What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

This book provides a useful reality check about the “sharing economy”. While it’s a polemic, it’s a generally well reasoned and even handed one, and Slee convincingly demonstrates how firms such as AirBnb and Uber are not really interested in “sharing” and instead profit by externalising their costs to their workers/providers and actively evading regulations. The chapter demolishing the firms’ customer ratings systems is worth the purchase price alone.

The main shortfall of the book to my mind is it doesn’t go far enough. Slee notes at several points how the major sharing economy firms are motivated by libertarian ideology, but doesn’t really connect this into a strong argument on the topic. He also doesn’t really tease out the full implications for their evasion of regulations: for instance, if AirBnb is avoiding municipal regulations and allowing many of providers to (in effect) evade the law, can the rental properties it markets be assumed to be safe to use? The chapter on open source computing also should have been omitted as it doesn’t connect with the rest of the book (it’s argument is also confusing – it’s not clear why it’s a bad thing for firms to pay their employees to develop open source code).

Overall, this is an important book on the new economy, and deserves to be widely read.

This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the Sharing Economy. As an early user of Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and other sites that fall under the umbrella, I fell for the promise of the peer-to-peer economy before eventually becoming critical of it. Tom’s articles helped me see how my own experiences fit into the broader cultural shifts at play, and that the companies I was working for didn’t have my own best interests at heart. This book takes an in-depth look at all of the major peer-to-peer platforms, focusing on their relationships with city regulators, the corporate marketing behind their rise, their user base, their profits, and more. Pairs well with “Do What You Love” by Miya Tokumitsu.

I have to admit that my dislike of Uber came initially from the God feature in their platform and how it was used to stalk a female reporter. Beyond that, as the author documents in this book. Many of sharing economy companies trade on their utopian flavored marketing while still being veritable old school corporations. Well worth the read.

Unless you’re not planning to live in the society that “sharing economy” platforms are creating (spoiler: they don’t really give you a choice) you should know their moral limits from implementational shortcomings – something Mr. Slee is very concisely pointing out in this book.

The best document I have seen on how this goofy business process ever got funded.

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