From “The ‘Sharing’ Hype,” an interview published today at In These Times conducted by Rebecca Burns with me, Neal Gorenflo, co-founder and publisher of Shareable Magazine, and the SolidarityNYC collective, which supports the growth of cooperatives in New York City.
“Sharing” can be seen as a form of resistance to the capitalist economy. But the “sharing economy” becomes a way of capitalizing on that resistance. This strikes me as a strong instance of cyberlibertarianism, which is the yoking of far-right ideas about “freedom” and government to an apparently apolitical digital utopianism. The political mushiness of the rhetoric surrounding such projects masks what the leaders of the projects want, which is the extraction of profit from sectors so far insulated from such monetization. The only “freedom” such efforts ultimately serve is the economic freedom of concentrated capital.
Read the complete interview at In These Times.