Below Graphic: Partnered with Vision Critical, Crowd Companies (the association I started for big brands in the collaborative economy) surveyed over 90,000 people to find out why they share goods, services, space, transportation, and money.
A dissection of the largest study in the Collaborative Economy
Over the coming months, we’ll be dissecting some of the key findings from the largest study ever done on the Collaborative Economy, sharing both factual data and insights beyond market observations. When people first think of the sharing economy, a subset of the greater Collaborative Economy, they think of technology-laden hipsters in communes. What we found was quite the opposite – that this sharing behavior is common place behavior across many scenarios. We discovered that people often share for reasons that made pragmatic sense for themselves – not community altruism. If you want to view the entire report (over 28k already have), you may download it by clicking here.
In this new work, Michel continues to propose powerful ideas that not only demonstrate his capacity for synthesis, but more importantly, his capacity to articulate ideas that facilitate points of convergence between broad sectors that are sympathetic to the ideas of production based on the commons.
Michel Bauwens sent us a work that will soon be published, in which he summarizes and clarifies what he sees as the possible evolution of the means of monetization in a world in which the P2P mode of production has gained strength.
[D]emonetization will be a good thing in many sectors under a regime of civic domination, we will also need new forms of monetization, and restore the feedback loop between value creation and value capture.
Michel Bauwens
Netarchic capitalism, the direct result of recentralization, has established a new model of value, in which capital extracts it as an intermediary in the creation of platforms for P2P interaction between individuals, gradually renouncing its role of directly controlling information production.
So, cognitive capitalism can be said to be suffering a severe “value crisis,” in which the use value of production grows exponentially, but its exchange value grows linearly, and is almost exclusively captured by capital, giving rise to exacerbated forms of labor exploitation, especially with respect to the new informational proletariat:
It could be said that this creates a sort of “hyper-neoliberalism”… in classical neoliberalism, wages stagnate; in hyper-neoliberalism, salaried workers are replaced by isolated, and mostly precarious, freelancers.
For example, Bauwens cites preliminary studies that indicate that the average hourly wage of “digital workers” doesn’t exceed two dollars an hour, citing as a prototype of this phenomenon aggregation services like TaskRabbit, in which workers can’t communicate with each other, unlike clients.
This is a pre-publication article. It is provided for researcher browsing and quick reference.The final published version of the article is available at:
When the world recession in 2008 began, the economy wars, which had beendormant for two decades, flared again. After thirty years of the culture wars, this came as a bit of a relief.
The sharing economy offers enormous potential to create jobs. Sharing leverages a wide variety of resources and lowers barriers to starting small businesses.
Cities can lower the cost of starting businesses by supporting innovations like shared workspaces, shared commercial kitchens, community-financed start-ups, community-owned commercial centers, and spaces for “pop-up” businesses.
Collaborative consumption is growing from a trend for the young and urban to a viable alternative for everyone. From renting a movie online (e.g., Netflix) to renting a stranger’s couch (e.g., Couchsurfing), the economy of sharing changes the way we behave, consume, seek new options, and commit to decisions. The phenomenon is not just about getting access to new cars and the latest movies; it’s also about creating a new type of peer-to-peer commerce, making meaningful connections, and establishing a sense of trust among those involved.
A little-known California company called Esri offers a “Facebook for Maps” that promises to change the way we interact with our environment, predict behavior, and make decisions in the decades ahead.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The setting is central California’s Yosemite National Park. A hiker, let’s call him Steve Clark, has gone missing on one of the trails. As the head park ranger, your job is to lead a search-and-rescue mission to find him. All you have to go on is the point where he was last seen, your training, and a computer; from this, you have to predict the behavior of a lost hiker. Sunset is approaching, and in some parts of the park the temperature will be below freezing in a matter of hours. What do you do?
Click on Image to Enlarge
Many experienced hikers know that the recommended course of action when lost is to follow a stream downhill and this will eventually lead to civilization. But you can’t assume that Steve Clark is aware of this, or that he’s even seen the Discovery Channel. He might elect to stay put, or, if he has a cell phone, he might be moving uphill to find a signal. You also don’t know if he’s injured. A person with a sprained ankle is less likely to walk up, but he may not move down, either.
You go to your computer and open ArcGIS.com. A computer map of Yosemite that you’ve made and uploaded appears on the screen. Let’s say you also have access to a “big data” database of records from 30,000 lost hiker search-and-rescue missions and you can query this database with key words.
You soon learn that 66% of lost hikers are found within two miles of the spot last seen. You impose a ring over your map reflecting this two-mile perimeter. You then learn that 52% of lost hikers are found downhill, only 32% go up, and 16% keep walking at the same elevation. You impose an elevation layer on the area with all the land above the last point seen shaded one color and the land beneath it shaded another. You can even impose a new lens depicting tree and plant cover and open fields, and one depicting linear objects like trails, roads, power lines, and streams, knowing that the vast majority of lost hikers follow some sort of linear marker to avoid going in circles.
Phi Beta Iota: ESRI code is proprietary and they do not play well with others. They either have to change both of those conditions, or be replaced by CrisisMappers at scale. The future is open. This is not negotiable.
You can’t avoid peer-to-peer marketplaces. For transportation and housing, look no further than Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Skillshare and TaskRabbit are tackling education and task completion. Etsy and Shapeways have created handmade and fabrication marketplaces. They all facilitate integration into the economy without the need to secure employment from a large company.
Instead, the growing peer economy enables people to monetize skills and assets they already have. Vendors and providers on these platforms choose when to work, what to do and where to do it, sidestepping traditional constraints of geography and scheduling. Investors, advocacy groups and companies tout its apparent advantages, including a greater sense of solidarity through peer-to-peer commerce and reduction in carbon footprint through access to products and services instead of ownership.
. . . . . . .
Peer economy providers are also vulnerable but with a crucial factor that makes all the difference: They are a visible workforce, able to make these collective interests heard.
