If you try to play Monopoly with a two year old, you will not win.
Sure, you may be better at buying up property, building hotels and following rules about when to pass Go – good on you. But when the two year old decides he’s playing a different game, like Throw the Entire Board at the Adult, that game and its goals will absolutely trump yours.
Disruption went from Silicon Valley buzzword to cliché years ago, but it persists as an operational goal for countless tech startups and their investors. (See Judith Shulevitz’s excellent 2013 exploration of the term.)
We still see such supercharged words as reinvent, reimagine and revolutionize as investors search for the next “unicorn” – the term for a startup valued at more than $1 billion.
» Read more about: Do Unicorns Play Monopoly? Ask Uber and Amazon »
There has been no shortage of ink spilled on the so-called “sharing economy”. To cut through the rhetoric, LAANE’s Jon Zerolnick spoke with Tom Slee, an Ontario-based writer whose work on the intersection of technology, politics, and economics has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, The New Inquiry, The Guardian, and Jacobin.
Let’s start with some definitions. What is the sharing economy?
The sharing economy is internet platforms, and more-or-less independent people exchanging real-world goods and services through those platforms. This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sharing, but that is the name now.
Some of these platforms started off non-commercial. I’m thinking of things like Couch Surfing, where individuals host each other in their own homes, with no money exchanged; it was a non-profit and provided a coordination service.
» Read more about: Couch Surfers and Billionaires: On the Sharing Economy »