sharing economy

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pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As I will argue later in this chapter, it is quite natural that the sharing economy spans the continuum between market economies and gift economies. But to get there, I first need to better bound the scope of what is meant by the “sharing economy,” and discuss the evolution of recent thinking about it. What Is the Sharing Economy? In the introduction, I provided a number of examples that fall under the umbrella of what I call the “sharing economy” or “crowd-based capitalism,” terms I use more precisely (and interchangeably) to describe an economic system with the following five characteristics: Largely market-based: the sharing economy creates markets that enable the exchange of goods and the emergence of new services, resulting in potentially higher levels of economic activity.

He is explicit, however, in his interest in the “business” of sharing, and, realizing the inherent potential contradiction, explains his use of the term “sharing economy”: Why am I using the term “sharing economy” time and time again in this book? In part, I do so because this term has come to dominate discourse on the subject. The genie is out of the bottle. It would be near-impossible to dislodge the term without the risk of fracturing a growing movement of people who largely have no problem with the term, and who are building something that—for the most part, as we will see—is a social and economic good.17 How Key Early Thinking on the Sharing Economy Evolved What I defined as the sharing economy (or as crowd-based capitalism) emerged at scale around 2010.

In Remix Lessig uses a stark definition of a sharing economy in the context of culture, distinguishing it definitively from what he calls a “commercial economy.” He writes: “There exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is regulated not by price but by a complex set of social relations.”24 Later in the same chapter, Lessig qualifies his point: “Of all the ways in which the exchange within a sharing economy can be defined—or put differently, of all the possible terms of the exchange within a sharing economy—the one way in which it cannot be defined is in terms of money.”25 Lessig himself then draws a parallel between his thinking and Benkler’s.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

“Debating the Sharing Economy.” Great Transition Initiative, October. www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy. ———. 2014b. “Risks and Rewards of Cultivating a Sharing Economy.” Brink, December 23. ———. 2015. “The Sharing Economy: Reports from Stage One.” Unpublished paper. ———. 2017. “Does the Sharing Economy Increase Inequality within the Eighty Percent?: Findings from a Qualitative Study of Platform Providers.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 10(2):263–79. Schor, Juliet B., and William Attwood-Charles. 2015. “Platform Providers in the ‘Sharing’ Economy.” Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work and Equality, July 28. https://workinprogress.oowsection.org/2015/07/28/platform-providers-in-the-sharing-economy/. ———. 2017.

Yet even the latest workplace policies are no match for the sharing economy’s bulldozing of workplace protections. Chapter 5 examines sexual harassment in the sharing economy and how the egalitarianism of peer-to-peer employment results in the loss of political language as workers “explain away” sexual harassment. In chapter 6, I explore the shady underbelly of the sharing economy through stories of workers who find themselves engaging in illegal or at least legally questionable activities as part of their sharing economy work. I argue that the anonymity of the sharing economy can make it easier to source otherwise law-abiding workers for drug deliveries and can lead to unsuspecting workers involved in various scams.

The increase in discrimination, partnered with a reliance on reviews and profiles and a declining level of trust, suggests that the sharing economy—while many things—is hardly a positive return to the ideal of small town life. The Increasing Casualization of Labor and the Related Risk Shift The sharing economy also brings to the forefront issues regarding the changing relationship between worker and firm and the resulting workplace risks encountered by sharing economy workers. The majority of sharing economy workers—including Uber/Lyft drivers, TaskRabbit runners, Airbnb hosts, and Handy cleaners—are independent contractors.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

BERTOLT BRECHT, From a German War Primer What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is my own. Traditional Yorkshire saying To my mother, Audrey Slee Contents 1 The Sharing Economy 2 The Sharing Economy Landscape 3 A Place to Stay with Airbnb 4 On the Move with Uber 5 Neighbors Helping Neighbors 6 Strangers Trusting Strangers 7 A Short History of Openness 8 Open Wide 9 What’s Yours Is Mine Bibliography Endnotes Acknowledgements 1. The Sharing Economy The Sharing Economy is a wave of new businesses that use the Internet to match customers with service providers for real-world exchanges such as short-term apartment rentals, car rides, or household tasks.

There is no doubt that the word “sharing” has been stretched beyond reasonable limits as the “sharing economy” has grown and changed, but we still need a name when we talk about the phenomenon. While it may not last more than another year or so, “sharing economy” is the name used right now in 2015. I will use the name, but to avoid repeated use of the word “alleged” or annoyingly frequent scare quotes I will capitalize it as the Sharing Economy.2 Definitions don’t take us very far when talking about something as fluid and rapidly changing as the Sharing Economy, but we still need to draw some boundaries around the topic to talk about it coherently.

New businesses may be built around sharing and openness, but commercial instincts will tend to drive out altruistic behavior, and the generous impulses that inspired the Sharing Economy will be crushed by monetary incentives. The Sharing Economy is young and it is changing rapidly. It will be shaped by our behavior as consumers, but also by our behavior as citizens and our behavior as workers. Sharing Economy companies claim we should trust them and their technologies to take over functions provided by governments: guaranteeing a safe consumer experience, ensuring that employment is fair and dignified, and shaping cities to be livable and sustainable. We should not do so. I wrote this book because the Sharing Economy agenda appeals to ideals with which I and many others identify; ideals such as equality, sustainability, and community.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Frenken, Koen, Toon Meelen, Martijn Arets, and Pieter van de Glind. 2015. “Smarter Regulation for the Sharing Economy.” The Guardian, May 20, 2015. Frenken, Koen, and Juliet B. Schor. 2017. “Putting the Sharing Economy into Perspective.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 23 (June): 3–10. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminist Mystique. New York: Norton. Friedman, Thomas L. 2013. “Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy.’ ” New York Times, July 20, 2013. FTC Staff. 2016. “The ‘Sharing’ Economy—Issues Facing Platforms, Participants & Regulators.” Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission. www.ftc.gov/reports/sharing-economy-issues-facing-platforms-participants-regulators-federal-trade-commission.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin. ———. 2014. “Debating the Sharing Economy.” www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy. ———. 2015. “Homo Varians: Diverse Motives and Economic Behavior in the Sharing Economy.” Unpublished paper. Boston College. ———. 2016. “ ‘Old Exclusion in Emergent Spaces.’ ” In Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, 38–42. New York: OR Books. ———. 2017. “Does the Sharing Economy Increase Inequality within the Eighty Percent? Findings from a Qualitative Study of Platform Providers.”

Schor, and Robert Wengronowitz. 2018. “Domesticating the Market: Moral Exchange and the Sharing Economy.” Socio-Economic Review (Feb. 16): doi:10.1093/ser/mwy003. In chapter 3: Juliet B. Schor. 2017. “Does the Sharing Economy Increase Inequality within the Eighty Percent? Findings from a Qualitative Study of Platform Providers.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 10 (2): 263–79. In chapter 5: Juliet B. Schor, Connor Fitzmaurice, Lindsey B. Carfagna, Will Attwood-Charles, and Emilie Dubois Poteat. 2016. “Paradoxes of Openness and Distinction in the Sharing Economy.” Poetics 54:66–81. Note: This Book Has Been Coproduced This book is the product of a thoroughly collaborative effort among a team of researchers.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (O/R Books 2015), 27. The website itself seems to have gone offline at the time of final editing. 6. Anya Kamenetz, ‘Is Peers the sharing economy’s future or just a great Silicon Valley PR stunt?’, Fast Company (9 December 2013), http://www.fastcompany. com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-the-sharing-economys-future-or-just-a- great-silicon-valley-pr-stunt, archived at https://perma.cc/6DMG-DGBJ 7. Andrew Leonard, ‘The sharing economy gets greedy’, Salon (1 August 2013), http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/the_sharing_economy_gets_greedy/, archived at https://perma.cc/M9E6-EVF5.

For subsequent details, see Andrew Leonard, ‘Who owns the sharing economy?’, Salon (2 August 2013), http:// www.salon.com/2013/08/02/who_owns_the_sharing_economy/, archived at https://perma.cc/AL8X-VZXT 8. Sarah Kessler, ‘Peers says its new focus is helping sharing economy workers’, Fast Company (12 November 2014), http://www.fastcompany.com/3038310/peers- says-its-new-focus-is-helping-sharing-economy-workers, archived at https:// perma.cc/D5WR-WXXW 9. Tech:NYC, ‘What we are’, http://www.technyc.org/what-we-are/, archived at https://perma.cc/Z9ND-3ETH 10. Sharing Economy UK, ‘About us’, http://www.sharingeconomyuk.com, archived at https://perma.cc/3ENY-TLF3 11.

A host of industry-representative groups and lobbying outfits working on behalf of the on-demand economy have sprung up—with varying degrees of transparency. Sharing-economy critic Tom Slee points to Peers.org as a particularly interesting example of such lobbying efforts, ‘appropriating the language of collective action and progressive politics for private financial gain’.5 The platform describes itself variably as a ‘member-driven organization to support * * * Keeping Regulators at Bay 33 the sharing economy movement’, ‘the world’s largest independent sharing economy community’, and an organization aiming ‘to support workers by making the sharing economy a better work opportunity’—yet the reality appears to be somewhat different.6 Following an early promotional call, Andrew Leonard of Salon wondered: So the obvious question is, who does Peers represent?


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Puritan society has waged war against economies for sex that compete with sex within a monogamous relationship—believing both fornication (a competing sharing economy) and prostitution (a competing commercial economy) put too much pressure on an idealized sharing economy. Likewise, the content industry today wages war against economies for exchanging copyrighted content—peer-to-peer sharing economies, where people don’t necessarily know one another, as well as friend- 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 150 8/12/08 1:55:25 AM T W O EC O NO MIE S: C O MMERC I A L A ND SH A RING 151 ship sharing economies,44 where they do. In both cases, the judgment that the one economy is poison to the other may well be right.

For despite the intuitions that names give to the contrary, a thin sharing economy is often easier to support than a thick sharing economy. This is because inspiring or sustaining thee motivations is not costless. Or at least, all things being equal, a me motivation (for us, now) comes more easily to most. Thus, distinguishing cases where a thee motivation is necessary from cases where it isn’t will be helpful in predicting whether a certain sharing economy will survive. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 154 8/12/08 1:55:26 AM T W O EC O NO MIE S: C O MMERC I A L A ND SH A RING 155 Internet Sharing Economies The Internet has exploded the range and thickness of sharing economies too.

T WO ECONOMIES: COMMERCIAL AND SHARING 117 Commercial Economies 119 Three Successes from the Internet’s Commercial Economy 122 Three Keys to These Three Successes 128 Little Brother 132 The Character of Commercial Success 141 Sharing Economies 143 Internet Sharing Economies 155 The Paradigm Case: Wikipedia 156 Beyond Wikipedia 162 What Sharing Economies Share 172 7. HYBRID ECONOMIES 177 The Paradigm Case: Free Software 179 Beyond Free Software 185 8. ECONOMY LESSONS 225 Parallel Economies Are Possible 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd x 225 8/12/08 1:54:25 AM Tools Help Signal Which Economy a Creator Creates For 226 Crossovers Are Growing 227 Strong Incentives Will Increasingly Drive Commercial Entities to Hybrids 228 Perceptions of Fairness Will in Part Mediate the Hybrid Relationship Between Sharing and Commercial Economies 231 “Sharecropping” Is Not Likely to Become a Term of Praise 243 The Hybrid Can Help Us Decriminalize Youth 248 Part III: Enabling the Future 9.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For a description of the sharing economy as a signifier of a constellation of business activities with roots in collaborative commerce, see sociologist Juliet B. Schor, “On the Sharing Economy,” Contexts 14, no. 1 (2015): 12–19, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536504214567860; see also Edward T. Walker, “Beyond the Rhetoric of the ‘Sharing Economy,’” Contexts 14, no. 1 (2015): 12–19, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536504214567860; Natasha Singer, “Twisting Words to Make ‘Sharing’ Apps Seem Selfless,” New York Times, August 8, 2015; Caroline Jack, “Imagining the Sharing Economy,” Points, November 21, 2016, https://points.datasociety.net/imagining-the-sharing-economy-3a2048469da5. 52.

Universal basic income is one form of “automation alimony” that is proposed to relieve the rising inequality often attributed to automation. It was in this economic and cultural climate that the buzz around “the sharing economy” began. Its promise was seductively simple. The sharing economy was a social technology movement designed to use tech to share resources more efficiently—a true “commonwealth” aimed at remedying some of the insecurity fostered by the Great Recession. The sharing economy was built atop earlier cultural conversations, like those about rental commerce, car-sharing, and cooperative housing. Technology could connect those who possessed underutilized assets, skills, or time with potential consumers, a form of commerce that reduced the costs of ownership and more efficiently distributed goods and services.17 For struggling millennials displaced by the recession, this new model provided a hopeful new paradigm for earning income.

A Pew Research Center survey published in November 2016 shows that 8 percent of American adults earned money from an online employment platform in the previous year across industries such as ridehailing, online tasks, or cleaning/laundry.35 Rounds and rounds of venture capital funding bolstered Uber and Airbnb, the two most successful companies to emerge from the sharing-economy period. Both companies became “unicorns,” a term for start-ups that reach billion-dollar valuations. In 2016, Uber reached a $68 billion valuation, while Airbnb was valued at $30 billion,36 less than a decade after their beginnings in 2009 and 2008, respectively. By July 2017, the Oxford Internet Institute’s iLabour Project published a report finding that the online sharing economy, which includes clerical and data entry services for jobs posted online, had grown 26 percent in the previous year.37 But as the sharing economy has grown, things have gotten complicated.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

ECONOMIC BARRIERS AND ENABLERS OF DISTRIBUTED OWNERSHIP ARUN SUNDARARAJAN In May 2015, I chatted with OuiShare’s co-founders Antonin Léonard and Benjamin Tincq during their OuiShare Fest, the annual gathering of over a thousand sharing-economy enthusiasts in Paris. I sensed a tension at the Fest between the purpose-driven and profit-driven participants: those who saw the sharing economy as a path to a more equitable and environmentally sensible world, and those who were excited by the massive infusions of venture capital into hundreds of burgeoning sharing-economy platforms. Léonard spoke of the confusion and disappointment he detected from those who had hoped that the sharing economy would really change the world. “And because there was so much hope, the ones that were once so hopeful are now so disappointed, in a way,” he said.

This episode showed me how a culture of genuine sharing can also mean sharing technology, just like anything else. Over the past five years, the technological ingenuity of the “sharing economy” deeply resonated with the zeitgeist. Emphasizing community, underutilized resources, and open data, the genuine sharing economy was initially presented as a challenge to corporate power. Just like my Buddhist friends, the pioneers of this economy proposed to split the use of lawn mowers, drills, and cars. But soon, the non-commercial values behind many platforms were rewritten in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, turning the “sharing economy” into a misnomer. Today, facing various prophecies about sharing and the future of work, we need to remind ourselves that there is no unstoppable evolution leading to the uberization of society; more positive alternatives are possible.

