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The article identifies some problems but totally misses their actual source. The problem isn't that we own less stuff, it's that the ownership is replaced by a

by _bxg1 8y ago

The article identifies some problems but totally misses their actual source. The problem isn't that we own less stuff, it's that the ownership is replaced by a dependency on a handful of corporations which we have no ability to influence or appeal to. The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren't getting communal ownership in return; we're getting nothing but convenience. Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.

ictoan 8y ago
In other words, monopoly.
- pc86 8y ago
  Nothing in the parent comment indicates or requires a monopoly. At all.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    It does, partially. While it's no replacement for democracy or other forms of cooperative stakeholding, the one avenue we have for influencing companies we grow to depend on is through our business. Monopolies remove that sole piece of leverage.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- apozem 8y ago
  That is absolutely the end goal of all these network-effect companies. Uber wants to be a monopoly on transportation, Google a monopoly on search, Spotify a monopoly on music consumption, etc.
  - downrightmike 8y ago
    *Google a monopoly on advertising
    - colecut 8y ago
      FB blows it out of the water for audience/demographic targeting
    - apozem 8y ago
      I'd say they have it well split with Facebook at the moment, but yeah, a duopoly isn't much better.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market. This is about multiple corporations. The proper word is cartel or "corpocracy" which dislike as corporations are just a legal fiction. Someone still owns the corporation. The article isn't really about americans not owning stuff. It is about average americans not owning stuff. Poor, or at least not-rich, people are today less likely to own things like houses and cars. But the rich still own plenty. They are owning a greater percentage of everything. So perhaps the best word is plutocracy.
  - rapnie 8y ago
    Plutocracy is the name of governance style where a few parties hold all the power. But on a corporate level oligopoly would be better. A few corporations dominating an entire market segment.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      Sounds like the 70's film classic "Rollerball."
  - sunshinelackof 8y ago
    > Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market. This isn't quite right. Traditionally for a company to be a monopoly it isn't even required it control a majority of the market. It has more to do with the company being in a privileged circumstance in a market and explicitly using that privilege to bolster themselves or suppress competition in the same or related markets. An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.
pathseeker 8y ago
>The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. IMO it's still terrible if there is effectively only one product option. A democratic decision is just as bad as a shareholder one if it's choosing to favor a majority group over the minority (2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for dinner choices). >outsources the generation of actual value to others If you don't think there is value in the network, feedback mechanisms, and simplicity of using Lyft/Uber/whatever, you have completely missed why they are popular. Cabs would still dominate and would have been as popular as Lyft and Uber are now if all of the value was generated by drivers with cars. I think you probably meant to say 'outsourcing the labor' to others, which is completely different and companies have been doing that for centuries. Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.
- lovich 8y ago
  If the local can company had an option for me to call one of their cans and i could track it to my door, I probably never would have used Uber. There's some value in being an app you can use in any city, but the number of people who are jet setting around the world _and_ need a cab is probably quite low
  - macleginn 8y ago
    Based on my travel experience and given that taxis are rather cheap in many countries, I’d say that most of the people jet setting around the world are very likely to use a universal cab-hailing app at some point.
    - lovich 8y ago
      My point, which I did not make clear, is that there aren't very many people traveling all over the world to begin with. Most people on the planet do not routinely visit other cities outside their home area and could easily be served by a single local company rather than needing a company with a network that spans the globe
qiqing 8y ago
Minor quibble, but Airbnb doesn't own the hosts' homes or apartments, and Uber doesn't own the drivers' cars. Renting is an accurate descriptor of Netflix or Kindle (and Google Play movies actually does have "rent" on the label of the button when you want to rent a movie). And I can see what you mean from the perspective of the guest or rider, but not from the perspective of the host or driver.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment. These are companies that mostly just serve as middlemen. They could theoretically be entirely decentralized enabling people to genuinely connect directly with other people to offer a service. There are even technological solutions towards avoiding bad actors and abuse. For instance mutual facial recognition to ensure people are who they say they are - when you get in a ride, you and the driver both snap a pic of each other, it's verified on both ends, and off you both go. And all metainformation could be publicly stored in a trustless append-only decentralized ledger. They're just the early middlemen of budding industries that, in an optimistic future, will not even need middlemen.
  - gaius 8y ago
    I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment They are not “sharing” anything in the sense that people normally understand the word. Money is exchanged for services, as normal. The only thing they do differently is evade regulations and taxes.
  - hotgoldminer 8y ago
    They're protocol. Without a trusted party in the middle, there isn't a market.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      ...which makes me wonder if maybe the blockchain aficionados are onto something. The problem that blockchains solve is precisely to replace the "trusted middlemen" with a distributed network of miners and coin-holders, and to split the rewards that would accrue to them across a competitive market. If every Internet marketplace were replaced with a smart contract, that's a massive potential market.
