The Sharing Economy
Fast Company article
[..] Gorenflo is a leading proselytizer of a global trend to make sharing something far more economically significant than a primitive behavior taught in preschool. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of the social web, an entirely new generation of businesses is popping up. They enable the sharing of cars, clothes, couches, apartments, tools, meals, and even skills. The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have. Many of these sites depend on millennials disenchanted by the housing bubble and the banking crisis, or uninterested in traditional icons of success such as house or auto ownership. But the number of people who have quietly begun tapping in is impressive: Already, more than 3 million people from 235 countries have couch-surfed, while 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month. Contends Rachel Botsman, coauthor of the recently published What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption: “This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership.”
The evolution of the social web, explains Botsman, first enabled programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed people to share their lives (Facebook), and most recently encouraged creators to share their content (YouTube). “Now we’re going into the fourth phase,” says Botsman, “where people are saying, ‘I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.’ [..] The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them.
The earliest of these marketplaces, like Freecycle and CouchSurfing, encouraged the exchange of goods among peers for free. But the latest sharing platforms are anchored in commerce. They have the potential to amass a new ecosystem of entrepreneurs, just as eBay once aggregated fragmented buyers and sellers into a global online marketplace. Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013.
Nice development… BTW, Marxist morons should think twice before celebrating, since this has nothing to do with disappearance of the free market, it has everything to do with the collapse of modernity. One-size-fits-all approaches to “using items (as in owning them)” is disappearing. People on the go, (a side effect of 3rd wave) need more flexible arrangements to use things, and more and more the new generation is finding out what is essential for living and what is not.
People who move after a long time are always surprised to discover how much junk they collected in their house, let’s think about that and understand that the new generation does this much more frequently now and therefore has a better understanding of the issue of ownership in 21st century.
Markets are good at allocation of resources, and allocation of unused resources through these new scheduling, record keeping systems powered by the Internet is a shining example of this.
Very nice.