Sorry, I didn't read the article before I passed it on - I just read the beginning about craigslist and couch surfing. Charity Focus, who publishes The Daily Good, walks their talk, and everything they do is volunteer-based. But sometimes the articles they publish are a bit too corporate for my taste.

That said, I like the sites that enable people to rent their own houses. I'll never stay in a commercial property again for a vacation. I was happy to hear that someone was developing a way for cars to be shared without risk. I hope that P2P taxi services will be soon to follow, so I can pay someone in the neighborhood next time I need a ride to the airport. Lots of people are piecing together a living from a little bit of money here and there and I'd rather support that than incur a favor I don't have time to repay. Most people either have time or they have money, but it's rare to have both. So hooking the people with time up with the people with money is okay in my book. I'm not a purist.

I like what you're doing, Robin, with the helping on the street. I'm sure that's making an impact.

Tereza

On Apr 23, 2011, at 9:10 AM, Duane wrote:

But the capitalist drive will not be extinguished. They will to "optimize" the culture of sharing for their profit, whether by persuasion, threat, or force, and they will find ways. Their hypocrisy, that they will not <i>share</i> their optimizations, is the glint which betrays the machinations to inject extraction in the network of cooperation.

The "central authority" will be the architects of the means of sharing. The means of sharing cannot be totally autonomous and will be organized, to some extent. Whereas a rising tide would lift all boats, in an ebb tide, someone will have to pay for the tugboat.

The most revolutionary force in the world will not go down easy.

Duane

----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin 
To: <gifteconomy@lists.gifteconomy.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2011 2:29 AM
Subject: [GiftEconomy] 'Emerges'? How about 're-emerges'?

Thanks for this, Tereza.

The Sharing Economy Emerges
Peer to peer exchange of goods and services has skyrocketed way
beyond craigslist.org and Couch Surfing. Now, access to goods and
skills is becoming more important than ownership of them. And that
has sparked a "Sharing Economy". Gartner Group researchers estimate
that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion
by 2013. Botsman says the consumer peer-to-peer rental market will
become a $26 billion sector, and believes the sharing economy, in
total, is a $110 billion-plus market. "Is this purely a
warm-and-fuzzy kind of thing?" says Ann Miura-Ko, a venture
capitalist at Floodgate Fund. "It's not. It's underutilized asset
utilization." That is to say, sharing is becoming common place.

The rise of digitally mediated sharing is indeed promising, but only a
capitalist could see this as a fundamentally new thing. I mean life is
full of sharing. To say nothing of shared genes, shared understandings
or shared streets, people in most parts of the world still share all
sorts of stuff daily, just as they used to in the past in USA.
Barnraising? Potlatch?

So whilst in one sense it's a welcome step away from what Eisenstein
calls "the discrete and separate self", sharing does not cease to count
just because it goes unaccounted in ledgers. Arguably, unmetered sharing
is more important. I haven't investigated the 'Floodgate Fund', so I may
be doing her an injustice, but Ann Miura-Ko's designation as 'venture
capitalist' suggests to me that she's expecting to get out more money
than she puts in.

Anyway, it's food for thought for my work on the Internet Gift Economy,
which has been going slow lately - distracted by working on the
roofgarden. The current model as regards metering is to leave it up to
those involved whether they want to record things. Eitherway, a big
difference is that there won't be any central authority in charge, so no
point for revenue extraction. No business model.

Robin

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