The problem with the sharing economy

I actually like the concept of having less material posessions. Things you own end up owning you, as Taylor Durden in the movie “Fight Club” stated. The constant race to buy shiny new things to impress your neighbors and coworkers is pointless, expensive and damiging to the environment. Wouldn’t we be better off, if instead of buying the whole baby gear for a year and then struggle to sell it back, we would just borrow it and return when the kid grows up? Adopting a lifestyle of a digital nomad, why would I want to own a house? Why buying your own car, when it stays on the parking lot unused 90% of time?
Those are all valid points and they all led to the concept of shared services that we are all enjoying and hoping to have even easier access to them in the future. The flexibility they provide is often benefiting both sides of the service. Airbnb lets you find cheap accomodation on your travels in the same time allowing the owner to make side income if he has spare living space.
There is one problem with that. We do not live in a comunist, possessions-free society. Those services that we are more and more relying on, are privately owned companies that are working on the for-profit basis. There is a man in the middle, having a financial incentive to make you use their service. Could you imagine ten years ago to make profit on house rental without owning a single apartment? Or be a mobility company that does not have cars? On one hand, those platforms rely of you as a provider of goods, on the other, you have pretty much no choice since they take lion share of the industry. I know that it seems like a win-win-win for the customer, service provider and platform owner, but think about it for a second.
Take Uber as an example. Providing a platform to match drivers with customers is actually just an intermediary step before launching a fleet of self-driving cars. Owning a car will be a useless luxury, since there will be cars available on demand taking you wherever and whenever you want to go. Great thing accept for the fact, that all those cars will be still privately owned. Whether it will be Uber or Google, there will be a massive amount of wealth in the form of cars accumulated in the hands of one or two private owners. Those cars will not be shared, they will belong to someone. And you will be paying for them one time after the other till the rest of your life, and it will be the same people getting the profit.
Autonomously-driven car sharing service would be an amazing thing if provided by the city as a solution to the traffic jams and parking shortage. But assuming they have money for it, they still need to buy it from Google or Uber. And the public transport providers will have no choice but go along with this.
The second thing about shared services replacing ownership is the loss of individualism and difficulty in providing means to accumulate wealth. If we end up embracing the model, we will end up living in the IKEA furnished three or four variations of almost same apartment. Maybe not in debt but certainly without any assets. This is already happening in some places. In Zürich where I live, many buildings are owned by Coop or Migros (two dominant shopping chains in Switzerland) as a form of investment and are built to be rented — each apartment has a kitchen and bathroom equipped, and is ready to be furnished and lived in. Apartments may differ in size and shape, but it is essentially the same box, with varying price depending on location. All of the apartments have a good standard and look so neutral that they should match whatever furniture you buy. Convenient, but nevertheless, they lack soul.
Isn’t the beauty of life hidden in the imperfections? Isn’t having your own personal style just combining things in a unique way “to make it work” even if you lack funds? Isn’t mixing a lamp of your dreams with a chair found on a flee market when your budget suddenly shrunk and you simply needed something to sit on more interesting and personal than living in an IKEA catalogue?
Buying excessively is a sickness of our times, but denying value to all our posessions is insanity. We like things because they are beautiful, or simply because they tell a story about our past. We like being different, even if it sometimes means uglier, less reasonable or simply stupid. The same is true about our earthly posessions. And the value we attribute to them comes partly from making a decission to buy that particular one instead of other things in our reach.
And while we all get so easily persuaded about the benefit of borrowing and sharing, do you think the big players — billionaire entrepreneurs, influential celebrities and powerful politicians will also gladly participate in this model?
So although I am all for mobility and valuing mind and heart over matter, I would be cautious buying into the sharing economy utopia. Maybe we were created equal, but certainly we were not created identical. We are defined not only by what we believe in and what we achieved, but also by the things we had to deny ourselves in order to get there.