extralego 8y ago
Tyler Cowen is libertarian capitalism’s teddy bear. His job (at Mercatus Center) appears to be precisely diverting attention from the economic damages of libertarian capitalism. He is always limited to perseverance porn, capitalist worship, or otherwise discussion of extremely vague virtues like ‘ideas’, ‘innovation’, ‘integrity’. When the audience is attentive, these tactics often backfire. I find his interviews cringeworthy. Then there’s the Mercadus Center’s recent disasterous study on taxpayer cost of Bernie Sander’s ‘Medicare For All’ plan: https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all-plan-cost-save-money-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-...
kkop 8y ago
The biggest change probably isn't that you are renting things, even from companies (which tends to be a bad thing to do long term). But that the people, or companies, you rent from doesn't even own their stuff. Banks i.e. capital increasingly owns everything. They are the record companies of reality. Takes little of the risk, does little of the work, but profits handsomely and makes everything more expensive.
dalbasal 8y ago
I think topics like this (definitely Cowan's style) are better left a little more open. The "thing that is happening" is a sort of etherealization of property. One underlying cause is that the bits of "property" themselves are digital/ethereal. Books, songs, films... They are no longer physical, and the economic norms around them are changing to reflect that. In conjunction, I think the cultural impact of consuming more digital goods (and probably a million other things) is that people are used to this type of economy. They want the same for their car, bike, etc. I would call uber a step passed renting, or an extreme form renting. Leasing has already been the norm for a while, along with financing that is indistinguishable from leasing. The "handful of corporations" part is... more of a consequence, I think. Etherealization/digitization is proving to be very centralization (or winner-take-most) friendly. There are a bunch of drivers to this though. One big reason is centralization of wealth. Big piles of money need big investments to go into. Uber could raise money on better terms than an "uber-for-aukland," adjusting for scale. $1 of profit/revenue/DAU is simply worth less than 1/100th of $100 in profit, on the "speculative investment" market. I agree on your main points. There is a danger of becoming more of a "rentier" economy. If this trend continues (projecting trends is always speculative) we could end up with more property/wealth in corporate hands, and private individuals will only have liabilities and consumption. The big elephant in this room is the same elephant that stomped through pyramid rooms 5,000 years ago: real estate, or "land" as it was once known. This is the big ticket item, and represents most of the wealth ordinary people own if they own anything. Cars, CDs and such just don't add up to much value, not anymore.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
I don't own a safe, I rent a safe. It's fine. If ever these corporations cause trouble, our government (well, maybe not the US government, but most sensible governments) will step in to remedy the situation. We've done so with privacy laws, we've done it with non-compete laws, we're going to do it with other companies as well.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  One can hope. But the U.S. government is so deep in the pockets of corporations - hiding behind America's blind worship of the free market - that I question if we'll ever get back to a place where it's willing to intervene. Europe has been doing a great job of picking up our slack lately, but there's only so much they can do. Most of these companies are based in America, and most of the world's market is in Asia. There's a ceiling on how much the EU can fine companies before it's easier to just stop operating there. I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    Brexit will not help the situation, either.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    Cities and states pick up where federal governments do not. Airbnb is being restricted by the cities (not federally) and so is Uber in a lot of places. > I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line. A large company is not going to leave a market because it doesn't want to comply with regulation, esp. one the size of the US, the EU, or China.
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      They do a little bit, but in some cases the federal government has overruled them. They would if it became unprofitable, between the fines and the costs of compliance. Google was recently fined $5 billion; that's a significant chunk of their annual revenue, of which Europe is probably a minority. Add onto that the cost of updating for GDPR, and the EU is pushing about as hard as they can afford to. I'm not saying this is a reason for Europe not to take a strong position. I'm just saying their leverage is finite, and less than that of the U.S. government.
qubex 8y ago
I might add that Silicon Valley et al has not simply cleverly redefined the meaning of ’sharing’ to cover their rental practices, but even the meaning of community has been totally warped out of shape. A community used to be a group of geographically proximate people whose collective survival depended on getting over their sometimes conflicting mutual interests and opinions in order to survive; now we use the term ’community’ to cover collections of isolated loners who are on average many hundreds of kilometres apart but are united by a common and often generally speaking controversial opinion that puts them at odds with their actual neighbours. The Information Superhighway was meant to usher in the Global Village but instead it begat a landscape of virtual ghettoes.
- atomi 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I disagree that community requires geographical proximity, but I definitely agree that it's on the list of positive terms co-opted by internet companies to disguise their profit-driven motives. Community requires compassion and shared interest; these days it's applied to any and every kind of human connection, with no regard to whether that connection is beneficial or even wanted.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    I would even go so far as to say that "community" has come to mean "group of people who have some common characteristic". No actual interaction or bonds between any of them is required. The word loses meaning as the actual human connections involved are removed.
- Kalium 8y ago
