Erstellt am: 10. 3. 2017 - 10:41 Uhr

Today's Webtip: The Taking Economy

An academic look at why "sharing" isn't always caring.

I have been pissed about the term "sharing economy" for quite some time now. Not the idea, though. I love the idea.

I just don't like how it was copied to describe a kind of rent-seeking economy that turns actual sharing into a market and funnels the funds off into a corporate black hole.

Hacker spaces? Tool Libraries? Couch surfing? That's sharing.

Those massively funded tech behemoths that do a really good job of messing up local markets and finding new ways of screwing over the not employed employees? Not so much.

But I realise that's just my opinion.

Or it was just my opinion. Now it is an idea with a little bit of academic backing. One that has been supported by a paper published by a robot-law scholar and technological ethnographer (yeah, I was surprised that those things exist too).

Anyway, you can read a summary of the conclusions they came to at boingboing.net, or just jump straight to the actual paper, which isn't behind a paywall and can either be downloaded or viewed online (yay!).

The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power