What if we had an Internet of ownership? REAL SHARING, REAL DEMOCRACY Another word that the Internet has gotten to is sharing. Sharing used to mean something we do with the people we know and trust. In the so-called sharing economy, it means more convenient transactions that take place on distant servers somewhere. Convenience is great, but all along there has been a real sharing economy at work, the cooperative economy. One can trace the modern cooperative movement to the Rochdale Principles of 1844, in England, though it had precursors among ancient tribes, monasteries, and guilds around the world.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

This category has registered an increase of 1.7 per cent (2.9 million) between 2005 and 2015,71 but most of these increases have been for offline work. Given that no direct measures of the sharing economy are currently available, surveys and other indirect measures have been used instead. Nearly all of the estimates suggest that around 1 per cent of the US labour force is involved in the online sharing economy formed by lean platforms.72 Even here, the results have to take into account that Uber drivers probably form the majority of these workers.73 The sharing economy outside of Uber is tiny. In the United Kingdom less evidence is presently available, but the most thorough survey done so far suggests that a slightly higher number of people routinely sell their labour through lean platforms.

Henwood, Doug. 2003. After the New Economy. New York: New Press. Henwood, Doug. 2015. ‘What the Sharing Economy Takes’. The Nation, 27 January. http://www.thenation.com/article/what-sharing-economy-takes (accessed 25 May 2016). Herrman, John. 2016. ‘Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic’. The New York Times, 17 April. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media-websites-battle-falteringad-revenue-and-traffic.html (accessed 30 June 2016). Hesse, Jason. 2015. ‘6 per cent of Brits Use Sharing Economy to Earn Extra Cash’. Real Business. 15 September. http://realbusiness.co.uk/article/31360-6-per-cent-of-brits-use-sharing-economyto-earn-extra-cash (accessed 25 May 2016).

In particular, there has been a renewed focus on the rise of technology: automation, the sharing economy, endless stories about the ‘Uber for X’, and, since around 2010, proclamations about the internet of things. These changes have received labels such as ‘paradigm shift’ from McKinsey1 and ‘fourth industrial revolution’ from the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and, in more ridiculous formulations, have been compared in importance to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.2 We have witnessed a massive proliferation of new terms: the gig economy, the sharing economy, the on-demand economy, the next industrial revolution, the surveillance economy, the app economy, the attention economy, and so on.


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The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Weaver and Kayla Deru, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning at Motels, Hotels, and Resorts,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, July 2007. 98 According to the National Fire Protection Association: Richard Campbell, “Structure Fires in Hotels and Motels,” National Fire Protection Association, September 2015. 100 relative to nonblack hosts: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca, “Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, no. 14-054, January 2014. 100 compared with white guests: Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, September 16, 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2701902. 101 rejections stopped: Shankar Vedantam, Maggie Penman, and Max Nesterak, “#AirbnbWhileBlack: How Hidden Bias Shapes the Sharing Economy,” Hidden Brain, NPR, podcast audio, April 26, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/04/26/475623339/-airbnbwhileblack-how-hidden-bias-shapes-the-sharing-economy. 101 “your XXX head”: Elizabeth Weise, “Airbnb Bans N. Carolina Host as Accounts of Racism Rise,” USA Today, June 2, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/06/01/airbnb-bans-north-carolina-host-racism/85252190/. 102 the experts’ recommendations: Laura W.

, Commercial Observer, October 12, 2015, https://commercialobserver.com/2015/10/airbnb-is-a-growing-force-in-new-york-but-just-how-many-laws-are-being-broken/. 143 industry-demand growth: Lodging and Cruise—US: Lowering Our Outlook to Stable on Lower Growth Prospects in 2017, Moody’s Investors Service, September 26, 2016, https://www.moodys.com/. 143 The Sharing Economy Checks In: Jamie Lane, The Sharing Economy Checks In: An Analysis of Airbnb in the United States, CBRE, January 2016, https://cbrepkfcprod.blob.core.windows.net/downloads/store/12Samples/An_Analysis_of_Airbnb_in_the_United_States.pdf. 143 the most vulnerable hotels: Georgios Zervas, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” Boston University School of Management Research Paper Series, May 7, 2015, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2bb7/f0eb69a4b026bccb687b546405247a132b77.pdf. 144 “pace of growth continue”: Kevin May, “Airbnb Tipped to Double in Size and Begin Gradual Impact on Hotels,” Tnooz, January 20, 2015, https://www.tnooz.com/article/airbnb-double-size-impact-hotels/. 146 deals were announced: Alison Griswold, “It’s Time for Hotels to Really, Truly Worry about Airbnb,” Quartz, July 12, 2016, http://qz.com/729878/its-time-for-hotels-to-really-truly-worry-about-airbnb/. 146 the meetings industry: Greg Oates, “Airbnb Explains Its Strategic Move into the Meetings and Events Industry,” Skift, June 29, 2016, https://skift.com/2016/06/29/airbnb-explains-its-peripheral-move-into-the-meetings-and-events-industry/. 146 from early 2015 to early 2016: “Airbnb and Peer-to-Peer Lodging: GS Survey Takeaways,” Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, February 15, 2016. 148 “to come to it”: Susan Stellin, “Boutique Bandwagon,” New York Times, June 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/business/03boutique.html. 149 to list it: “VRBO/HomeAway Announcement,” Timeshare Users Group, June 6, 2005, http://www.tugbbs.com/forums/showthread.php?

And then of course, there is the more modern era of short-term vacation rentals, which has been with us for decades, whether through big players like HomeAway or VRBO or niche sites like BedandBreakfast.com, or, before that, advertisements on Craigslist or classified ads. “One of the signature elements of the sharing economy is that the ideas themselves are not new,” says Arun Sundararajan, professor at New York University and author of the book The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. What is new, though, and what Airbnb specifically has done, is to toss aside the barriers and build an easy, friendly, accessible platform inviting anyone to do it.


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Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

San Francisco Bay Guardian. Aug. 6, 2013. sfbg.com/2013/08/06/thin-air. 238 “grassroots organization”: “About Peers.” Peers. peers.org/about. 238 “sharing economy startups”: Andrew Leonard. “Who Owns the Sharing Economy?” Salon. Aug. 2, 2013. salon.com/2013/08/02/who_owns_the_sharing_economy. 239 “It’s like the United Nations”: Jones and Yesko. “Into Thin Air.” 239 “a shared identity”: Tom Slee. “Why the Sharing Economy Isn’t.” Whimsley. Aug. 30, 2013. tomslee.net/2013/08/why-the-sharing-economy-isnt.html. 239 “unreasonable obstacles”: ibid. 239 Atkin’s connection to Peers: Nitasha Tiku. “Airbnb’s Industry Mouthpiece Astroturfs for Donations.”

And their plan involves no less than doubling down on social ideology and online labor, turning everything, and everyone, into something to be bought or sold. Welcome to the sharing economy. BAIT AND SWITCH The sharing economy combines all the elements of online labor, reputation, and social media’s marketing-of-the-self to help make one’s entire life purely transactional. Playing off the notion that a gig-based economy, filled with mobile freelancers, is inherently liberating, partisans of the sharing economy preach flexibility and personal empowerment. The sharing economy offers services that let you turn the core elements of your life—housing, transportation, physical labor, expensively earned skills—into rentable commodities.

In the summer of 2013, evictions in San Francisco were at their highest in eleven years, due in part to the latitude the city gives landlords in evicting residents of rent-controlled apartments and the tempting payday of short-term, under-the-table rentals. Among the most pernicious aspects of the sharing economy is the way it presents itself as a populist operation, a loose community coming together to engage in mutually beneficial, informal economic exchanges. In reality, it is anything but these things. What is shared most among participants in the sharing economy is risk—risk that the platform owners displace onto workers and customers. But the industry’s self-mythologizing masks this reality. Peers, an industry lobbying group that calls itself a “grassroots organization to support the sharing economy movement,” acknowledged after its launch that its “mission-aligned independent donors” included “investors and executives of sharing economy start-ups.”


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City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

Airbnb will help provide housing flexibility in cities that now have a severe mismatch in supply (of outdated, oversized housing) and demand. The sharing economy, Orsi believes, could even address urban crime, through the stability of social networks that it will spawn and the greater number of people it will be able to provide for. Orsi says, “It’s going to just completely change how cities visualize their space and visualize their problems and how to solve them.” Trouble is, the existing American city wasn’t built for the sharing economy. Our cities have been designed to separate out the functions of our lives, with residential and commercial zones, consumers and producers clearly demarcated. The sharing economy upends all of that.

Image: Daniel Harris “The reality is that if D.C. swells from a place where there are 500,000 people in 2010 to a place where there are 850,000 in 2020, well, what are we doing with those 350,000 extra people?” Singer asks. “A lot of the sharing economy just has to do with the number of people living per square foot of land. It’s all about physical space.” The rise of the so-called sharing economy has been chalked up to many things: Millennials rejecting car ownership, the environmentally conscious glomming onto the latest eco-trend, even broke urbanites who will want all their own stuff again as soon as the economy recovers.

But she predicts that services meeting the needs of both sides of a market — the givers and receivers in sharing — will succeed. Airbnb, for instance, helps homeowners and also increasingly serves a freelance work force as prone to temporarily changing cities as jobs. Some physical goods — maybe not dogs or toilets — are exchanging hands in the shared economy, too. There actually is someone in Manhattan on SnapGoods offering whoopee-pie makers (includes a recipe book!). But the shared economy of stuff works best with assets that are expensive to own and infrequently used, like camera and music accessories, or high-end home tools. SnapGoods sells itself with the slogan “Own less, do more,” a nod to the idea that our culture increasingly values the accumulation of experiences over assets (if you don’t own a high-end camera with multiple lenses and tripods, maybe you can afford to take a trip to Yosemite as an amateur photographer with borrowed gear).


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Snapchat is a well-known and fast-growing communications platform that famously turned down a multibillion-dollar offer from Facebook in 2014. Stripe is a fastgrowing payment platform for e-commerce merchants. Platforms power the sharing economy movement Lastly, platforms are at the heart of the emerging ‘sharing economy’ since many enable the redistribution, sharing and/or reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. The term ‘sharing economy’, which was first introduced in 2010, describes a ‘social revolution’ based on the ‘sharing of resources across multiple platforms’ in a way that creates values for all participants.16 eBay was an early precursor of this trend by allowing people to resell their little-used assets directly and easily, but many other companies have followed suit.

In the meantime, and irrespective of market volatility, it is interesting to see overall patterns of value creation around platform businesses. The meteoric rise of platform businesses 19 16 See early definitions of the sharing economy in R. Botsman and R. Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, New York: Harper Business, 2010. More recently, A. Stephany, The Business of Sharing, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 17 www.justpark.com/creative/sharing-economy-index/, February 2016. Chapter 3 What is a platform business? Narrowing the search: platform definitions The very definition of what is a platform business is fraught with difficulty.

Lastly, we see significant transferable skills from one platform to another, even across industries, and we are starting to see talents able to build on their experiences with ‘platform careers’ spanning multiple firms. Our own corporate and consulting experience at Launchworks strongly points to the importance of having senior individuals able to build and deploy cross-industry platform knowledge. The platform-powered ‘sharing economy’ Platforms powering sharing economy activities will undoubtedly continue their expansion. Today, they can be classified into five broad categories: • The sharing of goods, from recirculation of second-hand goods (eBay or Craiglist) to shared usage (Drivy and Turo for peer-to-peer car rentals, The future of platforms • • • • 209 BlaBlaCar for car-sharing trips, Airbnb for home rentals, Love Home Swap for home exchanges).


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The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

She has done business with people all over America, none of whom she has met but all of whom she trusts because of algorithm-generated trust. The next leap forward in the code-ification of trust and markets is in the so-called sharing economy. I think of the sharing economy as a way of making a market out of anything and a microentrepreneur out of anybody. The sharing economy uses a combination of technology platforms packaged as apps on mobile phones, behavioral science, and mobile phone location data to create peer-to-peer marketplaces. These marketplaces take underused assets (e.g., an empty apartment, empty seats in a car, or skill as a math tutor) and connect them with people looking for a specific service.

While the idea that Airbnb is bringing people from around the world together is cute, it masks the economic reality. Airbnb has succeeded in bringing eBay’s trust-through-algorithms-and-ratings model to lodging and built a business around it. Nobody is really sharing anything in the sharing economy. You can call it the sharing economy, but don’t forget your credit card. At last measure, the estimated size of the global sharing economy was $26 billion, and it’s growing fast, with some estimates projecting it will be more than 20 times larger in size by 2025. Part of why Chesky’s story is cloying is that Airbnb is now a destination for castles in addition to couches.

In some cases, the sharing economy has turned what might have once been a casual favor into a financial transaction. That is hardly the stuff of “sharing.” In most cases, sharing-economy businesses are just businesses. Brian and Joe didn’t share their spare air mattresses; they rented them out. To the extent that there is an underlying ideology, it is not about sharing or creating community around the breakfast table; it is the economic theory of neoliberalism, encouraging the free flow of goods and services in a market without government regulation. One company that seems to recognize the sharing economy has nothing to do with sharing is Uber.


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The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A SHARED FUTURE Many of the most disruptive new business models will emerge in what has been called the sharing economy. Information equivalence is the primary driving force behind the sharing economy, which is also known as the shareconomy, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, or peer economy. All of these terms are used to describe a broad range of economic activities.40 Arun Sundararajan does an excellent job of characterizing this phenomenon in his book, The Sharing Economy.41 The sharing economy, he writes, is market based and facilitates the efficient exchange and sharing of goods, services, and human skills.

Jon Henley, “Sweden Leads the Race to Become Cashless Society,” The Guardian,, June 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/04/sweden-cashless-society-cards-phone-apps-leading-europe (accessed June 27, 2019). 40. “Sharing Economy,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy (accessed June 27, 2019). 41. Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2016), 27. 42. Paul Barter, “‘Cars Are Parked 95% of the Time.’ Let’s Check!,” Reinventing Parking, February 22, 2013, http://www.reinventingparking.org/2013/02/cars-are-parked-95-of-time-lets-check.html (accessed June 27, 2019). 43.

A MATTER OF RATIOS Office space, temporary accommodations, and vacation rentals are another area where capital assets are underutilized, and the sharing economy is ready to help. If you are looking for vacation rentals, Airbnb is just one of many services that you can use. Tripping.com has more than 8 million vacation properties listed. Tripping.com competes with Flip-Key, Roomorama, VacayHero, and Wimdu.52 ShareDesk lets you find on-demand workspace in more than four hundred cities.53 A sharing economy service or equivalent exists for just about anything you can think of. That includes sharing people as well. If you want to hire freelance labor for everyday work, TaskRabbit is operating in approximately thirty cities.


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Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

As we saw in Chapter 1, these services typically take advantage of the web and social media to enable ordinary people to monetise their time, space, knowledge or skills. The sharing economy contributes to environmental sustainability because it reduces individual consumption by allowing, for instance, four people to share the same car rather than having to buy four different cars. The sharing economy also reduces waste by making excess capacity and unused resources available to those who need them most. By enabling products and assets to be fully utilised, the sharing economy increases their value. Although sharing in the UK accounts for only 1.3% of GDP, and an even smaller proportion of the US economy, it is expected to grow exponentially in coming years, especially given the preference of young consumers to share everything from flats to cars to books.

Similarly, Uber, a taxi service that connects users with drivers at the tap of a smartphone, has recently launched an extension called uberPOP in several European capitals. uberPOP is a peer-to-peer service that enables non-professional drivers to register their cars to transport individuals, thus earning extra income in their free time. The initial value of the sharing economy – powered by providers like Airbnb and Uber – was in saving customers money; now it is being used to earn money by turning customers into prosumers. In 2013, the sharing economy generated revenues of around $3.5 billion, that went straight into prosumers’ wallets. This is just the start. Growing at an annual rate of 25%, the sharing economy is expected to become a $110 billion market within a decade, without requiring any major investments. The European Commission predicts:8 At this rate, peer-to-peer sharing is transforming from an income boost through a stagnant wage market, into a disruptive economic force.

