Consumer revolution? The sharing economy as a new vision of the social order

Abstract

Uber, Airbnb, CouchSurfing, Netflix, electric scooters: all of these have become part of our daily lives, just as Allegro.pl, Amazon.com and other network economy businesses already have. Even so, according to their promoters they are a harbinger of a new order. For the market economy, with its anonymous market, sharing economy practices are to be what institutions of direct citizen influence on political decisions are to representative democracy. The economy will at last begin to fulfil actual human needs instead of producing superfluous things on a mass scale. The Earth’s devastation and the wasteful exploitation of its resources will cease. Old pre-capitalist economy institutions, spread all over the globe by means of the Internet, will empower the people marginalized by the market and reconstruct the communities weakened by it. Trust will be the greatest capital at people’s disposal, both in the local and global exchange of things and services. I do not estimate how realistic this promise is; all I do is present, from the perspectives of both sharing economy advocates and its critics, the specific institutions (in the sociological sense) meant to deliver on it. In the summing-up I highlight the ambivalence towards the market economy that the very idea of sharing itself is burdened with, and consequently, the ambiguity of its self-professed mission: is to be a mere correction to the present-day form of capitalism or an alternative to it?