P2P Foundation – The Sharing Economy

“In a locust economy, you cannot just decide to go somewhere and get in your car to drive there. You have to coordinate with other potential users of that shared resource. You have to keep your apartment clean and sharing-ready. You have to do minimum-wage work that you might consider beneath you (though such status concerns don’t bother me, annoying chores do). In the sharing economy, we may not be eating each other literally, but we’re certainly eating into what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype of our neighbors. To the extent that your belongings are a logical expression of your genes and memes sharing them amounts to allowing others to eat them. So the harsh bottomline of the locust economies, once the Jeffersonian middle class prey base has been bankrupted, is that we locusts turn on each other. We call it peer production and prosumer economics, but it isn’t Jeffersonian producerism. It is locusts in their cannibalistic phase.”

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