By reusing materials again and again, through multiple production cycles, and by adopting the resource-efficient design principles of biomimicry, companies are able to significantly reduce their supply chain costs and pass these savings on to customers. Widening the sharing economy In a circular economy, a product undergoes multiple incarnations – with its materials being recycled and reused again and again – thus sustaining its value over multiple lifetimes. During any particular lifetime, however, the product is most likely to be owned and used by just one customer. But what if, during even a single lifetime or incarnation, the same product could be consumed by many users? Then the same inputs could be made to create greater value for more and more users. That is the underlying premise of the sharing economy – also known as collaborative consumption – in which participants aspire to share access to goods and services rather than to have individual ownership.


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The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Claire Cain Miller, “Google Grapples with Mobile,” International New York Times, October 19–20, 2013, 14. 93. Ibid. 94. “National Study Quantifies the ‘Sharing Economy’ Movement,” PRNewswire, February 8, 2012, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-study-quantifies-the-sharing-econo my-movement-138949069.html (accessed March 19, 2013). 95. Neal Gorenflo, “The New Sharing Economy,” Shareable, December 24, 2010, http://www.share able.net/blog/the-new-sharing-economy (accessed March 19, 2013). 96. Bryan Walsh, “10 Ideas that Will Change the World: Today’s Smart Choice: Don’t Own. Share,” Time, March 17, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,20 59521_2059717,00.html (accessed March 19, 2013). 97.

The distributed, collaborative nature of the Internet allowed millions of people to find the right match-ups to share whatever they could spare with what others could use. The sharing economy was born. This is a different kind of economy—one far more dependent on social capital than market capital. And it’s an economy that lives more on social trust rather than on anonymous market forces. Rachel Botsman, an Oxford- and Harvard-educated former consultant to GE and IBM who abandoned her career to join the new sharing economy, describes the path that led up to collaborative consumption. She notes that the social Web has passed through three phases—the first enabled programmers to freely share code; Facebook and Twitter allowed people to share their lives; and YouTube and Flickr allowed people to share their creative content.

While empathy for others had been decreasing and materialism was becoming more rampant with each passing year, the trend suddenly turned around after 2008 among young millennials, who reported “more concern for others and less interest in material goods.”26 The new studies find that millennials are less interested in keeping up with materialistic trends and less invested in obsessive consumerism as a way of life. These findings dovetail with the sharp rise of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy. All over the world, a younger generation is sharing bikes, automobiles, homes, clothes, and countless other items and opting for access over ownership. A growing number of millennials are eschewing designer brands in favor of generics and cause-oriented brands and are far more interested in the use value of material things than their exchange value or status. A sharing economy of collaborative prosumers is, by its very nature, a more empathic and less materialistic one. The waning of the materialistic ethos is also reflected in the increasing commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship.


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Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

v=xpg4PjGtbu0; her call was echoed in Brian Van Slyke and David Morgan, “The ‘Sharing Economy’ Is the Problem,” Grassroots Economic Organizing (July 3, 2015); see a directory of North American tech worker co-ops at techworker.coop and coops.tech for the UK; for accounts of the rationale for tech co-ops, see Brian Van Slyke, “The Argument for Worker-Owned Tech Collectives,” Fast Company (November 20, 2013), and Gabrielle Anctil, “Can Coops Revolutionize the Tech Industry?” Model View Culture 34 (March 16, 2016). 16. Nathan Schneider, “Owning Is the New Sharing,” Shareable (December 21, 2014); Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy” (December 5, 2014), medium.com/@trebors/platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad. See also Scholz’s subsequent, fuller account of the concept in his pamphlet Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016), as well as the collective manifesto he and I coedited, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (OR Books, 2016).

The best-selling futurist handbook of the same period, John Naisbitt’s Megatrends, likewise promised that “the computer will smash the pyramid,” and with its networks “we can restructure our institutions horizontally.”16 What we’ve gotten instead are apps from online monopolies accountable to their almighty stock tickers. The companies we allow to manage our relationships expect that we pay with our personal data. The internet’s so-called sharing economy requires its permanently part-time delivery drivers and content moderators to relinquish rights that used to be part of the social contracts workers could expect. Yet a real sharing economy has been at work all along. During the 2016 International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec, I attended a dinner at the Château Frontenac, a palatial hotel that casts its glow across the old city.

By October 2014, Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, in Oakland, promulgated a cartoon video online that called for “the next sharing economy”—a sharing of cooperative ownership. Orsi was also helping to design the bylaws for Loconomics Cooperative, a gig platform owned by gig workers. Small web-development shops were finding worker-ownership a congenial means of attracting talent and distinguishing themselves in a crowded industry.15 Three people I met in Paris at OuiShareFest that summer were gesturing in the same directions during the months afterward. Venture capitalist Lisa Gansky had been nudging sharing-economy startups to understand and imitate cooperative tradition.


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Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

[back] 13. Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Airi Lampinen et al., “Studying the ‘Sharing Economy’: Perspectives to Peer-to-Peer Exchange,” in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (New York: ACM, 2015), 117–21, https://doi.org/10.1145/2685553.2699339; Juliet Schor, “Debating the Sharing Economy,” Great Transition Initiative, October 2014, http://www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy; Schor et al., “Paradoxes of Openness and Distinction in the Sharing Economy,” Poetics 54 (2016): 66–81.

Scholz, Trebor. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2016. Schor, Juliet B. “Debating the Sharing Economy.” Great Transition Initiative, October 2014. http://www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-sharing-economy. Schor, Juliet B., Connor Fitzmaurice, Lindsey B. Carfagna, Will Attwood-Charles, and Emilie Dubois Poteat. “Paradoxes of Openness and Distinction in the Sharing Economy.” Poetics 54 (2016): 66–81. Schor, Juliet B., and Craig J. Thompson. Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy.

., “Paradoxes of Openness and Distinction in the Sharing Economy,” Poetics 54 (2016): 66–81. [back] 14. Kristofer Erickson and Inge Sørensen, “Regulating the Sharing Economy,” Internet Policy Review 5, no. 3 (June 30, 2016), https://doi.org/10.14763/2016.2.414; Juho Hamari, Mimmi Sjöklint, and Antti Ukkonen, “The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015; Aaron Smith, Shared, Collaborative, and On Demand. [back] 15. “We believe the new economy is creating opportunities to reinvent work, but we need to ensure the end goal is work that is good for workers.”


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Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

December 21, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-monetize-your-closet.html; Geron, Tomio. Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy. Forbes. February 11, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/#463a65b6790b. 14   Johnson, Justin Elof. Will You Leave Your Job to Join the Sharing Economy? VentureBeat. January 21, 2013. http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/21/will-you-leave-your-job-to-join-the-sharing-economy/. 15   Manjoo, Farhad. Uber’s Business Model Could Change Your Work. New York Times. January 28, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/technology/personaltech/uber-a-rising-business-model.html. 16   Retelny, Daniela, Sébastien Robaszkiewicz, Alexandra To, Walter S.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, among the latter camp, held that “these entrepreneurs are not the only answer for our economic woes … but they are surely part of the answer.” A Forbes cover story in 2013 explained that the sharing economy and gig economy had created “an economic revolution that is quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs.”13 Tech journalists and bloggers, perhaps having spent too much time immersed in the optimism of entrepreneurs, typically went for full-out hype. “Will You Leave Your Job to Join the Sharing Economy?” prompted the tech blog VentureBeat in a 2013 headline.14 The article’s author had met a Lyft driver who also worked for TaskRabbit, a website on which neighbors could hire each other to complete odd jobs.

New York Times. July 20, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/business/smallbusiness/a-new-wrinkle-in-the-gig-economy-workers-get-most-of-the-money.html?_r=0. 6   Scholz, Trebor, and Nathan Schneider. The People’s Uber: Why the Sharing Economy Must Share Ownership. Fast Company. October 7, 2015. https://www.fastcompany.com/3051845/the-peoples-uber-why-the-sharing-economy-must-share-ownership. 7   Feeding America. Food Insecurity in the United States. http://map.feedingamerica.org/county/2015/overall/arkansas/county/desha. 8   Blanchflower, David G., and Andrew J. Oswald. What Makes an Entrepreneur?


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

They’d be constantly ‘asset stripping’ their own homes in order to find things to rent out.73 This would be a particular problem in the digital lifeworld, where we already expect an imbalance between asset-haves and asset-have-nots. Moreover, it increasingly looks like the people who benefit most from the sharing economy are not the participants but the platformowners themselves: Uber, Airbnb, and the like. As Jonathan Allen explains, the early wealth effects of the sharing economy are hard to calculate but any wealth created ‘will be highly concentrated in the hands of technology founders and early investors’.74 At its heart, the sharing economy doesn’t really disrupt the Private Property Paradigm.The critical issue in the long-run, I suggest, will be what is shared. Sharing items of comfort, convenience, and amusement may help the asset-poor to make the most of what little they have, but it won’t make them any wealthier over time.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS The Wealth Cyclone 335 Sharing The ‘sharing economy’ offers another possible model of ownership for the digital lifeworld. These days, the term is used loosely to describe most forms of ‘peer-to-peer’ online transactions conducted online. The best example is Airbnb, which allows people to rent out their vacant residential properties to strangers. Sharing, with or without strings attached, is nothing new. What’s new is the scale and extent enabled by digital technology.71 At a glance, the ethos of the sharing economy resembles that of the commons. But there are a couple of key differences.

But there are a couple of key differences. First, in a commons no one strictly owns any of the stuff held in common, while in a sharing economy individuals retain the title of their property while letting others use it. Second, in the sharing economy, people tend to pay owners for their goods and services, while this would be antithetical to the ethos of the commons. The sharing model is interesting because it encourages sellers to monetize assets that would otherwise be economically useless. And it offers purchasers the benefits of possession without the associated burdens of ownership. Thinking about the digital lifeworld, one might imagine a system that enabled people to share day-to-day items using a fleet of airborne drones that shuttle goods from one place to another:72 [Let’s say] you could just snap your fingers and have something magically appear in your hand whenever you wanted it [at] no cost, and it was instantaneous.


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Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Chapter 6 Face-off in AI China and the United States are racing to dominate the high-stakes AI market. China could bypass the United States with its wealth of data and quicker rollout of self-driving vehicles, facial recognition for public security, and AI technologies for fintech, edtech, and health-care startups. Chapter 7 A Shared Economy The fad in China’s booming sharing economy for hitching a ride has been very bumpy for bike-sharing startup Ofo, but ride-hailing leader Didi has had a good run in beating Uber. Now shared umbrellas, mobile chargers, and even takeout kitchens are here. Chapter 8 E-Commerce Gets Social Just when you think there’s nothing else new in e-commerce, along comes social commerce app Pinduoduo, which combines bargain shopping, games, and social sharing—and it’s very popular in China’s rural areas.

The growth was made possible by the integration of AI and big data technology into biomedicine to develop oncology media records covering all types of cancers. “This would not have been possible before” in the health-care field, said Xiadong Jiang, managing partner at Long Hill Capital. “I would never have foreseen this.” CHAPTER 7 ________________ A SHARED ECONOMY The fad in China’s booming sharing economy for hitching a ride has been very bumpy for bike-sharing startup Ofo, but ride-hailing leader Didi has had a good run in beating Uber. Now shared umbrellas, mobile chargers, and even takeout kitchens are here. An hour’s ride from Beijing’s Forbidden City to the high-tech zone Zhongguancun in the northwest of this sprawling megalopolis is the modern headquarters of Didi Chuxing, China’s ride-hailing service, which ranks among the most valuable venture-backed startups worldwide.

•Fintech: Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial is a one-stop financial services giant that uses big data and machine learning to dominate in money market funds, lending, insurance, mobile payments, wealth management, and blockchain services. •Social credit: China’s new, controversial social credit system judges a citizen’s trustworthiness through technological surveillance and encourages compliance by giving ratings that can determine access to loans, jobs, schools, and travel. •Sharing economy: China-invented business models for shared bikes, battery chargers, umbrellas, basketballs, and takeout kitchens have been popularized by dozens of startups. •Livestreaming: Video streaming sites from Baidu’s Netflix-like iQiyi and digital entertainment innovator YY are booming and creating online celebrities paid in virtual gifts by addicted viewers.


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The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Both startups offered age-old ideas (share a vehicle, rent your home) with new twists and ended up fostering a remarkable degree of openness among people who had never previously met. In a previous decade, most of us would have stayed far away from someone’s private car or unlit home, scared by headlines about crime and by our mothers’ earnest warnings to avoid strangers. Airbnb and Uber didn’t spawn “the sharing economy,” “the on-demand economy,” or “the one-tap economy” (those labels never quite seemed to fit) so much as usher in a new trust economy, helping regular folks to negotiate transportation and accommodations in the age of ubiquitous internet access. The nearly simultaneous emergence of both companies has been striking.

It was spacious, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a comfortable living room, and, up the main flight of stairs, a roof terrace overlooking the golden city, which was undergoing its own momentous reinvention. At the time, the two men had no way of knowing that over the next few years, this apartment would be ground zero for a worldwide social movement and global business phenomenon called the sharing economy. Surve, a native of Mumbai, India, had used the internet to rent an airbed for eighty dollars a night during the World Design Congress, a biennial conference held by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, or ICSID. All the hotels in the city that week were either booked or too expensive for Surve, so he hadn’t expected much.

With cities waking up to the problems posed by people turning their homes into ad hoc hotels, Chesky’s mettle would soon be tested further. He would have to prove to suspicious lawmakers and regulators that Airbnb’s intentions were pure and that its impact on cities was constructive. It would be his most serious challenge yet and one that Travis Kalanick, Chesky’s new friend and a peer in the proliferating movement called the sharing economy, was about to face in an even more potent form. CHAPTER 7 THE PLAYBOOK Uber’s Expansion Begins I’ve never seen an entrepreneur work as hard. He lives, eats and breathes Uber. —Shervin Pishevar, e-mail to his partners at Menlo Ventures To Travis Kalanick, Uber wasn’t merely a fecund investment opportunity or a promising startup with an auspicious set of early results.


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What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Little wonder that the most serious threats to these companies are not financial scandals but attacks on that trust, as when Uber was revealed to be tracking the movements of journalists, or incidents where its drivers have been arrested for sexually assaulting passengers.37 The sharing economy ultimately depends on an atomized form of intimacy, a series of fleeting, close encounters with strangers that are managed and underwritten (in emotional, financial, and liability terms) by algorithmic culture machines. While this intimacy is necessary for the sharing economy to function, it is not the primary commodity these systems are selling. The real sell is the interface itself: the experience of computationally mediated culture and its underlying algorithmic simplification and abstraction.

Uber depends on abstracting away the complexities, regulations, and established conventions of hailing a cab, turning the hired car experience into a kind of videogame. That mode of abstraction has been so successful that an entire genre of Silicon Valley startups can now be categorized as “Uber for X,” where that X is actually a double abstraction. First, we adapt Uber’s simplifying, free-agent “sharing economy” business model to another economic arena. Then we make all such arenas fungible, a variable X that can stand for any corner of the marketplace where ubiquitous computing and algorithmic services have yet to disrupt the status quo. Like Turing’s original abstraction machine, these systems extend a symbolic logic into the cultural universe that reorders minds and meanings that come into contact with them.

