I wouldn't say it was a scam. I mean, at the end of the day, these 'sharing economy' services are basically platforms with a middleman taking a cut, and were or

I wouldn't say it was a scam. I mean, at the end of the day, these 'sharing economy' services are basically platforms with a middleman taking a cut, and were originally meant for people to use as a hobby more than anything else. You might occasionally drive for Uber for a bit of spare cash, or lease out a room on Airbnb because you weren't using it right now. In that scenario, it's fine. It doesn't provide a living wage, but really, it wasn't meant to replace your full time income. But the thing is, where a market and platform exists, that's where you see a creeping level of 'professionalism' among participants, and eventually, the people doing it for fun do getting crowded out by people doing it for a living. Yet the model doesn't work for that. What's sustainable for legions of people doing things in their spare time/using their spare resources is not sustainable as a full time replacement for hotels or taxis or what not. The problem is that the gig economy is just that; about gigs, not full time work. And to some degree, you can see this trend everywhere. YouTube was at one point meant as a place to post amateur videos; now nearly everyone sees it as a full time job. Medium was a place for amateur writers, now it's see as a market for selling articles. Even game mods, an area which used to be 100% free now has a growing percentage of devs trying to treat it as a full time career. Hence the problems with the sharing economy (and arguably platforms as a whole) are really two fold: 1. What works as a hobby/extra way to make money on the side doesn't really scale well to a full time career, but more and more people seem to expect the latter. It's like trying to use a paper round (or a ton of them) to pay the mortgage. 2. The existing markets/businesses these platforms target become unprofitable due to the huge increase in competition and lower number of regulations. But that's not really a scam. It's just technology and society unlocking a lot more supply in these areas than there was before, and the existing businesses in the market suffering because of it. You don't even a platform for that, the internet has basically destroyed journalism as a viable career in much the same way as Uber has taxis. On another note, the article also seems to conflate two different things; platform/gig economy services and subscription services. Something like Amazon Prime Video isn't that. It's another example of how companies seem to be trying to kill off private property with the endless subscription, and a whole 'nother kettle of fish in itself.