Why has the promise of the sharing economy failed?

Putting your startup idea in cartoon form is guaranteed to make it seem friendlier.

Putting your startup idea in cartoon form is guaranteed to make it seem friendlier.

Fast Company takes a look at why the utopian idea of borrowing things you only use rarely (tools, bikes, etc) through the internet never really took off. Today’s “sharing economy” businesses like Uber or Airbnb are actually more traditional pay-for-service than anything to do with sharing, but somehow the most pure common-good businesses fell by the wayside. This quote is particularly on point:

There was just one problem. As Adam Berk, the founder of Neighborrow, puts it: “Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit. They go buy [a drill]. Or they just bang a screwdriver through the wall.”

Makes you wonder if it’s not the idea, but the people who are the problem. If we can’t be bothered to sign up or use simple web services like this that theoretically both save us money and helps communities feel more neighborly…

 

Is the sharing economy built on a flawed premise of cooperation?

 

Are we too self-involved for this to work at all, or is there hope that going about it slightly differently could make sharing more appealing?

 

At the root of it all: do you even want to be closer to your neighbors, or feel a stronger sense of community, or is that an old-fashioned ideal?
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what would make you want to live with your coworkers?

wework

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

 

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

 

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

 

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

 

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?
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