These companies operate in what design entrepreneur Scott Belsky calls the “interface layer,” using appealing design to clarify and rationalize messy aspects of cultural life into simple, dependable choices.32 The Interface Economy If Zynga and its cohort of game-makers have found ways to extract labor value from entertainment, the new wave of interface layer companies is reframing labor as a kind of entertainment, adopting the optimistic framing of the “sharing economy.” Their rhetoric relies on the notion of technological collaboration and just-in-time delivery: taking advantage of unused resources like empty seats in cars, unused rooms in houses, and so forth. But all of these interactions are grounded in the mediating computational layer that manages ad hoc logistics, matches buyers and sellers of services, and structures access to platforms through carefully constructed interfaces.


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The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Such a depressed labor market is essential to the sharing economy. Now paid less, forced to work part-time or be unemployed, individuals participate in the sharing economy to cover income shortfalls. Individuals renting out their houses, cars, or labor make a fraction of what they would receive in traditional full-time jobs, without any employment benefits. In the sharing economy it is “possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers.”10 Having ridden the globalization wave with The World Is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman now endorses the sharing economy, celebrating new micro-entrepreneurs.

9 Peer-to-peer brokers reduce costs, decreasing the income of service providers. The sharing economy requires abundant cheap contract laborers to be available at the touch of a smartphone screen. Full-time employees with normal benefits would make the model unworkable. Comparisons to Wikipedia and open-source software are misleading. In those cases, the individuals are employed elsewhere. They contribute their services free for the joy of participation and contribution, as well as recognition as a member of a community. The sharing economy exploits low-wage workers in a weak economic environment. Despite improving economic statistics, the deterioration in real living conditions is evident.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.” 7 Technology and innovation are touted as sources of future employment. The sharing economy (also known as the peer economy, collaborative economy, and gig economy) is based on the ubiquitous Internet, improved broadband connectivity, smartphones, and apps. Individuals with spare time, houses, rooms, cars, and the like can use them as sources of work and income. The economy that benefits everyone focuses on transport (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, GetTaxi, Hailo), short-term accommodation (Airbnb, HomeAway), small tasks (TaskRabbit, Fiverr), grocery-shopping services (Instacart), home-cooked meals (Feastly), on-demand delivery services (Postmates, Favor), pet transport (DogVacay, Rover), car rental (RelayRides, Getaround), boat rental (Boatbound), and tool rental (Zilok).


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5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

Take it to the next step. In addition to the domain, also secure social media profiles that match the domain. Then, build out a simple branded website on the domain. Essentially, you are creating and selling pre-built brands and assets to business owners. The Sharing Economy Also referred to as collaborative consumption, the sharing economy is based on people sharing their access to goods and services, and coordinating this sharing via community-based online services. In this new model, people rent beds, cars, boats, and other assets directly from each other instead of owning things themselves or purchasing them from traditional retailers and service companies.

At the time of this writing, the consumer peer-to-peer rental market is valued at $26 billion.10 Harvard Business Review argues that the term “sharing economy” is a misnomer and that a more accurate term for it is “access economy.”11 We won’t split hairs. The point we want to make is that this new technology-facilitated model is a great, simple way to leverage your existing assets to earn extra money on the side. Here are just a few examples of ways you can use the sharing economy to boost your income: Airbnb Airbnb, VRBO, and other companies allow you to rent a room or your whole home to travelers, thus earning supplemental income with existing assets.

International Drive, 2007). http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/12/where-to-start.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiverr http://www.go-globe.com/blog/mobile-apps-usage/ http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/video-game-coach-salary/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-sharing-economy-isnt-about-sharing-at-all Cecilia Kang, “Podcasts Are Back — and Making Money,” Washington Post, September 25, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/podcasts-are-back--and-making-money/2014/09/25/54abc628-39c9-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html?


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The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

To reinforce the point, in the USA one of the founders of CrowdFlower indiscreetly revealed that ‘the firm sometimes paid workers $2 to $3 an hour, rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, or paid workers in points for various online reward programs and videogame credits.’38 It will be hard to prevent that sort of outcome. THE REAL SHARING ECONOMY Describing rentier platforms as the sharing economy is misleading and mischievous, allowing platforms to claim they are merely facilitating neighbourly sharing rather than providing a commercial service. One genuine sharing online community is Couchsurfing, which enables travellers to find a bed for a night offered for free by other members of the community.

If this is a ‘sharing economy’, as its advocates claim, costs as well as benefits should be shared. As an emerging ‘profession’, labour brokers should be registered and required to join an association that develops ethical codes and monitors their conduct. In the UK, work has started on a consumer trust mark for online platforms, including labour brokers, intended to promote good practice for handling consumer complaints. Minimum requirements will be set by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Said Business School, working in collaboration with Sharing Economy UK. This trade body, created in March 2015 by twenty-eight online businesses, includes Airbnb, car-hire service Zipcar and cleaner-booking platform Hassle.com.

Some do not charge interest but levy a flat fee. A feature of all these companies is that they require full access to their clients’ bank accounts and other personal data, which they use to determine whether to provide loans, what interest rate to charge and for how long to lend. THE PLATFORM DEBT MACHINE The misnamed ‘sharing economy’ is also fostering indebtedness. App-based taxi services, such as Uber and Lyft, have tie-ups with lenders that enable drivers to buy vehicles on credit. Big car companies are becoming involved. In January 2016, General Motors announced a deal with Lyft, under which it would supply rental vehicles to Lyft drivers.


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Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Companies can maximize revenue by offering us just what we want right that minute. We may feel we own more, but we really don’t. Life à la Carte There is one last stop on this frontier tour of ownership: the sharing economy. In a sense, the sharing economy is the flip side of digital ownership. Instead of wrongly believing we own more than we really do, in the sharing economy we intentionally want to own less. Forget the bundle of ownership. Just give us temporary use of someone else’s good or service. We seek micro-ownership in exchange for micropayments. This is the world of twigs, not sticks.

failed hole providers: Sarah Kessler, “The ‘Sharing Economy’ Is Dead, and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015. “A startling number of young”: Janelle Nanos, “The End of Ownership: America’s New Sharing Economy,” Boston Magazine, April 30, 2013. “Nowadays we don’t”: Brian X. Chen, “We’re Living in a Subscriptions World. Here’s How to Navigate It,” New York Times, January 15, 2020. “Many of us are starting to rethink”: Nanos, “End of Ownership.” “Who remembers the sound”: Brooke Masters, “Winners and Losers in the Sharing Economy,” Financial Times, December 28, 2017. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Michael Heller is the Lawrence A.

There is something appealing to this idyllic vision, but it also misses a larger point. The sharing economy isn’t really about sharing; nor is it about the end of ownership. It’s about advances in ownership technology that transform who we are as citizens and consumers—just like catch shares and FastPass+, oil unitization and dynasty trusts have changed the landscape of ownership. Going forward, the intersection of micro-ownership and smartphones may upend life as thoroughly as ownership attachment and barbed wire remodeled the Great Plains. There will be surprising costs in the shift from owning things to streaming life. For starters, the sharing economy may turn out to encourage not Zen simplicity but even more conspicuous consumption.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

With Airbnb, runners will have more choices for more convenient places to stay than ever before, and many people in Boston will have some extra income. Airbnb is one of the leaders in what’s known as the “sharing economy.” That’s one of the most popular business buzzwords of 2015. A Google search of that phrase yields more than 30 million hits. According to Google trends, there weren’t any news headlines with “sharing economy” in them before February 2010. There were a hundred in November 2015, more than twice as many as in September 2014. What’s novel and what isn’t here though? Airbnb and other companies that are part of the “sharing economy” are multisided platforms. What they have in common is that they are matching up people who have spare capacity—an extra room, a car, or a lawnmower, for example—with people who would benefit from that spare capacity.

Our five messages might sound contradictory, but they aren’t. Trust us. 1. Matchmakers have been around for millennia. Some of them were even part of the sharing economy of years past. 2. A lot of what the new market darlings do is old stuff. They just use technology to improve on things that other matchmakers have done for many years. 3. What is pioneering is that modern information and communications technologies have turbocharged the multisided platform business model. 4. The history of matchmakers suggests that today’s sharing-economy matchmakers won’t be the last to make waves. 5. Turbocharged matchmakers will transform industries. That will happen gradually over the space of decades, but in fast spurts, as innovative new matchmakers rapidly emerge and displace incumbents.

That’s why turbocharged matchmakers are behind the gales of creative destruction that are transforming industries worldwide. The End of History (?) Could this, then, be the golden age of matchmakers? It is remarkable that in the space of only about five years, companies like Airbnb and Uber have become global players in lodging and transportation. Similar sharing-economy matchmakers are popping up all over. With the turbocharged sharing economy, have matchmakers achieved their final destiny? Several millennia of experience strongly suggest otherwise. We expect that better, or at least different, matchmakers will come along and have their turn at disruption. With all due respect to the brilliant entrepreneurs behind today’s unicorns and yesterday’s huge IPOs, the telegraph was a far more important multisided platform in terms of its impact on the global economy than anything the Internet has yet spawned.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 30. Interview with David Ticoll, August 7, 2015. 31. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 32. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&. 33. Sarah Kessler, “The Sharing Economy Is Dead and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it#1. 34. “Prosumers” is a term invented by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1980). In The Digital Economy (1994) Don Tapscott developed the concept and notion of “prosumption.” 35.

An open world where everyone can contribute to our technology infrastructure, rather than a world of walled gardens where big companies offer proprietary apps. A world where billions of excluded people can now participate in the global economy and share in its largesse. Here’s a preview. Creating a True Peer-to-Peer Sharing Economy Pundits often refer to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and others as platforms for the “sharing economy.” It’s a nice notion—that peers create and share in value. But these businesses have little to do with sharing. In fact, they are successful precisely because they do not share—they aggregate. It is an aggregating economy. Uber is a $65 billion corporation that aggregates driving services.

He said, “People still have to want to do it, to take the risk of doing it.”31 So get ready for blockchain Airbnb, blockchain Uber, blockchain Lyft, blockchain Task Rabbit, and blockchain everything wherever there is an opportunity for real sharing and for value creation to work together in a cooperative way and receive most of the value they create. 4. The Metering Economy Perhaps blockchain technology can take us beyond the sharing economy into a metering economy where we can rent out and meter the use of our excess capacity. One problem with the actual sharing economy, where, for example, home owners agree to share power tools or small farming equipment, fishing gear, a woodworking shop, garage or parking, and more, was that it was just too much of a hassle. “There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote in The New York Times.


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The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Well-known examples of the sharing economy exist in the transportation sector. Zipcar provides one method for people to share use of a vehicle for shorter periods of time and more reasonably than traditional rental car companies. RelayRides provides a platform to locate and borrow someone’s personal vehicle for a period of time. Uber and Lyft provide much more efficient “taxi-like” services from individuals, but aggregated through a service, enabled by location services and accessed through mobile apps. In addition, they are available at a moment’s notice. The sharing economy has any number of ingredients, characteristics or descriptors: technology enabled, preference for access over ownership, peer to peer, sharing of personal assets (versus corporate assets), ease of access, increased social interaction, collaborative consumption and openly shared user feedback (resulting in increased trust).

A Supercomputer in Your Pocket 7. Storage for All 8. The Internet of and for Things 9. The Connected Home 10. Smart Cities 11. Big Data for Decisions 12. Driverless Cars 13. Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making 14. AI and White-Collar Jobs 15. Robotics and Services 16. Bitcoin and the Blockchain 17. The Sharing Economy 18. Governments and the Blockchain 19. 3D Printing and Manufacturing 20. 3D Printing and Human Health 21. 3D Printing and Consumer Products 22. Designer Beings 23. Neurotechnologies Notes Introduction Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and shape the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind.

Some countries or institutions are already investigating the blockchain’s potential. The government of Honduras, for example, is using the technology to handle land titles while the Isle of Man is testing its use in company registration. On a broader scale, technology-enabled platforms make possible what is now called the on-demand economy (referred to by some as the sharing economy). These platforms, which are easy to use on a smart phone, convene people, assets and data, creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services. They lower barriers for businesses and individuals to create wealth, altering personal and professional environments. The Uber model epitomizes the disruptive power of these technology platforms.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

Baidu has also announced a driverless bus for the year 2018. This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 32 THE SHARING ECONOMY TREND From a financial perspective, the cars of private users and also of many commercial users can be described as underused assets. As already explained, most privately owned cars are not even used for an hour each day. Another point is that there is only one person in most cars on many journeys, which means that the standard capacity of five seats is also underused. This is where the sharing economy comes into play as a hybrid market model in between owning and gift giving. Sharing offers the possibility to make better use of underused assets (cars) by making them accessible to a community, which in turn leads to a reduced need for ownership of those assets [132, 90, 79].

Norms and Standards 241 25. Ethics and Morals 249 PART 7 IMPACT ON VEHICLES 26. The Vehicle as an Ecosystem 261 27. Vehicle Design 265 28. Human Machine Interaction 277 29. Time, Cost and Safety 295 PART 8 IMPACT ON COMPANIES 30. Business Models 311 31. Value Chains 327 32. The Sharing Economy 341 33. The Insurance Industry 353 Contents viii PART 9 IMPACT ON SOCIETY 34. Work and Welfare 363 35. Competitiveness 367 36. Emerging Societies 377 37. Urban Development 381 PART 10 WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE? 38. Agenda for the Auto Industry 395 39. Ten-Point Plan for Governments 401 Epilogue: Brave New World 409 Bibliography 413 Index 427 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book could never have been written without the inspiring and instructive discussions we had with some special people.

Nonetheless, this generation doesn’t want to forego pleasure, so those who cannot afford, or want, to buy everything tend to swap products instead. In view of the useful lives of objects, the changed mindset initiated by Generation Y seems to make sense [4]. For example, a power drill is typically used for only 11 minutes a year, and lawn mowers are used only for a few hours every summer in many parts of the world. In a sharing economy, payment is still made using money or at least digital money but mutual trust may well turn out to be a kind of new currency. As previously explained, companies or persons could operate entire fleets of self-driving cars, primarily in urban areas. Customers would order such a car via an app, use it for a certain journey and pay a price related to the distance covered or time taken, or an agreed flat rate.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Patents themselves should not be seen as ‘rights' (IPR), but rather as a tool with which to incentivize innovation in the sectors where they are relevant - but in such a way that the public sector also gets its return; drug prices could become ‘fairer', reflecting the collective contribution of different actors and making a healthcare system sustainable. The sharing economy would not be based on the ability of a few companies to use public infrastructure for free and the dynamics of network economies to monopolize a market. A true sharing economy must by definition respect the hard-won gains of all workers, irrespective of race, gender or ability. The eight-hour day, the weekend and holiday and sick pay fought for by workers' movements and trade unions were no less important economic innovations than antibiotics, the microchip and the Internet.

