After the Gig

How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back

Juliet Schor

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520974227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

Management & Workplace Culture Book of the Year, 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards A Publishers Weekly Fall 2020 Big Indie Book The dark side of the gig economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and how to make it equitable for the users and workers most exploited.

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work—giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability. Nevertheless, the basic model—a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech—holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.

1

From the Counterculture to “We Are the Uber of X”

From the beginning the buzz surrounding the sharing economy was that it was about more than money. It was also a social project, a chance to remake work and build a humane alternative to global capitalism.

Mark, a twenty-five-year-old white management consultant from Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, was a true believer from the very start. “I first heard about the service while reading Rachel Botsman’s The Rise of Collaborative Consumption [sic] . . . and I thought, ‘Wow, this makes sense.’ . . . I think it is transformative. . . . And I have enjoyed its disruptive power. . . . Right now we’re seeing it in Boston with the new taxi service [Lyft] coming online.” Mark loved all the new services available to him as a consumer. “[If] I need an executive assistant, I’ll go to TaskRabbit and hire someone to do five hours’ worth of work for me. If I need a car, I’ll go to Zipcar. If I need a bike, I use Zagster—rental bikes that are in the building—or Hubway [the municipal bike-sharing service].”

Mark bought into the rhetoric about the shift from an “ownership” to an “access” economy. “So people all the time ask me why I don’t get a bike. . . . It’s not about whether I can afford a bike or want a bike. It’s about the fact that I’m able to share fifteen hundred bikes with thousands of other people. And that I don’t have to take care of it. And there’s joy in pulling up to a Hubway station and you see someone waiting, and you give them that bike, and they can go on with their trip.”

Like many others, Mark loved the lack of encumbrance and convenience. He also believed these services were leading people to reduce their purchases of new cars and bikes. He was an ardent environmentalist, and these things were important to him. But his main involvement in the sector was as an Airbnb host. Mark rented out his luxury apartment on a regular basis, even making it onto Airbnb’s Boston “top twenty” list at one point. When we talked, he had earned $34,000 on the platform. This allowed him to remain in a place he’d originally leased when he had a partner to share the rental payments. Now he was “sharing” with strangers—in his mind, helping them when they needed a place to stay and allowing guests of modest means to enjoy the amazing location and amenities of his home. “Because life’s not about money, life’s about experience, life’s about making this world a better place. . . . This is just my feelings about what priorities should be. Mine at my core is helping other people. This is just one medium through which I can do that and benefit financially.” Throughout the interview Mark minimized his monetary motives. (We found his performance somewhat unconvincing, given the large sums he was pulling in.)

We’ll return to Mark’s story later, as renting got a bit more complicated than he’d bargained for. Here our point is that he believed strongly in the good that sharing represented, a view that was widely held among our respondents. Like Mark, Jason was a twentysomething single white man. We recruited him as someone who rented out his car on Turo, but he was also an employee of the platform. “When I graduated college, I wanted to work for a company that I felt was really kind of doing something, at least, somewhat good. I wasn’t necessarily out to save the world. I wanted . . . something that I really believed in and didn’t really want to be in a large sort of faceless corporation. I definitely feel that when I’m at Turo and it’s great.” Stephanie, a former special education teacher and caterer, believed that fate had brought her to TaskRabbit after she successfully used the platform to start her own personal assistant business. She loved “being able to help other people,” especially the “strong, amazing women” who became her clients.

Devon (the Jamerican we met in the introduction), Mark, Jason, Stephanie, and many of our respondents believed in the “idealist discourse.”¹ Its major tenets are efficiency and economic empowerment, lower eco-impact, and social connection—benefits that were widely touted. Why was the idealist discourse so compelling, especially when its “everyone will win” claim was implausible on its face? Yes, it jibed with self-interest, as we saw with Mark. And the presence of nonprofits allowed the corporate players to bask under the moral halo of sharing.² But the hegemony, or commonsensicalness, of the discourse also drew on a powerful faith in technology. For centuries new machines and methods of communications have arrived with outsized hopes about their ability to change the world.³ Sharing initiatives were mainly greeted with technological enthusiasm, which attracted users and propelled growth.⁴ This technophilia wasn’t just a passion of the moment. It can be traced back decades, to the invention of personal computers and belief in their social powers.⁵ Understanding this history helps explain why platforms raised such hopes and went so wrong.

The Californian Ideology

The 1960s counterculture that was centered in San Francisco is now mostly famous for psychedelic drugs, “flower power,” and the Grateful Dead. But in its heyday it posed a profound challenge to modern society, in the form of a critique of concentrated power and a desire for egalitarian social relations. Fred Turner, in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has identified two strains of the counterculture—antiwar and free speech activists such as Berkeley’s Mario Savio, who helped form the New Left, and the “New Communalists,” who decamped to rural sites around the West to form small-scale communities. Both groups were rooted in an antibureaucratic ethic, but they took different paths. The New Left retained a political focus—opposing the military, the corporations that supported it, and the U.S. government. They viewed technology through the lens of war, as a destructive, dehumanizing force.⁶ New Communalists rejected politics as part of the problem and saw technology as a solution. Their bible was Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which was known for its innovative gadgets and technical offerings. When personal computing and the internet developed in the 1990s, New Communalists hailed them as the route to the ecotopias they had failed to create in their back-to-the-land phase.

