The politics of the sharing economy
Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor for Culture and Media at The New School in New York, writes that he “support[s] peer production and sharing practices but [he is] vexed by attempts to subsume them into the new corporate hype of “the sharing revolution†that comes with calls to make the world a better place and comparisons to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.”
“Value creation is no longer bound to corporate wage-labour. The value that is created through the collaborative economy is based on social connectedness, it is based on communities, it is based on connectivity; it is grounded in the ubiquitous use of mobile phones, collaboration, and economies of scale. Free labour may not be the problem itself but at the same time, I am not interested in being a wheel on the bandwagon of any soon-to-be billionaire incumbent.”