Common attribution is to Andrew Lewis, as blue_beetle on MetaFilter 2010, ‘If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold': http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046 65. M. J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (London and New York: Allen Lane and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 66. Evgeny Morozov, ‘Don't believe the hype, the “sharing economy” masks a failing economy', the Guardian, 28 September 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/28/sharing-economy-internet-hype-benefits-overstated-evgeny-morozov; Evgeny Morozov, ‘Cheap cab ride? You must have missed Uber's true cost', the Guardian, 31 January 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/cheap-cab- ride-uber-true-cost-google-wealth-taxation 67.

., ‘Learning the meaning of a dollar: Conservation principles and the social theory of value in economic theory', Social Research 57(3) (1990), pp. 689-718. Mishan, E. J., The Costs of Economic Growth (New York: Praeger, 1967). Morozov, E., ‘Don't believe the hype, the “sharing economy” masks a failing economy', the Guardian, 28 September 2014: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/28/sharing- economy-internet-hype-benefits-overstated-evgeny-morozov Morozov, E., ‘Silicon Valley likes to promise “digital socialism” - but it is selling a fairy tale', the Guardian, 28 February 2015. Morozov, E., ‘Where Uber and Amazon rule: Welcome to the world of the platform', the Guardian, 6 June 2015.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

In short, this publication is something of a harbinger of anti-market opinion. And given its popularity, it seems to speak for a sector of opinion that is intractably opposed to all forms of market action. So what does this publication say about the sharing economy? “Uber is part of a new wave of corporations that make up what’s called the ‘sharing economy,’” writes Avi Asher-Schapiro in the strangely titled article “Against Sharing.” “The premise is seductive in its simplicity: people have skills, and customers want services. Silicon Valley plays matchmaker, churning out apps that pair workers with work.

But he does introduce one very interesting argument. “At its core,” he writes, “the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers.” Here is a remarkable claim. At last, a socialist has found a reason for a corporation to exist: to bear the speculative risk of investing in an uncertain future. Why any corporation would exist at all if it could not also gain some reward and therefore survive economically is the great unanswered question. All businesses form for a reason; it is not to bear all risk and then die. It’s true that under the sharing economy, workers own the enterprise themselves. Rather than depending on the “the man” to decide wages independent of productivity, the workers make money as a direct result of the services they provide. 13 So yes, of course, with worker ownership comes the bearing of risk.

Today, the same and better knowledge is being democratized with such services as Kensho, which is bringing quant-style power to every investor and institution, essentially running a Google-style search feature for investments, giving the information it gets based on real-time experience. These are the technologies of the peer-to-peer or sharing economy. You can be a producer, a consumer, or both. It’s a different model—one characterized by the word “equipotency,” 6 meaning that the power to buy and sell is widely distributed throughout the population. It’s made possible through technology. The emergence of the app economy—an emergent order not created by government or legislation—has enabled these developments, and they are changing the world.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s email around with this comment appended: “:)”19 Amazon, meanwhile, is famous for devising ways to goad its executives into fighting with one another—engaging in what the New York Times calls an “experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers”—while its blue-collar workers, often recruited through local temp agencies, are electronically tracked so that their efficiency is maximized as they go about assembling items in the company’s enormous fulfillment centers.20 For the rest of us, Amazon has come up with a nifty device for casual employment called “the Mechanical Turk,” in which tasks that can’t be done by computers are tossed to the reserve army of the millions, who receive pennies for their trouble. This last is a good introduction to the so-called sharing economy—“sharing” because you’re using your own car or apartment or computer, not your employer’s—which has been one of the few robustly growing employment opportunities of the Obama years. The magic derives from the way just about anyone can sign up at one of these sharing companies and work as a sort of temp, only hooked up with the client and employer via software, which makes it all digital and innovative and convenient. In nearly every other way, however, the sharing economy is one of the most lopsided, antiworker employment schemes to come down the pike in many years.

On the increasingly fraught matter of the sharing economy—the battle of Silicon Valley and Uber versus the workers of the world—Hillary actually tried to have it both ways in the same speech in July 2015. She first said she approved of how these new developments were “unleashing innovation,” but also allowed that she worried about the “hard questions” they raised. That was tepid, but it was not tepid enough. Republicans pounced; they harbored no reservations at all about innovation, they said. Hillary’s chief technology officer was forced to double down on her employer’s wishy-wash: “Sharing economy firms are disrupting traditional industries for the better across the globe,” she wrote, but workers still needed to be protected.

Schmidt) Humphrey, Hubert Iacocca, Lee Illich, Ivan India Indiana IndyMac Bank inequality acceleration of Bill Clinton and Decatur and Democrats and education and Hillary Clinton and innovation and Massachusetts and Obama and professional class and Rhode Island and sharing economy and technocracy and infrastructure innovation Massachusetts and rules circumvented by Intel International Math Olympiad International Women’s Day International Year of Microcredit Internet. See also Silicon Valley; technocracy In the Shadow of FDR (Leuchtenburg) investment banks Iran Iraq War Isaacson, Walter It Takes a Village (H. Clinton) Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Robert Jefferson, Thomas Jobs, Steve jobs. See also unemployment NAFTA and sharing economy and training and Johnson, Dirk Jones, Jesse Jordan, Vernon JPMorgan Judis, John Justice Department Kahn, Alfred Kalanick, Travis Kamarck, Elaine Kennedy, Robert F.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

As with the Web, Andreessen says, the more people who use the new currency, “the more valuable Bitcoin is for the people who use it.”107 “A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers,” writes Andreessen, predicting the historical significance of this networked currency. “What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and—I believe—Bitcoin in 2014.”108 What Silicon Valley euphemistically calls the “sharing economy” is a preview of this distributed capitalism system powered by the network effect of positive feedback loops. Investors like Andreessen see the Internet—a supposedly hyperefficient, “frictionless” platform for buyers and sellers—as an upgrade to the structural inefficiencies of the top-down twentieth-century economy.

Not merely content to give their own stuff away for nothing, Napster gave away everybody else’s as well. Along with other peer-to-peer networks like Travis Kalanick’s Scour and later pirate businesses such as Megaupload, Rapidshare, and Pirate Bay, Napster created a networked kleptocracy, masquerading as the “sharing economy,” in which the only real abundance was the ubiquitous availability of online stolen content, particularly recorded music. Over the last fifteen years, online piracy has become an epidemic. In a 2011 report sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it was estimated that piracy sites attracted 53 billion visits each year.6 In January 2013 alone, the analyst firm NetNames estimated that 432 million unique Web users actively searched for content that infringes copyright.7 A 2010 Nielsen report estimated that 25% of all European Internet users visit pirate sites each month,8 while a 2012 study funded by the United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office found that 1 in 6 of all British Web users regularly accessed illegally streamed or downloaded content.9 Such “abundance” has had a particularly catastrophic economic impact on the music industry.

As Robert Levine, Billboard’s former executive editor and author of the meticulously researched 2011 book Free Ride, argues, “The real conflict online is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content—legally or otherwise.”21 And it’s this struggle between an entertainment industry that, to survive, needs to be paid for its expensive content and an Internet built around the utopian idea that “information wants to be free,” Levine argues, that is “breaking” the Internet.22 Many of today’s multibillion-dollar Internet companies are complicit in the piracy epidemic. “Free” social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, for example, have spurred the growth of the distribution of unlicensed content. What is left of the photography industry is particularly vulnerable to this kind of “sharing” economy. Because much of the content on these social networks isn’t accessible to the general public and instead is shared only between individuals, photographers find it nearly impossible to stop this form of unlicensed content use or even to accurately measure the extent of the illegal activity. As the American Society of Media Photographers notes, this problem has been compounded because networks like Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook make very little effort to warn their members against the illegal sharing of images.23 Then there’s the Google problem.


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The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Millions of individuals are constructing the knowledge of the world and sharing it on Wikipedia, a nonprofit website that is the fifth-most-trafficked website, all for free.2 The sharing of a range of virtual and physical goods is the cornerstone of an emerging circular economy, allowing the human race to use far less of the resources of the Earth while passing on what they no longer use to others and, by doing so, dramatically reducing carbon emissions. The Sharing Economy is a core feature of the Green New Deal era. The Sharing Economy is now in its infancy and is going to evolve in many directions. But this much is assured: The Sharing Economy is a new economic phenomenon made possible by the digital infrastructure of communication, energy, and mobility that is changing economic life. To this extent, the Sharing Economy is the first new economic system to enter onto the world stage since capitalism and socialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In provider/user networks, industries and sectors are replaced by “specialized competencies” that come together on platforms to manage the uninterrupted flow of goods and services in smart networks, returning sufficient profit, even at low margins, by the 24/7 continuous traffic across the system. Margins for some goods and services, however, shrink so low “toward zero” that profits are no longer viable even in capitalist networks because the goods and services produced and distributed are nearly free. This is already occurring and giving rise to a new phenomenon—the Sharing Economy. At any given time of the day, hundreds of millions of people around the world are producing and sharing their own music, YouTube videos, social media, and research. Some are taking massive open online courses (MOOCs), taught by professors at the best universities, and often receiving college credit, for free.

The goal is to work with a full range of transportation partners to develop seamless mobility services that can partner Ford’s autonomous self-driving electric vehicles with public transportation, bike-sharing and scooter-sharing services, and pedestrian walkways to ferry passengers and goods effortlessly, passing them off between the various modes of transportation to final destinations, with the objective of reducing congestion and carbon emissions.8 I joined Mark Fields, then CEO of Ford, in January 2017 on the opening day of the North American Auto Show in Detroit to introduce the new business model. Ford went on to sponsor the premiere of the film that our office coproduced with Vice Media, The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy, at the Tribeca Film Festival and sponsored subsequent premieres of the film in Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The erection of the autonomous Mobility and Logistics Internet transforms the very way we view passenger mobility. Today’s youth are using mobile communication technology and GPS guidance on an incipient Mobility and Logistics Internet to connect with willing drivers in car-sharing services.


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The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Although important in their own right, these are all examples of a much broader and deeper cultural shift away from ownership. We see evidence of this transformation in the emergence of the so-called “sharing economy.” For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers broadly to services and business models that enable individuals and organizations to share, rent, and reuse resources, often enabled by technology. If you’ve ever gotten a ride in an Uber or spent the night in an Airbnb rental, you’ve taken part in the sharing economy. The range of goods and services in the sharing economy is staggering. In addition to rides and apartments, there are platforms for renting parking spots, bicycles, private planes, and clothes.

But we need to be fully aware of the bargains we are striking. There are losers in the sharing economy, and they aren’t just legacy taxi companies and expensive hotels. The savings Airbnb users realize and the company’s profits are in part the result of externalities—costs that Airbnb and its users aren’t bearing. In cities big and small, there is evidence that Airbnb contributes to rent increases for residents.2 As more housing units are devoted to the sharing economy, fewer are available for locals to rent. Long-term renters have even been evicted to make room for vacationers.3 The unseen costs of the sharing economy are also borne by the increasing number of workers classified as independent contractors.

But many of the services lumped together under the “sharing economy” moniker are premised on short-term, for-profit rentals. Most are built around the exchange of money for temporary access. Some services rely on a distributed network of individual owners connecting to end users through a technology platform. Others depend on a single provider that coordinates the needs of lots of users. The rapid growth of some of these efforts has attracted lots of attention. But we rented cars, stayed in hotels, and endured rented bowling shoes long before the first iPhone app. So what is it—if anything—that makes the sharing economy “disruptive”?


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

We expect that corporations will become more willing and adept at spotting talented independent producers, and creating a personalized relationship with them that could range from full-time employment, to part-time work, right up to buying their IP or the business itself. Travelling light The major investment of the explorer and independent producer stage is in intangible assets – particularly transformational assets. So during these periods, financing is always going to be tricky. That is why developments in the technologies of the sharing economy are so interesting.19 The sharing economy is a great way of enabling people to remain asset-light or to bring income in to finance their asset accumulation. Sharing platforms such as Airbnb, Simplest, Lyft or even Dogvacay are all examples of an emerging economy where people share capacity of assets that they may have purchased or created.

As our discussion about leisure and the working week showed, governments will need to allow for a significant range of lifestyle and work-style choices, and simple characterizations of full-time and part-time will make little sense. This is already apparent in what has been called the ‘sharing economy’. The growth of sharing businesses, such as Uber and Airbnb, has already brought to the fore complex questions such as ‘What is an employee?’ and ‘Who is responsible for benefits such as healthcare and pensions?’ In the past, trade unions have spoken for the collective rights of their members. The profiles of these unions are only just emerging in the sharing economy and we can expect more battles as the rights of these flexible workers are contested in the courts. Our discussion of transitions and partnerships is also challenging for governments.

In thinking of possible lives for Jane’s 100 years, the flexibility that the ecosystem model offers makes the prospect of self-employment at certain stages a viable option. The technology that connects an individual to companies who want to buy their skills is becoming more global, cheaper and more sophisticated. These connecting platforms are already proliferating, leading to growing commentary about the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘sharing economy’. Technological change reduces information costs and so enables buyers and sellers to find each other more easily as well as determine the reliability and quality of each other from independent sources. The gig economy refers to the idea that there will be a rising number of people earning their income not through full- or part-time employment, but rather through providing a series of specific tasks and commissions to multiple sequential buyers.


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Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

“We had to straighten out this congressman here who said something real positive about the sharing economy,” he told me at one point in our conversation. “We said, ‘What the fuck? Don’t you understand what it is?’” “What did you tell him?” I asked. “We said, ‘This isn’t any sharing economy—this is taking the responsibility of employment away from employers and putting it one hundred percent on people’s backs.’” Rome’s diagnosis was so simple and succinct, even a member of Congress could understand it. Of course, such hypocrisies are not confined to the phony “sharing economy.” They span the industry. Similarly, sympathy for the tech company perspective spans American political institutions, beginning with both major parties.

“They are all at university or living their lives or having new relationships and I feel thoroughly forgotten about.” While traditional social institutions left such underemployed, undereducated young people behind, the postwork sharing economy came to the rescue by affording them the opportunity to serve as virtual strippers. Who says the tech industry doesn’t make room for women? * * * The sharing economy’s greatest success story was a YouTube celebrity for whom work and play and reality and artifice had merged beyond all recognition. There were many dubious aspects of his rise to stardom, not the least of which was his politics, beginning with the name he chose for himself: PewDiePie.

They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software. The programmers also knew that the fastest way to win that promotion to founder was to find some new domain that hadn’t yet been automated. Every tech industry campaign designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing—at that time, it was the “sharing economy”—concealed a larger program for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favored the investor and executive classes. In the first seven years after the 2008 crash, sixteen million people left the U.S. labor force. And in that same period, thanks to Silicon Valley’s timely opportunism, the country gained an endless bounty of gigs.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In a two-sided market, network effects created by the impact of users from one side of the market on other users from the same side of the market—for example, the effects that consumers have on other consumers and the effects that producers have on other producers. Same-side effects can be positive or negative, depending on the design of the system and the rules put in place. Sharing economy. The growing sector of the economy in which products, services, and resources are shared among people and organizations rather than having their availability limited to one proprietor. Often facilitated by platform businesses, sharing economy systems have the potential to unlock hidden or untapped sources of value and to reduce waste. Side switching. The phenomenon of platform users from one side of the platform joining the opposite side—for example, when those who consume goods or services produced on the platform begin to produce goods and services for others to consume.

Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti, “Entry into Platform-Based Markets,” Strategic Management Journal 33, no. 1 (2012): 88–106. 9. Jason Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” Wired, April 23, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/. 10. Arun Sundararajan, “From Zipcar to the Sharing Economy,” Harvard Business Review, January 3, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/01/from-zipcar-to-the-sharing-eco/. 11. Dan Charles, “In Search of a Drought Strategy, California Looks Down Under,” The Salt, NPR, August 19, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/19/432885101/in-search-of-salvation-from-drought-california-looks-down-under. 12.

Kevin Boudreau and Andrei Hagiu, Platform Rules: Multi-Sided Platforms as Regulators (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009), 163–89. 2. Malhotra and Van Alstyne, “The Dark Side of the Sharing Economy.” 3. Felix Gillette and Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Airbnb’s Battle for New York,” Businessweek, June 19, 2014, http://www.bloomberg .com/bw/articles/2014-06-19/airbnb-in-new-york-sharing-startup-fights-for-largest-market. 4. Ron Lieber, “A Liability Risk for Airbnb Hosts,” New York Times, December 6, 2014. 5. Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” Boston University School of Management Research Paper 2013-16, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2366898. 6.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Krugman, “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong.” 10. Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” 11. Galloway, The Four. 12. Bradshaw, “Google Chief Touts Utopian Ambitions.” 13. Cited in Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy, 7. 14. Bowles, “Clooneys to Attend a VIP Fundraiser for Clinton—and Sanders Fans Are Outraged.” 15. Weiss, The American Myth of Success, 9. 16. For a good critique of platforms, see Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. 17. Sundararajan, Sharing Economy, 124. 18. Moazed and Johnson, Modern Monopolies, 62. 19. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 106. 20. Anderson, “The End of Theory.” 21. Harris, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” 22.

These networks of empowered individuals are creating something from nothing—new consumption experiences, new economic activity. We are growing the pie, making new space for individuals who were left out in neoliberalism. As Arun Sundararajan, New York University professor and the author of The Sharing Economy, enthuses: [Thomas] Piketty’s “renters” can begin to experience the other side of the coin by making money through investing or owning rather than laboring. . . . People once relegated to laboring for others are assuming new roles and occupying new locations in the established economic equation, transcending from being people who receive wages to people who own capital.17 This vision jettisons the false promises of neoliberalism in favor of a new promise: in the digital world being created by Silicon Valley individuals can be their own boss, making capitalism work for them, without relying on the government for a handout or a big corporation for sustenance.

JC, “Ridester’s 2018 Independent Driver Earnings Survey,” Ridester, March 29, 2019, www.ridester.com/2018-survey. 53. For a discussion, see Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things. 54. Friedman, The World Is Flat. 55. Waddell, “Why Bosses Can Track Their Employees 24/7.” 56. Levin, “Sexual Harassment and the Sharing Economy.” 57. See Laufer, “Social Accountability and Corporate Greenwashing.” 58. Amazon.com, “2017 Amazon Holiday Commercial,” video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OITWgx8K6Ko. 59. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. Chapter 2: New Titans 1. General Service Studios, “A Trip Through the River Rouge Plant,” film, n.d., https://archive.org/details/TripThroughTheRiverRougePlant. 2.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

It’s as if startups are out there writing algorithms to combat inefficiency and idleness by making sure that everything everyone owns is in use all the time. The platform collects its fee for putting user and provider, rider and driver, or guest and host together and enabling a new transaction where once there was none. Our assets are their new territory. Welcome to the sharing economy. Just as Lanier would have us share our data, these new companies would have us share our homes, cars, and anything else. Only it’s not really sharing; it’s selling. In fact, just as there used to be an Internet that ran entirely on “shareware,” there were originally free versions of these new asset-renting platforms.

That’s why the final indignity will be on the Uber drivers themselves, when they are replaced with the automatic cars currently in development by Uber investor Google. The app will orchestrate the movements of robot vehicles even more seamlessly than those driven by humans, and Uber’s shareholders should do just as well—even better—in this more automated future. To them, the sharing economy is less a cultural ethos than part of a strategic transition toward more fully automated solutions. Peer-to-peer is not a means of including more people as value creators but a prelude to getting rid of them—first the skilled, fairly paid ones, and then the unskilled ones who took their places.

The investors at this stage make a similar calculation, spreading their tens or hundreds of millions of dollars across a wide range of startups. They may hope to limit their downside by developing a “thesis” about the kinds of companies they think will succeed, such as “social smartphone apps,” “gamified sharing economy,” or “health, medical, and fitness entertainment.” But in the end, venture capitalists invest with low expectations of any single company surviving. Their business model is still based on the rare big winner offsetting a dozen or more losers. If they invest $10 million in a company at a valuation of $50 million, then they need that company to become worth half a billion dollars in order to see a $100 million return.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism. What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing. • • • In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Perry Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, “dot-communism.” He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.

He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right about the virtual money since the content that Twitter and Facebook distribute is created by unpaid contributors—that is, users like you. And Barlow was right about the lack of ownership, as explained in the previous chapter. We see sharing economy services such as Netflix and Spotify move audiences away from owning anything. But there is one way in which “socialism” is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.

We can head out in the wilds of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google with pretty good confidence that we will uncover someone who has anticipated our most remote interests with a finished work or forum. Each niche is just one step away from a bestselling niche. Today the audience is king. But what about the creators? Who will pay them in this sharing economy? How will their creative acts be financed if the middle is gone? The surprising answer is: another new sharing technology. No method has been as beneficial to creators as crowdfunding. In crowdfunding the audience funds the work. The fans collectively finance their favorites. The technology of sharing enables the power of one fan who is willing to prepay an artist or author to be aggregated (with little effort) together with hundreds of other fans into a significant pool of money.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Basecamp, a multi-million dollar project management software company, was started by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, while living in different countries and while also running a web development consultancy. But it’s not just tech companies. Rent to Own: The Sharing Economy Over the last decade, a more publicly available internet has enabled the “Sharing Economy,” which has democratized the tools of production. Technology and the internet have brought trust and transparency to markets, which lets people share existing resources and repurpose them into higher and better uses to take them from a lower to a higher area of productivity. The sharing economy has made manufacturing more efficient—you can create increased inventory without immediately needing more supply.

Let’s use the hotel industry as an example. In the past, if there weren’t enough rooms in a city for visitors, Hilton went and built a new hotel. They would pay millions of dollars for a piece of land downtown, millions of dollars to construct a hotel, and then millions of dollars to hire staff to run it. The sharing economy version of that is a company called AirBnB, which allows homeowners to post their rooms online so people coming to visit can stay in them. It’s often less expensive than a hotel and many people like getting to know a city as a resident instead of as a tourist. Let’s say Julian has a house that he owns in Dallas, Texas.

The cost of the tools needed to invest in entrepreneurship has dropped dramatically because the infrastructure has gotten so much more efficient. Let’s look at a few of the primary tools and how entrepreneurs are using them. Software as a Service (SaaS): Plug and Play Tools and Systems Software as a service has arisen primarily in the last decade and facilitates a large part of the sharing economy. Instead of having to buy expensive equipment or sign long-term contracts, entrepreneurs can buy month-to-month access to different services that they need. Previously, a new company would have had to buy accounting software that would cost hundreds of dollars. Now, instead of buying expensive accounting software, you can use a month-to-month service like Xero, which starts at $9 a month.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Brent Leary, “Amir Elaguizy of Cratejoy: Good Subscription Business Models Focus on Relationships Not Transactions,” Small Business Trends, August 14, 2015, http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/08/elaguizy-cratejoy-subscription-business-models.html. Principle 7, Employees 1. Travis Kalanick, “The Charms of the Sharing Economy,” Economist, The World in 2016 (single issue), November 6, 2015, http://www.theworldin.com/article/10631/charms-sharing-economy. 2. Ernst & Young, Study: Work-Life Challenges across Generations, http://www.ey.com/US/en/About-us/Our-people-and-culture/EY-work-life-challenges-across-generations-global-study. 3. Rena Rasch, “Your Best Workers May Not Be Your Employees,” IBM Smarter Workforce Institute, October 2014, http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?

—PHIL COWDELL, CEO, MediaCom North America “Get ready for a future in which everyone and everything are digitally connected, marginal costs approach zero, and openness to the ideas and assets that exist around the organization matter more than sheer scale. The successful firms of the future will embrace the principles for creating network value found in this prescient book.” —GEORGE DAY, Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Emeritus, the Wharton School “In the new world of crowd sourcing, the sharing economy, and the internet of everything, there is no question that every business is being transformed by a networked world. In The Network Imperative, Libert, Beck, and Wind break down this twenty-first century phenomenon and offer an actionable and effective approach for any business to not only ward off disintermediation, but also to set a path for long-term success.”

PRINCIPLE 7 EMPLOYEES From Employees to Partners Employment in society has overstretched itself. —Charles Handy, author and philosopher WHEN UBER PASSED THE MILLION-DRIVER MARK (that’s right—one million drivers) in late 2015, CEO Travis Kalanick wrote in the Economist, “I realised that sharing-economy companies really are pointing the way to a more promising future, where we have more power over when, where and how long to work. It’s a shift that has the potential to give people more flexibility, more freedom and more control over their lives, their jobs and their incomes.”1 One might think that this quotation is self-serving, given that Uber’s digital network business model is based on a network of freelance drivers.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Scholz, T. (2017b) Platform cooperativism vs. the sharing economy. In N. Douay and A. Wan (eds.), Big Data & Civic Engagement. Rome: Planum Publisher. Scott, W.R. (2001) Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Semuels, A. (2018) The Internet is enabling a new kind of poorly paid hell. The Atlantic, 23 January, Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/ Silver, B.J. (2003) Forces of Labor, Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slee, T. (2015) What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. London: OR Books.

As Sarah Kessler (2018: x) recounts in a story from a startup founder, the gig economy had a promise that ‘we could work for our neighbours, connect with as many projects as we needed to get by, and fit those gigs between band rehearsals, gardening, and other passion promises.’ At this point, some commentators began talking about the ‘sharing economy’ (Sundararajan, 2017), a term that sounds very optimistic in light of the evidence that followed. Although there have been changes in the gig economy, it still involves work. At its core, paid work involves a relationship in which one person sells their time to another. This entails transferring the ownership of labour power (the capacity to work) from the worker to the owner of capital (the owner of the things needed to produce work).

Pollert, A. and Charlwood, A. (2009) The vulnerable worker in Britain and problems at work. Work, Employment and Society, 23(2): 343–62. Pollman, E. and Barry, J. (2016) Regulatory entrepreneurship. Southern California Law Review, 90: 383–442. Ravenelle, A. (2019) Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Raw, L. (2009) Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History. London: Continuum Books. Richey, L.A. and Ponte, S. (2011) Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roberts, S.T. (2016) Commercial content moderation: Digital laborers’ dirty work.


pages: 279 words: 76,796

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

These informal practices are not: Sudhanshu Handa and Claremont Kirton, “The Economics of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations: Evidence from the Jamaican ‘Partner,’” Journal of Development Economics, vol. 60, no. 1 (1999): 173–94; Sowmya Varadharajan, “Explaining Participation in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs): Evidence from Indonesia” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2004). 141 almost less than one in ten: PricewaterhouseCoopers, “The Sharing Economy,” Consumer Intelligence Series, pwc.com/CISsharing, April 2015. the sharing economy: Havas Worldwide, “The New Consumer and the Sharing Economy,” Prosumer Report (New York: Havas, 2014). 8. INSIDE THE INNOVATORS 143 This moment is notable: Brett King, Breaking Banks: The Innovators, Rogues, and Strategists Rebooting Banking (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), p. xv.

Jack works at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; he also participates in a ROSCA through his job. “We’re not supposed to do them, but we do. There’s a group checking account we set up with the Federal Credit Union. They pull a hundred dollars from my paycheck, and I get paid bimonthly, so that’s two hundred per month.” Indeed, research shows that the “sharing economy” is on the rise. This economy values shared resources and collaboration over accumulation and ownership, and it operates as a system of providers and users, although people often act in both roles. Providers offer goods and services to be shared, and users rent, pay for, or barter for what’s being offered.

Best known for services like Zipcar, Lyft, and Airbnb, it extends to crowdfunding as well as the sharing of equipment and media. Advances in technology—mobile apps and web platforms—allow individuals to connect and then facilitate services and transactions. While almost less than one in ten adults has participated in the sharing economy as providers, consumers under age thirty-five make up 38 percent of the total. Half of millennials belong to or expect to join a sharing service within the next year. Policymakers and most mainstream and alternative financial-services providers have failed to look closely at the informal component of the consumer financial-services system.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Discrimination may feed into users’ feedback, which would, perhaps less directly, lead to discrimination. Although we know of no research on the topic, the concern has seen much attention in the media. See, for example, “The Sharing Economy Is Not as Open as You Might Think,” The Guardian, November 12, 2014. A post titled “Can the Sharing Economy End Discrimination?” on the website of tech magazine Wired took the opposite view, albeit without providing any evidence in support of the argument. For a broader critique of the sharing economy, see Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine (London: OR Books, 2015). 12. Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536.

There need not be only two sides: Google’s Android is a meeting point for makers of smart phones like LG and Samsung, app designers, and consumers. The business networking service LinkedIn similarly brings together corporate recruiters, job hunters or employees, and advertisers. The list goes on, including some of the recent “sharing economy” companies that have gotten so much attention: Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Postmates, and many other online marketplaces. The market maker faces a delicate balancing act in satisfying the needs and wants of each side. And indeed a platform isn’t much good unless all sides agree to participate. Just as no one would visit a supermarket that stocked only a limited supply of cornflakes, eBay wouldn’t get many visitors if the only items for bid were a couple of old Pez dispensers.

If friction—informational, transactional, contractual—is all that stands between textbook economic models and the functioning of our real economy, then there is a vocal contingent out there (“there” being mostly Silicon Valley) that sees technology as the solution. When viewed through the lens of market frictions, the much-hyped notion of the sharing economy can be seen as an effort to bring free-market salvation to bricks, mortars, and automobiles. If you’ve ever tried to hail a taxi in San Francisco or rent a room in Washington, DC, you know the frictions of which we speak. The Bay Area’s sprawl, combined with strict regulations on the cab and livery businesses, used to leave you at the mercy of the two thousand or so taxi medallion holders that covered San Francisco’s 230 square miles.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

We sell our time, we sell our labour, sometimes we have to sell our bodies, sometimes we have to get money in ways we would rather not. But we accept that there is a distinction between making money, however you do it – and being money. Part of the problem, as ever, is the language we use. Big Tech hasn’t created, isn’t interested in creating, a ‘sharing’ economy. That’s just marketing. We don’t live in a sharing economy. We live in the most unequal, socially divided work-and-reward economy the world has ever seen. We must impose democratic limits on the untrammelled and uncontrolled political power of the internet giants. We want the platforms to be transparent about how their algorithms work.