  Personally, I view this as a distinct upgrade. Instead of being coerced into lots of interaction with people I may have nothing in common with except vague geographical proximity, I have the option of interacting with people who actually share my interests or concerns or hobbies. To me, this isn't isolated loners. It's the first real community I've ever known. The first one I've ever actually felt like I was a part of, where I was always welcome and could always rely on finding people like me. I understand that some people dislike this shift. It's easy to see where it might be inconvenient for local communities that used to depend on coercing membership to exist. It used to be easy to erase those who were alone in the crowd. You're absolutely right. We didn't get a Global Village. Instead, we have a network of Global Villages. They are many and diverse and offer genuine community to everyone in ways that the old approach no longer did. This is beautiful and terrible - it's a shift from surviving to thriving. We finally get to see that there's an option other than ghettos run by the tyranny of geography.
johnchristopher 8y ago
> Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money. Amen. What grind my gears even more is when governments adopt that novspeak and promote the uberization of entire sectors under the guise of "sharing resources".
pytyper2 8y ago
It's bad because our historical growth is based on us accumulating things using credit. Producing and consuming things is what creates job growth which sustains our growing population. Our acceptance of inflation due to said consumerism, credit, and the black hole of the federal reserve issuing new currency is what provides "new money" for investment in research. If we transition to a society where things are no longer valued for possession I have to think that we won't care to share them either. If a car is not cool enough for me to want to own, why would I care to use the communal car rather than the bus? Can the auto industry survive selling 10% of the vehicles is does now? Will consumers pay 10x what they pay now, it costs no less for R & D, all while not truly owning the thing? This communal ownership changes half the paradigm, the funds to rent the items still needs to come from an economy that relies on people buying things to own and those things becoming unavailable to the rest of us forcing new consumers to buy new things from a factory and hopefully destroying it or hoarding it before it hits the secondary market. I think we need to stay on the current path until we have abundant free energy. Add: I also feel this is why new home sales is such an important metric to judge the momentum of the US economy, lots of new home sales means lots of new home-wares. You buy or build a house you also buy a refrigerator, microwave, carpet, furniture etc. Mostly on credit. If we truly become a communal society the cycle is broken, the same people who said "no new house and no new car, I'll just save my cash" now earn less 5 years later because there are many fewer things sold and the interconnected supply chain stalls.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  >If a car is not cool enough for me to want to own, why would I care to use the communal car rather than the bus? Can the auto industry survive selling 10% of the vehicles is does now? Not every industry has to survive forever. Can the telegraph industry survive the ~0% of sales it had before? Cars just aren't that useful in densely populated areas. The US will have to move away from personal vehicle transport and to mass transport/walking/cycling.
jeffdavis 8y ago
"The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad." It's not necessarily bad, but it is a major change to share something among thousands of people or millions of people vs. just among family and friends. Saying that the people sharing are a "community" makes it sound wonderful, but it's actually a large group of people that may have interests very different from yours. Decisions need to be made and it's hard to get consensus among a lot of people, so you are basically talking about a government of some kind, along with all the conflicts that creates. Private ownership is not particularly convenient, but it has a very interesting relationship with freedom that we should not cast away lightly.
underwater 8y ago
The scary thing is that these private companies have an superhuman memory and are motivated to judge my worth as a customer. The article alludes to Amazon disabling accounts, but in the near future anyone can be blackballed from a major transport provider (Uber), communications service (Facebook, WhatsApp), store (Amazon), news source, TV network (YouTube, NetFlix), etc. with little to no recourse. Up until this point in history having cash was all you needed to complete a transaction. Now you have to maintain your status as a “good” consumer, under the threat that you will be defacto excluded from a part of society by an algorithm. At which time you lose access to the platform as well as all your previous purchases. There are also companies who are commoditising digital reputation. So a single, private, company will be able to effectively turn you into a pariah.
marcosdumay 8y ago
Depending on those handful of corporations may be a problem, but it also may not be. You depend on a handful of corporations for many important services, and I'd bet you mostly doesn't even notice that. It depends mostly on regulations and competitiveness of the market (and more on the quality of those than their existence). Besides, a for profit service can create a community just as well as a communal repartition of it. It adds another risk to the community, of the service provider going bad, but it's not some overwhelming factor that makes all other irrelevant. Like it or not, you are sharing stuff when you rent them, the resource pooling is present (more or less present, depending on the renting modality), people are coming together (or not, depending on how it's shared), and there is social development just like with a communal resource. The problem of Uber|etc and Netflix|etc is much more on how they do the renting than on they actually renting things. There is some related problem you didn't point, in that once people start pooling some resource they didn't use fully, they should become more wealthy. We are not seeing this, so is it that the pooling isn't efficient or is it because people are being forced into pooling them by poverty? Either way, it's a problem.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CalRobert 8y ago
For what it's worth, in some cases this arose after people tried genuine sharing and found it didn't scale (I dislike that word but it's appropriate) well. See Zimride, the predecessor to Lyft.

