Wired has an interesting article about internet-enabled social change.
Just as the internet has transformed and decentralized intellectual property management and 3-D printing promises to transform and decentralize production, I believe the services that make up the "sharing economy" will transform and decentralize a wide range of personal services, once again reducing people's reliance on mega-corporations and government regulators.
In this way, the internet, 3D printers and easily affordable CNC machines, P2P file sharing, mesh wi-fi, services such as Airbnb, Lyft, eBay and etsy and payment systems such as bitcoin and Ripple are all interrelated, and all point to a drastically different society in the future.
What say you?
The article then goes on to discuss trust relationships that governed most interactions in the pre-industrial age, and how important reputation was in those mostly-smaller communities. Then it goes on to describe how that reputation-based environment was modified as the world changed.The sharing economy has come on so quickly and powerfully that regulators and economists are still grappling to understand its impact. But one consequence is already clear: Many of these companies have us engaging in behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as five years ago. We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.
Finally, the author delves into how the purveyors of these new services in the "sharing economy" have approached replacing the formal systems in place in the centralized economy with arrangements somewhat more focused on interpersonal relationships and trust. In this new economic paradigm, trust and reputation once more move to the forefront of human interaction.That all started to change around the mid–19th century. As Americans moved from small towns to big cities, small merchants were replaced by large corporations, and local markets gave way to national distributors. Suddenly people couldn’t rely on interpersonal relationships or cultural norms to safeguard their transactions; they didn’t know, and often never even met, the people they were doing business with. The result, UCLA sociologist Lynne Zucker has argued, was the destruction of the trust that had sustained the US economy up until that point.
In the ensuing years, formal systems sprang up as proxies for the trust that citizens had lost in one another. The decades between 1870 and 1920 saw the explosion of the “social overhead capital sector”—industries like banking, insurance, and legal services that established rules and backstops for the new business environment. Meanwhile, a slate of government regulations helped establish the rules that this new breed of corporations had to follow.
Just as the internet has transformed and decentralized intellectual property management and 3-D printing promises to transform and decentralize production, I believe the services that make up the "sharing economy" will transform and decentralize a wide range of personal services, once again reducing people's reliance on mega-corporations and government regulators.
In this way, the internet, 3D printers and easily affordable CNC machines, P2P file sharing, mesh wi-fi, services such as Airbnb, Lyft, eBay and etsy and payment systems such as bitcoin and Ripple are all interrelated, and all point to a drastically different society in the future.
What say you?