Is the subtext here race? If it is law-abiding citizens using these services, such as typical whites and Asians, the system won’t break down, but what happens if the criminally inclined start using them massively?
I’ve never used either of these services, but if I got a text from somebody in ebonics wanting to rent my home for a few days, I would not be thrilled.
In most of rural Australia when I was growing up, almost everybody was white and people didn’t lock their cars or their homes (unless there were many aboriginees around) because they were safe. In Japan after an earthquake or some other disaster, there’s no looting, but in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, there was massive looting and the same in south-central Los Angeles during the 1965 and the 1991 riots.
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.
This is not just an economic breakthrough. It is a cultural one, enabled by a sophisticated series of mechanisms, algorithms, and finely calibrated systems of rewards and punishments. It’s a radical next step for the person-to-person marketplace pioneered by eBay: a set of digital tools that enable and encourage us to trust our fellow human beings.
In 2012, the British Sunday Times, wrote about the white town of Orania in South Africa:
Building sites are everywhere. Plots of land that went for £1,000 four years ago now change hands for £20,000. There are supermarkets, all manner of other shops, a doctor, dentist, lawyers, architects, two schools and a radio station. Orania has organised many trips to Israel to study Israeli farming techniques—the Israelis too have made the desert bloom. Orania exports jewelry to the whole of South Africa, air-freighted vegetables to British supermarkets and pecan nuts to China. The community is probably the greenest in South Africa: all farming is organic, everything is recycled and alternative energy is used whenever possible. People leave their keys in their cars, live with their doors open and children play, unmonitored, in the street until dark.