by _bxg1 8y ago

ictoan 8y ago

In other words, monopoly.

pc86 8y ago
Nothing in the parent comment indicates or requires a monopoly. At all.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  It does, partially. While it's no replacement for democracy or other forms of cooperative stakeholding, the one avenue we have for influencing companies we grow to depend on is through our business. Monopolies remove that sole piece of leverage.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
apozem 8y ago
That is absolutely the end goal of all these network-effect companies. Uber wants to be a monopoly on transportation, Google a monopoly on search, Spotify a monopoly on music consumption, etc.
- downrightmike 8y ago
  *Google a monopoly on advertising
  - colecut 8y ago
    FB blows it out of the water for audience/demographic targeting
  - apozem 8y ago
    I'd say they have it well split with Facebook at the moment, but yeah, a duopoly isn't much better.
sandworm101 8y ago
Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market. This is about multiple corporations. The proper word is cartel or "corpocracy" which dislike as corporations are just a legal fiction. Someone still owns the corporation. The article isn't really about americans not owning stuff. It is about average americans not owning stuff. Poor, or at least not-rich, people are today less likely to own things like houses and cars. But the rich still own plenty. They are owning a greater percentage of everything. So perhaps the best word is plutocracy.
- rapnie 8y ago
  Plutocracy is the name of governance style where a few parties hold all the power. But on a corporate level oligopoly would be better. A few corporations dominating an entire market segment.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Sounds like the 70's film classic "Rollerball."
- sunshinelackof 8y ago
  > Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market. This isn't quite right. Traditionally for a company to be a monopoly it isn't even required it control a majority of the market. It has more to do with the company being in a privileged circumstance in a market and explicitly using that privilege to bolster themselves or suppress competition in the same or related markets. An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.