But maybe your friend is fired from the hotel because it loses business. Or wages are kept low because hotel-room rates must be kept low, because of competition from Airbnb. At the same time it gets harder to rent an affordable place to live. And those who live close by regularly let Airbnb ‘homes’. Do we love it? No, we hate it. The ‘sharing’ economy (sharing is not a financial transaction – do words mean nothing?) does not factor social consequences into its business model. The consequences for other people, for thriving cities where people can afford to live, the consequences of endless pointless travel, the toll on the planet, are irrelevant

Wear these glasses, see a face, and the face-owner’s details flash up on your phone – details scraped from social-media accounts. This is already possible via a database app called Clearview AI, which matches faces to personal details. Did you imagine you owned your face? Owning is so last century. This is a sharing economy. We share. Big Tech collects. As Tom Paine put it back in 1791: A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody. From Sci-Fi To Wi-Fi To My-Wi These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact wherever we may be. Where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location.


pages: 302 words: 87,776

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, experimental economics, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, impact investing, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, mobile money, PalmPilot, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, the payments system, Uber for X, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

SHARING IS FAIRING What about the phrase “the sharing economy”? Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit belong to “the sharing economy,” a phrase that frames these services in a positive way. Who doesn’t like to share and who doesn’t appreciate those who do? Who above the age of preschool doesn’t think of sharing as a wonderful human quality? No one, that’s who. The phrase “the sharing economy” conjures an image of the good side of humanity, and that causes most of us to value a service more. Certainly the language doesn’t draw attention to the negatives of the sharing economy. “Sharing” makes it all seem selfless, like we’re letting our little sister play with our Legos or donating a kidney to an orphan.

,” 205–6 honeymoon experience, 61–65, 69–71, 75 marriage proposal, 126 shopping for Optimum Slim cereal, 30 traveling with his family, 45, 55 unfulfilled friend’s party, 38 windfall hypothesis, 195 labor market in “sharing” economy, 160 Lambrecht, Anja, 33 Lanchester, John, 162 Langer, Ellen, 114 language, 149–66 overview, 154–55, 214–16, 220 adding value with rituals, 163–66, 179–80, 214–16, 220 choices based on descriptions vs. items, 153–56 consumption enhancement, 156–59, 163 double talk, 161–62 and expectations, 179–80 ignoring vs. immersing in, 149–52 language and fairness, 159–60 and restaurants, 150–55 sharing economy, 160–61 transformative ability of language, 162–63 Las Vegas, Nevada, 45–46 Levav, Jonathan, 50–51 listing price effect on Realtors’ estimates, 93–95, 98, 103 locksmith’s value, x, 133, 137, 140, 146 Loewenstein, George, 67, 77, 106–8, 191–92 loss aversion overview, 120–23 app for combating, 241 and employer’s retirement matching funds, 243 and investments, 123–25, 249 and Netflix new pricing scheme, 138, 138n overvaluing what we own, 219 and positive outcomes, 246–47 luxury items and resorts estate worth tens of millions, 119 prepaying vs. ala carte, 61–62, 69–70, 75–77, 228 relative price vs. real price, 29 malleable mental accounting, 53–54, 55 manipulation advertising copywriter skills, 119 new box and new price (same as old price), 30–31 pricing high to create excitement by lowering it, 104 self-manipulation, 221, 233 and transparency, 146–47, 220 winemakers and language manipulation, 151, 154–55, 162, 221 See also pricing Mansfield, Rob, 183–85, 190–91, 232 marshmallow test, 186 Martin, Jane, 41–43, 56 McGraw, Pete, 50–51 measurability, 24–25, 201, 204–5 Mencken, H.

“Sharing” makes it all seem selfless, like we’re letting our little sister play with our Legos or donating a kidney to an orphan. But that’s not always the case. In fact, critics claim that the rise of the sharing economy is the by-product of a labor market providing no full-time jobs, few benefits, and little security, that it rolls back worker protections and takes advantage of the “free-agent nation,” which itself is another term designed to help us feel better about underemployment. But we do all enjoy getting rides more easily, don’t we? Some companies have been accused of greenwashing, or making minor, cosmetic changes to their products so they can call themselves environmentally friendly.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

What I failed to appreciate back then was the much larger movement made possible by the Internet. Zipcar was a trailblazer. When you can connect and share assets, people, and ideas, everything changes, not just how you rent a car. Google, eBay, Facebook, OKCupid, YouTube, Waze, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Duolingo—all are part of this transformation of capitalism. Web 2.0, the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, collaborative production, collaborative consumption, and network effects are simply terms we’ve created along the way in an effort to capture what is going on. Attributing all this to “the Internet” misses the building blocks and therefore the ability to replicate this type of activity in a more controlled way.

Lots of us have heard about the tragedy of the commons: When people share a resource but don’t own it, everything goes to hell because they don’t care. As you know, this was not my experience with Zipcar, which proved to be a shock to investors and business pundits. And it was this reality that led to the founding of dozens of other successful sharing-economy companies. Ostrom identifies “common pool resources,” which have two characteristics: they produce a steady stream of benefits accruing from the resource, and it is very difficult to exclude individuals. You can see how this maps very closely to what is happening within the Peers Inc model. The platform for participation absolutely produces a steady stream of benefits, and the peers are free agents who opt in.

As more and more companies switch over to the Peers Inc structure, more and more people will become freelancers, working for themselves. What are the near-term and long-term implications for them? Andrew Leonard, a business and technology journalist writing for Salon and Wired, has raised a widespread concern about the sharing economy: “The services built on top of these [platform] technologies become especially lucrative when their creators figure out ways to avoid taxes or safety regulations or insurance costs that their old-economy, non-‘sharing’ competitors are stuck with.”9 Leonard’s assessment seems very straightforward, but it obscures the complexity that lies underneath.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Instead, they ended up hosting a forty-five-year-old father from Utah, a thirty-five-year-old woman from Boston, and a thirty-year-old Indian man. Brian and Joe realized this market might be bigger than they first thought. They soon launched Air Mattress Bed & Breakfast, later Airbnb. Airbnb is among the most successful of the shared-economy companies. Unlike many traditional businesses, shared-economy companies have no single base of customers. Rather, these companies provide two-sided markets that connect sellers (or people with something to share) with buyers (who are willing to pay for the product or service)—like the transportation-network company Lyft, which connects passengers who need a ride to drivers who have a car, and TaskRabbit, an errand-outsourcing company that connects people who need something done with “taskers” who will do the job.

When they combine these and other learning processes like experiments and trial and error, people and organizations gain a particularly potent way to improve their rules. MULTITASKING WAYS TO LEARN You’ve probably heard of Airbnb. You may have used the site to rent a vacation house or an apartment in another city. Maybe you even know that its founders are the first billionaires of the so-called shared economy. You may not, however, have given much thought to the learning processes that helped propel Air­bnb’s founders to fortune and fame. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky met while they were industrial-design students at Rhode Island School of Design. Although they talked about starting a company together, they went their separate ways after graduation.

Rather, these companies provide two-sided markets that connect sellers (or people with something to share) with buyers (who are willing to pay for the product or service)—like the transportation-network company Lyft, which connects passengers who need a ride to drivers who have a car, and TaskRabbit, an errand-outsourcing company that connects people who need something done with “taskers” who will do the job. For Airbnb, it’s connecting local residents with room to spare and travelers who need a place to stay. To grow, shared-economy companies have to keep both sides of the market—sellers and buyers—happy. And growing matters, because these companies face what are known as network effects—in other words, the positively reinforcing cycle in which more buyers attract more sellers and vice versa. Network effects can create exploding growth for the first company or two in a market sector, but they can also make success impossible for later and slower ones.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Some of this information is gleaned from the Car2Go website https://www.car2go.com/en/minneapolis/ April 3, 2015. 219 As quoted in Thomas Friedman's column: "just think how much better all this is for the environment — for people to be renting their spare bedrooms rather than building another Holiday Inn and another and another. ... The sharing economy — watch this space. This is powerful." See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0 220 Forecasts of the shared economy and local regulation, see: Rauch, Daniel E. and Schleicher, David (2015) Like Uber, But for Local Governmental Policy: The Future of Local Regulation of the "Sharing Economy" (January 14, 2015). George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 15-01. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2549919 221 National Multi-family Housing Coalition (2015-09) https://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?

We develop a framework to conceive of concepts related to transport and accessibility more broadly. In this framework, transport systems are being augmented with a range of information technologies. Fresh flows of goods and information provide a foundational aspect. We discuss large scale trends revolutionizing transport: dematerialization, electrification, automation, the sharing economy, and big data. The culminating chapters provide strategies to shape future debates about infrastructure. Even if transport is not your bailiwick, there is something interesting for you here. We aim for a quick read—and to encourage you to think outside your immediate realm. By the end of this book (this evening, if you so choose) you will appreciate the changing times in which you live.

The Future of Sharing: Cloud Commuting For communities where densities are relatively low, incomes high, and thus taxis scarce, the most reliable strategy for timely point-to-point transport is for people to maintain personal transport close at hand. Cars and bikes, which they own, are parked at their homes, workplaces, or other destinations. But with more widespread use of information technologies, ownership and possession are no longer necessary prerequisites for on-demand mobility. Widely called the 'sharing economy' or 'collaborative consumption,' its manifestations in transport: carsharing and ridesharing are viable if not widespread. Couple these technologies with autonomous vehicles discussed in the previous chapter, and one arrives at what we term 'cloud commuting' — the convergence of ridesharing, carsharing, and autonomous vehicles.211 More formally, this range of options can be termed Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Kiva, the world’s largest online platform for peer-to-peer microlending, has facilitated loans worth more than $630 million, mostly in the emerging world.51 Kickstarter, a crowd-funding platform that connects entrepreneurs to individuals interested in funding creative projects, has facilitated pledges of more than $1.4 billion to fund 70,000 creative projects since 2009.52 Small or individual registered investment advisors are the fastest-growing segment of the investment advisory business in the United States; they purchase turnkey back-end systems from companies like Fidelity and Charles Schwab to get all the capabilities they need in order to provide direct advice to consumers.53 In markets such as search, e-commerce, social media, and the sharing economy, the low marginal costs of digital infrastructure allow upstarts to build business models with near-limitless scale. WhatsApp, the mobile messaging platform that Facebook recently snapped up for $19 billion, reached 500 million monthly active users within five years of its launch.54 Snapchat surpassed the photo-sharing activity on both Facebook and Instagram with 400 million users only two years after its foundation.55 Sharing economy start-ups are growing at breathtaking speed. In 2013, some 450,000 active users were launching the Uber app every week, and more than a million Lyft users had requested a ride with the tap of a button.56 Traditional players have also benefited from changes in marginal cost economics to enter new markets, grow rapidly, or optimize processes and cost structures.

But they have never done so across so many markets and at the speed and scale that is being seen today. As digital platforms reduce to near zero the marginal costs of scaling up business activity, such platforms are enabling new business models, new entrants, and even new market models such as peer-to-peer transactions and the “sharing” economy. With lowered barriers to entry, it is now common to see small companies take on incumbents and gain critical mass in a matter of months. The boundaries separating sectors have become blurred, and digital capabilities are often driving the shift of economic values between players and sectors.

The average company’s tenure on the S&P 500 fell to about eighteen years in 2012, down from sixty-one years five decades earlier.13 It’s no longer sufficient to regard large firms as potential competitors; start-ups with access to digital platforms can be born global, scale up in the blink of an eye, and disrupt long-standing rules of competition in markets ranging from taxi services to hotels and retail. Many of these micro-multinationals are upending competition by bringing about a new “sharing economy” in hospitality (Airbnb), transportation (Lyft), and even home Wi-Fi rentals (Spain’s Fon). Technology has leveled the playing field between large and small players and increased companies’ willingness to enter new markets and expand into new sectors. Microsoft took fifteen years to reach $1 billion in sales.14 Amazon reached that mark in fewer than five years.15 Netflix is no longer merely disrupting content distribution, but is also becoming a formidable force in original content production.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

As former U.S. vice president Al Gore put it: Al Gore, “The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate,” Rolling Stone, June 18, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618. People have figured out that if they have idle assets: “The Rise of the Sharing Economy,” Economist, March 9, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573104-internet-everything-hire-rise-sharing-economy. A phrase from Mastercoin’s David Johnston: David Johnston, “Johnston’s Law,” http://www.johnstonslaw.org/. among a host of overhyped Super Bowl XXXIV ads: Dashiell Bennett, “8 Dot-Coms That Spent Million on Super Bowl Ads and No Longer Exist,” Business Insider, February 2, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/8-dot-com-super-bowl-advertisers-that-no-longer-exist-2011-2?

It includes visits to the mountains of Utah, the beaches of Barbados, schools in Afghanistan, and start-ups in Kenya. The world of cryptocurrencies comprises venture-capital royalty, high school dropouts, businessmen, utopians, anarchists, students, humanitarians, hackers, and Papa John’s pizza. It’s got parallels with the financial crisis, and the new sharing economy, and the California gold rush, and before it’s all over, we may have to endure an epic battle between a new high-tech world and the old low-tech world that could throw millions out of work, while creating an entirely new breed of millionaires. Are you ready to jump down the bitcoin rabbit hole?

David Johnston is a senior board member at the Mastercoin Foundation, the body that coordinates the funding for the Mastercoin project, which offers a special software platform for developers to design special decentralized applications that can run on top of the bitcoin blockchain. He says blockchain technology “will supercharge the sharing economy,” that emerging trend in which apartment owners use Airbnb.com to rent out quasi hotel rooms and car owners sign up as self-employed taxidrivers for smartphone-based Uber and Lyft. The idea is that if we can decentralize the economy and foster multiple forms of peer-to-peer exchanges, people will figure out profitable ways to turn much of what they own or control into a marketable service.


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The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Moving up past the “empowered” and the “influential” freelancers we reach the top: the “360 degrees Freelancer.” But the pinnacle isn’t about money, status, or applause. “It’s about giving back.”35 The Freelancers Union is part of an emerging social movement called “new mutualism” that’s grounded in the concept of a sharing economy. Jeremy Rifkin sees the sharing economy as the next big thing. He argues that hundreds of millions of people are already on board, sharing “information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D printed products at near-zero marginal cost.” People are also sharing more personal things like clothes, homes, and household items.36 “Flexible,” “diversified” freelancers are the archetypal sharers: They mentor.

Or they make sure they buy from and work with other local freelancers to keep the ecosystem healthy. They buy their groceries at the local food co-op. They attend classes. They teach classes. They go to networking events not just to hand out business cards, but to find other freelancers that share their passions.37 In the new sharing economy we’ll all be freelancers. We’ll rent out our spare rooms on Airbnb and drive our cars for Lyft. We’ll have a “portfolio of jobs” and live our lives by “essentialist” principles: We will live with “intention and choice” and celebrate the joy of “fulfilling a purpose” and making “small choices that lead to big change.”38 It’s all about adapting ourselves and acquiring the necessary skills and connections to make it in the world.

Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,” American Sociological Review 77: 4, 2012, 508; see also Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, New York: Polity Press, 1991. 26Gary Vaynerchuk, TED Talk, Web. 2.0 Expo, September 2008. 27Dan Schwabel, “Marie Forleo: How She Grew Her Brand to Oprah Status,” Forbes, May 16, 2013. 28See www.marieforleo.com/. 29Oprah Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech. 30O, The Oprah Magazine, March 2014. 31Madeleine Schwartz, “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships,” Dissent, Winter 2013. 32Mark Babbitt, “25 Jobs in a 50-Year Career: Is Gen Y Ready?” Savvy Intern, October 9, 2013. 33See www.freelancersunion.org. 34Ibid.; Freelancers Union, Instagram, February 18, 2014. 35Freelancersunion.org. 36Jeremy Rifkin, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2014. 37Freelancersunion.org. 38Ibid.; see also Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s piece on the Freelancers Union in Dissent, Winter 2012. 39C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959], p. 6. 40Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in J.


