Vonny Moyes: All this talk of a ‘sharing economy’ feels fundamentally dishonest

"Sharing" is a people word. It invokes humanity. A central resource is consciously portioned amongst the many. A word that seems inherently virtuous, predicated on an act of selflessness or sacrifice for the benefit of others. We’re told sharing stories our whole lives; think of Jesus feeding the multitude, or Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Big business appropriating this powerful word seems a little off.

When you combine that powerful, human word with another – ‘economy’ – you get something altogether different. A transformation of meaning that sort of jams the brain. How can it be sharing when you monetise the transaction of giving? Isn’t that selling? Can you really marry those two terms together? It seems not. Around the world – London, Berlin, New York, Dublin – local authorities are cracking down on the exponential expansion of Airbnb, imposing regulations and hefty penalties for any failure to comply. This week Uber, another giant of this so-called sharing economy, lost the right to call its workers self-employed. The company, which employs about 40,000 drivers in the UK, could face claims from all for the national living wage, paid holiday and pensions. The landmark ruling is a victory for worker’s rights in a time when the digital workforce can be so easily exploited. Exploitation that’s easily to overlook when you have a shiny app or a slick website full of carefully chosen language and pictures of people having a jolly nice time at their bright and airy holiday let in Copenhagen.

That’s because on the surface, it’s easy to buy into the rhetoric. We’re fatigued by the sharp end of capitalism and its flagrant, unapologetic exploitation of resource and people. It’s harder to gaze so readily upon the economic Darwinism at hand when big companies pay a clever design team to build an intuitive user interface and a copywriter to mask the reality with evocative fluff. We continue to buy into the sharing economy as the answer, because when it works, it’s wonderful. When you’ve had a good experience, likely indicated by cost, ease and availability, all of which the sharing economy facilitates, why would you complain? Service users can gloss over the murky unknowns of the digital quagmire underneath it because their interaction has been a positive one. That’s certainly been my experience.

I’ll freely admit to having been lax in my introspection about worker’s realities when I’ve been lapping up the benefits of this new industry. I’m one of the “asset-light” generation. The type for whom the simple milestone purchases of adulthood are out of reach, despite relatively well-paid full-time employment. It seems to me the rise in the use of the sharing economy is not just a conscious eschewing of the status quo by hip young things in search of experiences over possessions – it’s that we can’t front the costs of constant materiality. Running a car is non-viable, let alone buying one, so we take an Uber. We can afford the airfare, but not the hotels, so we want something cheaper. But as more of us use and depend on these supposed peer-to-peer services to simulate the quality of life our parents had, whilst feeling virtuous about our non-purchases, our use is contributing to someone else’s precarity. It’s a catch-22 we’re forced into as our prospects shrink and we look to these services to plug the gap – whether to meet our demand for a thing or fill an employment gap.

The sharing economy seems to be a confluence of a number of factors. The loss of skills, ailing job prospects, money woes and abundant technology. All of which adds up to people looking to the most plentiful resource – technology and the internet – for the answer to the problems created by the others. But with technology there is an enforced distance from the people at either end. Uber can’t see the taxi driver whose earnings are down by a third in two years thanks to more drivers and nose-diving fares. And he can’t see Travis Kalanick (number 290 on the richest Americans list, by the way) rubbing his hands together. It’s boomtown economics for the digital generation. We’re haven’t struck oil or found gold in our back yards – we're mining ourselves and our possessions, lining someone else’s pockets in the process. All the hallmarks are there: the possibility of economic prosperity and the resultant social disruption.

The more I think about these services continuing as is, the less comfortable I am. All in, they seem like a neoliberal Trojan Horse, masquerading as the answer to our troubles while shafting others as they grow. Workers. Communities. Renters. The sharing economy doesn’t need you – it needs your things. Your house. Your car. Your bike. You are secondary in the process. Your skills aren’t valued. You are an operator. A technician. A self-employed person largely makes a living from their skills, whereas people who rely on the gigging economy to live often don’t have those skills to rely on. What they have in place of that is a commodity some faceless internet conglomerate can exploit for profit.

The sharing economy is an indicator species. Just as a bushy lichen on a tree tells you your air is clean, or a sludgeworm tells you your water is toxic, the sharing economy tells us something is very sick with the working landscape in Britain. But, in reality, we’ll still use them, in the same way that we have to shop at Tesco or use Amazon because we have lives to live, families to feed, and bank balances to mind. The pound dictates the values we can really afford to live with, and as long as that’s the case we’ll grumble, but tolerate the gradual erosion of the things we once valued; skills, expertise, service, sharing, job security. With that in mind, I say bring on the regulation – the sharing economy seems here to stay, so let’s make sure it doesn’t forget the people who make the sharing possible.