pathseeker 8y ago

>The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. IMO it's still terrible if there is effectively only one product option. A democratic decision is just as bad as a shareholder one if it's choosing to favor a majority group over the minority (2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for dinner choices). >outsources the generation of actual value to others If you don't think there is value in the network, feedback mechanisms, and simplicity of using Lyft/Uber/whatever, you have completely missed why they are popular. Cabs would still dominate and would have been as popular as Lyft and Uber are now if all of the value was generated by drivers with cars. I think you probably meant to say 'outsourcing the labor' to others, which is completely different and companies have been doing that for centuries. Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.

lovich 8y ago
If the local can company had an option for me to call one of their cans and i could track it to my door, I probably never would have used Uber. There's some value in being an app you can use in any city, but the number of people who are jet setting around the world _and_ need a cab is probably quite low
- macleginn 8y ago
  Based on my travel experience and given that taxis are rather cheap in many countries, I’d say that most of the people jet setting around the world are very likely to use a universal cab-hailing app at some point.
  - lovich 8y ago
    My point, which I did not make clear, is that there aren't very many people traveling all over the world to begin with. Most people on the planet do not routinely visit other cities outside their home area and could easily be served by a single local company rather than needing a company with a network that spans the globe

qiqing 8y ago

Minor quibble, but Airbnb doesn't own the hosts' homes or apartments, and Uber doesn't own the drivers' cars. Renting is an accurate descriptor of Netflix or Kindle (and Google Play movies actually does have "rent" on the label of the button when you want to rent a movie). And I can see what you mean from the perspective of the guest or rider, but not from the perspective of the host or driver.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment. These are companies that mostly just serve as middlemen. They could theoretically be entirely decentralized enabling people to genuinely connect directly with other people to offer a service. There are even technological solutions towards avoiding bad actors and abuse. For instance mutual facial recognition to ensure people are who they say they are - when you get in a ride, you and the driver both snap a pic of each other, it's verified on both ends, and off you both go. And all metainformation could be publicly stored in a trustless append-only decentralized ledger. They're just the early middlemen of budding industries that, in an optimistic future, will not even need middlemen.
- gaius 8y ago
  I'd also agree that Uber/AirBnB do not really fit well in that comment They are not “sharing” anything in the sense that people normally understand the word. Money is exchanged for services, as normal. The only thing they do differently is evade regulations and taxes.
- hotgoldminer 8y ago
  They're protocol. Without a trusted party in the middle, there isn't a market.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    ...which makes me wonder if maybe the blockchain aficionados are onto something. The problem that blockchains solve is precisely to replace the "trusted middlemen" with a distributed network of miners and coin-holders, and to split the rewards that would accrue to them across a competitive market. If every Internet marketplace were replaced with a smart contract, that's a massive potential market.

extralego 8y ago

Tyler Cowen is libertarian capitalism’s teddy bear. His job (at Mercatus Center) appears to be precisely diverting attention from the economic damages of libertarian capitalism. He is always limited to perseverance porn, capitalist worship, or otherwise discussion of extremely vague virtues like ‘ideas’, ‘innovation’, ‘integrity’. When the audience is attentive, these tactics often backfire. I find his interviews cringeworthy. Then there’s the Mercadus Center’s recent disasterous study on taxpayer cost of Bernie Sander’s ‘Medicare For All’ plan: https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all-plan-cost-save-money-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-...

kkop 8y ago

The biggest change probably isn't that you are renting things, even from companies (which tends to be a bad thing to do long term). But that the people, or companies, you rent from doesn't even own their stuff. Banks i.e. capital increasingly owns everything. They are the record companies of reality. Takes little of the risk, does little of the work, but profits handsomely and makes everything more expensive.