The New Communalists’ views morphed into what became known as the Californian Ideology.⁷ It combined libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions.⁸ Its core belief was that technology would yield personal liberation and egalitarian community. Individuals could now determine their own fates, as personal computers plus the internet offered ways to earn money without relying on a bureaucratic institution.⁹ The financial accessibility of computers meant that everyone could join in as equals. The vision was of a high-tech Jeffersonian world¹⁰ populated by small-scale asset-holders who self-govern in “harmonious community.”¹¹ Many of these ideas would carry over into the original discourse of the sharing economy—personal empowerment through decentralized task-based work, egalitarianism, and community. An additional dimension of New Communalist thinking—cybernetics, the study of machine-based control—is also present in the design of sharing platforms. It focused on information, feedback loops, and self-correcting mechanisms, which appeared as dynamic algorithms, surge pricing, and crowd-sourced data.¹²

As it happened, the gelling of the Californian Ideology coincided with the neoliberal policy turn of the 1980s. Cyberutopians jumped on the “free market” bandwagon,^* combining “the free-wheeling spirit” of hippies with the “entrepreneurial zeal” of yuppies.¹³ In the process they came to believe in what Thomas Frank calls “market populism,” the view that “markets enjoyed some mystic, organic connection to the people while governments were fundamentally illegitimate.”¹⁴ Technology corporations were heralded as agents of revolution,¹⁵ and the task of those in the digital vanguard was to free the companies from the pesky regulations of government bureaucrats.¹⁶ The crucial intellectual move here was the conflation of individual liberty with freedom for corporations, an equivalence that made sense to cyberutopians who had been heavily engaged with Silicon Valley companies for years.¹⁷ The 1996 Telecommunications Act deregulated the sector, and platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon morphed into monopolies with virtually no opposition. Twenty years later, sharing platforms, many of which have been funded by the tech giants, would adopt the same antiregulatory stance and also become monopolies. While the path from New Communalism to the sharing economy is yet to be fully researched, there is a through line of location, people, and ideology.¹⁸

For some, the history of Silicon Valley is a case of genuinely transformative ideas and technologies gone awry. But it’s a more complicated story. From the beginning many believed that the software itself would ensure good outcomes—a strong technological determinism. It’s now clear this view was wrong. Unregulated markets frequently lead to monopolies, particularly in tech.¹⁹ The popular equation of democracy and the internet is also fatuous, as recent political events have made clear.²⁰ And in retrospect we can see that entitlement played an important role in solidifying the Californian Ideology. Adherents were mostly white, highly educated, well-off men who lived in a bubble of privilege they failed to recognize. It’s not surprising they came to believe that technology would be sufficient to solve the problem of social inequality.

Even as massive corporations came to dominate Silicon Valley, there was another option. Some programmers were building free and open-source software in a digital commons, engaging in what came to be known as peer production.²¹ This community avoided the determinism that had misled cyberutopians, holding instead to a middle ground in which digital tech made new social relations possible—but only if we chose to create them. These ideas animated many of the nonprofit alternatives that became part of the sharing economy, often under the rubric of the collaborative commons movement. But commons thinking was not influential among the for-profit sharing companies. They were more embedded in right-wing libertarian ideology, a positioning that would prove fateful as they scaled.

Founding the Platforms

Some years ago, I collaborated with colleagues from Harvard Business School to figure out what makes consumers trust companies with idealist discourses.²² One answer was a humble origin story. We found lots of “I accidentally discovered this recipe in my garage . . .” tales in the grocery store. Sharing platforms also adopted these origin stories to sell their brands. The best known is from Brian Chesky, a cofounder of Airbnb. In 2007, a few years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design as an industrial designer, Chesky quit his stable job. Short on cash to make rent on his loft in pricey San Francisco, he and his roommate bought some air mattresses to rent out in their living room. They threw up a website and targeted visitors to the upcoming Industrial Designers of America conference, who were facing a problem of sold-out hotels. As they say, the rest is history. TaskRabbit innovator Leah Busque claims to have thought up her company’s model one cold Boston evening when she had run out of dog food for her pet lab, Kobe. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online I could go to connect with my neighbors—maybe one who was already at the store at that very moment—who could help me out?”²³ Like many other founders, Busque draws on tropes of efficiency, neighborliness, and common sense.

Fitting with its brand, Uber has a less populist origin tale, but it also draws on a relatable consumer dilemma. In the late 2000s, San Francisco software entrepreneur Garrett Camp was at war with the taxi industry. He couldn’t find rides, had been blackballed by dispatchers for his frequent cancellations, and got charged $1,000 for a private driver on New Year’s Eve. Before long, he teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Travis Kalanick to found Uber.²⁴ Lyft’s story started in Zimbabwe, where Logan Green saw passengers using shared minivan taxis, a common practice in many Global South countries, as well as some low-income neighborhoods in the U.S. Impressed by this example, Green and John Zimmer started Zimride (from Zimbabwe), focusing on long-distance travel to and from college campuses. They debuted at Cornell, a famously isolated university. The platform was more convenient than bulletin boards for matching riders and drivers and preferable to Craigslist because it linked users to Facebook, which allowed them to research each other before committing. In 2012 Green and Zimmer started Lyft, which offered short rides in urban areas. The company emphasized its friendliness and adopted the idealist discourse, promising lower carbon emissions and good tr...