Valley
leaders or simply the provincial lieutenants tapped
to do their bidding — describe the transformations
that they promote as inevitable. They tell policy
makers and others that the types of exchanges
associated with their platforms are here for good
and that policy makers better adapt to the new reality
or risk being reduced to backwater status. Do you
see this sense of personal destiny as part of the California
Ideology that you described earlier?

TS: Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was very involved in the
design of their new logo, which represents the coming
together of bits and atoms. The merging of physical
and digital worlds. Could you paint yourself in
bigger, more spectacular colours? No. For them, it’s
very useful to conflate the march of technology with
the march of their businesses. But while technology
does advance, individual businesses can come and
go very quickly. A few years ago Groupon was the
future of shopping. And then, boom! What’s Groupon?
I think governments run the risk of closing
down future innovations by being too friendly to the
first big kid on the block.

DH: So we have these platforms that describe themselves
as revolutionary, transformative, etc., and
there is certainly a lot of truth to that. But insofar as
they are pursuing a relatively straightforward
deregulatory agenda, are they not, in many ways,
simply recapitulating a well-established form of
right wing politics?

TS: Sure, I think they are. I think it comes from a peculiarly
American worldview as well. I don’t think you
would have seen the same kind of development if
things had started elsewhere. There is a Sharing
Economy conference in Paris called OUIshare which
happens every year and it has been through a few
crises of conscience over this because it wasn’t the
original vision that they started with. To generalize,
I think we can say that Americans are more likely to
see the government as a thing to be got out of the
way. They simply don’t see it as having a useful role.
Whereas, I think most of the Left elsewhere has a
much more complex relationship with government. I
mean, of course there is the Snowden revelations,
there is a lot of surveillance stuff, and there are a lot
of coercive problems with the state. But at the same
time the state can be a bulwark against the ravages
of free market capitalism, so we have a more tortured
relationship with it, I think. Most defenders of
the Sharing Economy don’t seem to be at all troubled
by internal conflict on these questions.

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).

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