dalbasal 8y ago

I think topics like this (definitely Cowan's style) are better left a little more open. The "thing that is happening" is a sort of etherealization of property. One underlying cause is that the bits of "property" themselves are digital/ethereal. Books, songs, films... They are no longer physical, and the economic norms around them are changing to reflect that. In conjunction, I think the cultural impact of consuming more digital goods (and probably a million other things) is that people are used to this type of economy. They want the same for their car, bike, etc. I would call uber a step passed renting, or an extreme form renting. Leasing has already been the norm for a while, along with financing that is indistinguishable from leasing. The "handful of corporations" part is... more of a consequence, I think. Etherealization/digitization is proving to be very centralization (or winner-take-most) friendly. There are a bunch of drivers to this though. One big reason is centralization of wealth. Big piles of money need big investments to go into. Uber could raise money on better terms than an "uber-for-aukland," adjusting for scale. $1 of profit/revenue/DAU is simply worth less than 1/100th of $100 in profit, on the "speculative investment" market. I agree on your main points. There is a danger of becoming more of a "rentier" economy. If this trend continues (projecting trends is always speculative) we could end up with more property/wealth in corporate hands, and private individuals will only have liabilities and consumption. The big elephant in this room is the same elephant that stomped through pyramid rooms 5,000 years ago: real estate, or "land" as it was once known. This is the big ticket item, and represents most of the wealth ordinary people own if they own anything. Cars, CDs and such just don't add up to much value, not anymore.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

I don't own a safe, I rent a safe. It's fine. If ever these corporations cause trouble, our government (well, maybe not the US government, but most sensible governments) will step in to remedy the situation. We've done so with privacy laws, we've done it with non-compete laws, we're going to do it with other companies as well.

_bxg1 8y ago
One can hope. But the U.S. government is so deep in the pockets of corporations - hiding behind America's blind worship of the free market - that I question if we'll ever get back to a place where it's willing to intervene. Europe has been doing a great job of picking up our slack lately, but there's only so much they can do. Most of these companies are based in America, and most of the world's market is in Asia. There's a ceiling on how much the EU can fine companies before it's easier to just stop operating there. I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  Brexit will not help the situation, either.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  Cities and states pick up where federal governments do not. Airbnb is being restricted by the cities (not federally) and so is Uber in a lot of places. > I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line. A large company is not going to leave a market because it doesn't want to comply with regulation, esp. one the size of the US, the EU, or China.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    They do a little bit, but in some cases the federal government has overruled them. They would if it became unprofitable, between the fines and the costs of compliance. Google was recently fined $5 billion; that's a significant chunk of their annual revenue, of which Europe is probably a minority. Add onto that the cost of updating for GDPR, and the EU is pushing about as hard as they can afford to. I'm not saying this is a reason for Europe not to take a strong position. I'm just saying their leverage is finite, and less than that of the U.S. government.

qubex 8y ago

I might add that Silicon Valley et al has not simply cleverly redefined the meaning of ’sharing’ to cover their rental practices, but even the meaning of community has been totally warped out of shape. A community used to be a group of geographically proximate people whose collective survival depended on getting over their sometimes conflicting mutual interests and opinions in order to survive; now we use the term ’community’ to cover collections of isolated loners who are on average many hundreds of kilometres apart but are united by a common and often generally speaking controversial opinion that puts them at odds with their actual neighbours. The Information Superhighway was meant to usher in the Global Village but instead it begat a landscape of virtual ghettoes.

atomi 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
_bxg1 8y ago
I disagree that community requires geographical proximity, but I definitely agree that it's on the list of positive terms co-opted by internet companies to disguise their profit-driven motives. Community requires compassion and shared interest; these days it's applied to any and every kind of human connection, with no regard to whether that connection is beneficial or even wanted.
- Kalium 8y ago
  I would even go so far as to say that "community" has come to mean "group of people who have some common characteristic". No actual interaction or bonds between any of them is required. The word loses meaning as the actual human connections involved are removed.
Kalium 8y ago
Personally, I view this as a distinct upgrade. Instead of being coerced into lots of interaction with people I may have nothing in common with except vague geographical proximity, I have the option of interacting with people who actually share my interests or concerns or hobbies. To me, this isn't isolated loners. It's the first real community I've ever known. The first one I've ever actually felt like I was a part of, where I was always welcome and could always rely on finding people like me. I understand that some people dislike this shift. It's easy to see where it might be inconvenient for local communities that used to depend on coercing membership to exist. It used to be easy to erase those who were alone in the crowd. You're absolutely right. We didn't get a Global Village. Instead, we have a network of Global Villages. They are many and diverse and offer genuine community to everyone in ways that the old approach no longer did. This is beautiful and terrible - it's a shift from surviving to thriving. We finally get to see that there's an option other than ghettos run by the tyranny of geography.

johnchristopher 8y ago

> Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money. Amen. What grind my gears even more is when governments adopt that novspeak and promote the uberization of entire sectors under the guise of "sharing resources".

pytyper2 8y ago

It's bad because our historical growth is based on us accumulating things using credit. Producing and consuming things is what creates job growth which sustains our growing population. Our acceptance of inflation due to said consumerism, credit, and the black hole of the federal reserve issuing new currency is what provides "new money" for investment in research. If we transition to a society where things are no longer valued for possession I have to think that we won't care to share them either. If a car is not cool enough for me to want to own, why would I care to use the communal car rather than the bus? Can the auto industry survive selling 10% of the vehicles is does now? Will consumers pay 10x what they pay now, it costs no less for R & D, all while not truly owning the thing? This communal ownership changes half the paradigm, the funds to rent the items still needs to come from an economy that relies on people buying things to own and those things becoming unavailable to the rest of us forcing new consumers to buy new things from a factory and hopefully destroying it or hoarding it before it hits the secondary market. I think we need to stay on the current path until we have abundant free energy. Add: I also feel this is why new home sales is such an important metric to judge the momentum of the US economy, lots of new home sales means lots of new home-wares. You buy or build a house you also buy a refrigerator, microwave, carpet, furniture etc. Mostly on credit. If we truly become a communal society the cycle is broken, the same people who said "no new house and no new car, I'll just save my cash" now earn less 5 years later because there are many fewer things sold and the interconnected supply chain stalls.

Qwertie 8y ago
>If a car is not cool enough for me to want to own, why would I care to use the communal car rather than the bus? Can the auto industry survive selling 10% of the vehicles is does now? Not every industry has to survive forever. Can the telegraph industry survive the ~0% of sales it had before? Cars just aren't that useful in densely populated areas. The US will have to move away from personal vehicle transport and to mass transport/walking/cycling.

jeffdavis 8y ago

"The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad." It's not necessarily bad, but it is a major change to share something among thousands of people or millions of people vs. just among family and friends. Saying that the people sharing are a "community" makes it sound wonderful, but it's actually a large group of people that may have interests very different from yours. Decisions need to be made and it's hard to get consensus among a lot of people, so you are basically talking about a government of some kind, along with all the conflicts that creates. Private ownership is not particularly convenient, but it has a very interesting relationship with freedom that we should not cast away lightly.

underwater 8y ago

The scary thing is that these private companies have an superhuman memory and are motivated to judge my worth as a customer. The article alludes to Amazon disabling accounts, but in the near future anyone can be blackballed from a major transport provider (Uber), communications service (Facebook, WhatsApp), store (Amazon), news source, TV network (YouTube, NetFlix), etc. with little to no recourse. Up until this point in history having cash was all you needed to complete a transaction. Now you have to maintain your status as a “good” consumer, under the threat that you will be defacto excluded from a part of society by an algorithm. At which time you lose access to the platform as well as all your previous purchases. There are also companies who are commoditising digital reputation. So a single, private, company will be able to effectively turn you into a pariah.

marcosdumay 8y ago

Depending on those handful of corporations may be a problem, but it also may not be. You depend on a handful of corporations for many important services, and I'd bet you mostly doesn't even notice that. It depends mostly on regulations and competitiveness of the market (and more on the quality of those than their existence). Besides, a for profit service can create a community just as well as a communal repartition of it. It adds another risk to the community, of the service provider going bad, but it's not some overwhelming factor that makes all other irrelevant. Like it or not, you are sharing stuff when you rent them, the resource pooling is present (more or less present, depending on the renting modality), people are coming together (or not, depending on how it's shared), and there is social development just like with a communal resource. The problem of Uber|etc and Netflix|etc is much more on how they do the renting than on they actually renting things. There is some related problem you didn't point, in that once people start pooling some resource they didn't use fully, they should become more wealthy. We are not seeing this, so is it that the pooling isn't efficient or is it because people are being forced into pooling them by poverty? Either way, it's a problem.

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CalRobert 8y ago

For what it's worth, in some cases this arose after people tried genuine sharing and found it didn't scale (I dislike that word but it's appropriate) well. See Zimride, the predecessor to Lyft.