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Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Traditional government domains are now being invaded by the private sector. The rise of the sharing economy, in which people directly share resources with one another, is further changing our understanding of business. In a time of such rapid change, government faces the challenge of implementing regulatory standards and protecting consumer rights in an ever-changing landscape. The mobile telephony network was among the first wave of technologies that required such efforts from the government. Let’s see how some of the newer challenges are shaping up. The rise of India’s sharing economy When Uber made its Indian debut in 2013, it became one of a clutch of taxi services debuting an unfamiliar business model.

‘India’s tech opportunity: Transforming work, empowering people’. McKinsey Global Institute Report. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/indias_tech_opportunity_transforming_work_empowering_people 11. Fok, Evelyn. 31 January 2015. ‘Sharing economy fails to gain ground in Indian market as startups wary of model’. Economic Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-01-31/news/58650703_1_sharing-economy-taxi-aggregator-vardhan-koshal 12. Mazzucato, M. 2013. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press. 13. Sally, Madhvi Sally. 30 April 2014. ‘Demand for accurate weather predictions heralds burgeoning business opportunity for private forecasting firms.

The incumbents label the newcomers as ‘tax evaders’ and the new solutions as ‘unsafe’. There is also the risk of the existing interests lobbying against innovations and using regulations to create a barrier to entry. In all these cases, the conflict between regulation and innovation has led to considerable friction in the market. The sharing economy is also giving rise to a new class of ‘micro-entrepreneurs’—small-scale service providers who can now find customers through an online marketplace.8 The US has seen the emergence of a plethora of start-ups that will bring you groceries and flowers, wash your clothes, deliver meals, clean your house, carry out your personal tasks, or send a doctor to your home if you’re ill.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Phil Harrison, the former corporate vice president at Microsoft who led the division responsible for Microsoft’s Xbox, described this dynamic exponential growth in computing as a platform at the launch of the Xbox One at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2013: “Day one of Xbox One, we will have the [cloud] server power equivalent to the entire computing power of the planet in 1999. There’s a tangible data point for you…” Phil Harrison, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Entertainment Division The sharing economy and the social media collective have produced an explosion of content, bytes/bits and data that we didn’t really see coming ten years ago. We predicted a linear increase in demand for data, and when mobile came along we rightly predicted more data usage, but we didn’t expect the explosion of data that occurred as a result of social media, the amplification of “sharing” and the rise of consumers as producers of content.

Computational processing is probably another large component of the overall price, and it has a long history of exponential cost reduction. In addition, we can expect battery technology to improve dramatically and allow self-driving vehicles to eventually get through an entire day without the need for a charge. The sharing economy for vehicles will thrive. Electric, self-driving vehicles will be significantly cheaper to run, but the average city dweller won’t even need to own a car, or they may choose to own a share in a vehicle. The user will simply rent a vehicle by the hour, and each vehicle will shuffle between owners or renters themselves, stopping to charge at the required charging station in quiet periods.

The user will simply rent a vehicle by the hour, and each vehicle will shuffle between owners or renters themselves, stopping to charge at the required charging station in quiet periods. The trend of young adults moving away from vehicle ownership is already becoming evident. Instead of asking for their own car when they reach driving age, teens are now asking their parents for an Uber account.6 So this is not just a factor of electric, self-driving cars; the sharing economy is already starting to shift behaviour towards dramatically different vehicle ownership models. Children who have grown up with parents who use Uber or ride-sharing services will do the maths and find that it is cheaper to not own their own vehicle in an average city with good public transportation and an autonomous vehicle network.


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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“that’s somewhat unusual”: Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Peter Thiel’s Quest to Find the Key to Eternal Life,” The Washington Post, April 3, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-leadership/peter-thiels-life-goal-to-extend-our-time-on-this-earth/2015/04/03/b7a1779c-4814-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html. tribune of globalization: Thomas Friedman, “Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy,” The New York Times, July 20, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html. “Got Americans to Trust Each Other”: Jason Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” Wired, April 23, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy/. Thiel was concerned: Thiel’s 2009 Cato essay refers to the 1920s as the “last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” singling out the “vast increase in welfare beneficiaries,” in addition to women’s suffrage.

., 237 Sacks, David, xvi, 35–36, 47, 53, 67, 71, 83, 89–90 The Diversity Myth, 40–42, 47, 53, 145, 202, 252, 344n Salmon, Felix, 312 Sandberg, Sheryl, viii–x, 257, 260, 292 Sanders, Bernie, xvi, 300, 304 San Francisco Chronicle, 47, 120 Sankar, Shyam, 117, 265, 310–12, 318 Saverin, Eduardo, 108–9, 159, 205 Saving Arizona PAC, 332 Scalia, Antonin, 39 Schiavo, Terri, 227 Schmidt, Eric, xiv–xv, 54, 123, 261, 275–76 Schmitt, Carl, 94 Schwartz, Richard, 268 Scowcroft, Brent, 271 seasteading, 136–38, 169, 192, 229 SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), 86, 88, 249, 317 Seder, Sam, 287 SENS Research Foundation, 138, 326–27 September 11 attacks, see 9/11 attacks Sequoia Capital, 57, 66, 85, 86, 108, 119–20, 134–35 Sessions, Jeff, 286 700 Club, 42 Seymour, Stephanie, 228 sharing economy, 189–90 Shelton, Kathy, 243 Shockley, William, 144 Shockley Semiconductor, 143–44 Sicknick, Brian, 322 Signal, 330 Silicon Valley, vii, x, xii, 24, 43, 45–46, 54–56, 63–64, 75–76, 95, 121, 123–25, 134–35, 159, 162, 282–83, 305, 318, 334, 335 Bush and, 93–94 COVID pandemic and, 308–9 ideology of, xii, xiv, xv, xviii Karp on, 317–18 meritocracy in, 54 military-industrial complex and, 144, 145 Obama and, 262 sharing economy and, 189–90 Traitorous Eight and, 143–44 Trump and, 236, 240, 247–49, 257–64, 271, 281 Silicon Valley, 188–89, 326 Simmons, Russell, 53 Simpson, O.

“I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he said. “I think that’s somewhat unusual.” He added that he hoped his work to extend the human lifespan would be his legacy. At the moment, Thiel’s investment firm, Founders Fund, was throwing money behind the hottest Silicon Valley trend: the “sharing economy.” The term described a class of startups in which unemployed people, or those looking for extra income, offered professional services on smartphone apps—Thiel’s firm invested in most of the biggest players. There was Lyft, a ride-hailing app that replaced taxi drivers with regular people driving their own cars.


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The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Alyson Shontell, “Founder Q&A: Make a Boatload of Money Doing Your Neighbor’s Chores on TaskRabbit,” Business Insider, October 27, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/taskrabbit-interview-2011-10 (accessed August 12, 2013). 29. Tomio Geron, “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy,” Forbes, January 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 30. Johnny B., “TaskRabbit Names Google Veteran Stacy Brown-Philpot as Chief Operating Officer,” TaskRabbit Blog, January 14, 2013, https://www.taskrabbit.com/blog/taskrabbit-news/taskrabbit-names-google-veteran-stacy-brown-philpot-as-chief-operating-officer/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 31.

In fact, much of the change has been invisible for a long time simply because we did not know what to look for. There’s a huge layer of the economy unseen in the official data and, for that matter, unaccounted for on the income statements and balance sheets of most companies. Free digital goods, the sharing economy, intangibles and changes in our relationships have already had big effects on our well-being. They also call for new organizational structures, new skills, new institutions, and perhaps even a reassessment of some of our values. Music to Your Ears The story of music’s move from physical media to computer files has been told often and well, but one of that transition’s most interesting aspects is less discussed.

Research by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School has found that the increased transparency has helped smaller independent restaurants compete with bigger chains because customers can more quickly find quality food via rating services like Yelp, reducing their reliance on brand names’ expensive marketing campaigns.17 The intangible benefits delivered by the growing sharing economy—better matches, timeliness, customer service, and increased convenience—are exactly the types of benefits identified by the 1996 Boskin Commission as being poorly measured in our official price and GDP statistics.18 This is another way in which our true growth is greater than the standard data suggest.


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The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Despite the challenges that gig workers face, those who celebrate the “disruptive” effects that the sharing economy is having on traditional sectors (hotel and taxi companies, for instance) could perhaps be excused for seeing in all this a benefit for society—cheaper services. What is missing from such an analysis, however, is any discussion of long-term effects. The buyers of gig services today may enjoy lower costs, but if more and more of them are forced to become the providers of gig services tomorrow, then the “disruption” that the sharing economy is creating is clearly negative over the longer term. Surveilled Labor Not only are workers’ conditions becoming more precarious, but their moment-to-moment activities are also becoming increasingly monitored.

Work, for many, increasingly occurs within the sort of corporate environment of sensors that Davenport imagined; in its absoluteness, this recalls the continuous surveillance, if not the violence, that slave labor endured on a large scale under historical colonialism.37 Labor relations are becoming more directly and continuously extractive, whatever the formalities that cloak them.38 This has implications too for inequality, as exposure to (or freedom from) continuous surveillance becomes a key factor that distinguishes lower-status from higher-status jobs. New forms of labor are also emerging under data colonialism in the “sharing economy.” Here data relations are fused with labor relations, although the existence of labor relations is controversially denied by platforms such as Uber.39 These new hybrid data/labor relations encompass a huge variety of more or less formalized work, including data processing.40 Labor is captured in a seemingly “scale-less” business model that detaches workers from institutional supports but richly rewards platform management.

And yet, these trends are paradoxically being hailed—in the words of an Uber executive and former Clinton administration strategist—as “democratizing capitalism” and “driving wealth down to the people.”81 A Pew report from 201682 put the supposedly transformative impact of the gig economy into perspective: 24 percent of Americans in that year reported making money from gig platforms, with only 8 percent (around twenty-six million) doing so from employment, as opposed to other activities such as selling things on eBay. For comparison purposes, in China the sharing economy generated $500 billion in transactions involving six hundred million people in 2015 alone (although “sharing” in this context might simply mean renting a bicycle from one of the forty companies that facilitate fifty million rides every day).83 The gig economy, for all its limitations, has significance as an exemplar of where capitalism is heading.


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Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The Share Solution When I published The Overspent American in 1998, one sentence generated a reaction akin to outrage—my suggestion that neighbors could share expensive items that are only used periodically, such as riding mowers. Ten years later, it’s not only mowers that are being jointly owned, but tractors and even vehicles. The sharing economy is taking off. The best-known example is car sharing, pioneered in the United States by Zipcar, which makes vehicles available to urban members on a short-term basis. Its founder, Robin Chase, has moved on to create GoLoco, a ride-sharing service. Freecycle.org members are committed to the reciprocity of both giving and getting.

When money is cheap, nature isn’t counted, and time is expensive, as in the BAU economy, where incentives favor private ownership. A shift toward plenitude, which economizes on materials and is rich in time, enhances the value of sharing. Recapitalizing the Social: Economies of Reciprocity For the vanguard that is passionate about the sharing economy, it is a matter of more than ecological appeal. Sharing is a route to rebuilding social ties in a society that has experienced a rise in disconnection, loneliness, and individualism. Bioneers understand that reconstructing community, or recapitalizing the social, is a necessary adaptation for an economically and ecologically perilous world.

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies business-as-usual (BAU) economy decline of environmental impact of extra-market diversification and origin of term for systems dynamics and unemployment and California Closets Canada: health care system in hours worked in materials use in sharing economy in canning and preserving capitalism carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration of carbon footprint carbon pricing cashmere cell phones environmental impact of storage and disposal of Census of Manufactures Center for Alternative Technologies Center for Economic and Policy Research ceramics, imported, weight of chain stores, market power of Chase, Robin child care China commodities use by ecological footprint in greenhouse gas emissions and historical carbon emissions of Kuznets model and population and Chrysler Corp.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It’s been estimated that globally, 60 percent of all occupations will, in the next few years, be substantially redefined because of new disruptive technologies.60 It’s not only low-level or menial jobs that will be automated—it’s all jobs. In fact, there’s a case to be made that “knowledge work”—radiology, law, sales, and finance—will actually be automated faster than more physical jobs in areas like healthcare and manufacturing. Moreover, even in fields where humans can’t be replaced entirely, the gig economy and the “sharing” economy—driven, of course, by tech firms—have dramatically increased the number of contingency workers without benefits.61 Beyond these relatively easy-to-track numbers is perhaps a deeper and more worrisome issue, which is the way in which data-driven capitalism has turned people into the factory inputs of the digital age.

Billion-dollar venture funds, once unheard of, are now commonplace. Last year, Sequoia raised an $8 billion seed fund, and SoftBank a whopping $100 billion fund. Big, of course, begets big. Charismatic CEOs and their PR teams drum out compelling narratives around these sectors (wearables, electric cars, the “sharing” economy, cybersecurity). Then they send market signals about their own “value” with announcements that play off these narratives: Uber’s $680 million purchase of self-driving truck firm Otto, for example. Venture capitalists and private equity investors keep the bubble going by buying into it at higher and higher valuations.

She found that, not surprisingly, while Uber itself took most of the upside of the business, drivers were often left to bear the cost and the downsides of the disruptive technology on their own. Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor, has always been known as the kinder, gentler ridesharing company, in part because its CEO Logan Green has been more inclined to discuss the downsides of the sharing economy in a thoughtful and open way (that and the fact that he hasn’t been caught on a dashcam screaming at his own drivers). Green is, for example, concerned about the potential mass displacement of drivers in the United States (which represents the largest single category of work for men with a high school degree or less) by autonomous vehicles.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Concepts like the value chain and economies of scale provided incremental improvements on the old, linear model. But the shift from linear businesses to platforms that we’re seeing today is not incremental. Rather, it’s massive and immediate. Despite all the controversy around Uber and the so-called sharing economy, the magnitude of change that platforms have brought to our society has gone largely unnoticed. In fact, this shift is much larger than the sharing economy, as platforms encompass many more areas of economic activity. And it will only continue in the future when connected technology is adopted by more and more industries. The rest of this book will help you understand how and why these businesses work and, just as important, when they won’t.

Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States,” January 22, 2015 (http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp010z708z67d/5/587.pdf), which we collated with leaked customer numbers from: Nitasha Tiku, “Leaked: Uber’s Internal Revenue and Ride Request Numbers,” Valleywag, December 4, 2013, http://valleywag.gawker.com/leaked-ubers-internal-revenue-and-ride-request-number-1475924182. Another source, “Uber Spearheads Growth of the Shared Economy in Mexico,” Global Delivery Report, July 9, 2014 (http://globaldeliveryreport.com/uber-spearheads-growth-of-the-shared-economy-in-mexico/), puts the driver/passenger ratio at about 1 to 8, but exact, up-to-date data is not publicly available. 2. Tom Cheredar, “Airbnb Admits Gaming Craigslist, Blames Rogue Contractors,” Venture Beat News, June 2, 2011, http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/. 3.

Glen Weyl has acted as an advisor to Applico in the past. 12. David Plouffe, “Uber and the American Worker,” Medium, November 5, 2015, https://medium.com/@davidplouffe/uber-and-the-american-worker-bdd499ec5323#.24uxoctyq. 13. Georgios Zervas, David Prosperio, and John Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” May 7, 2015, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2366898. 14. Paul Carsten, “Alibaba’s Singles’ Day Sales Surge 60 Percent to $14.3 Billion,” Reuters, November 11, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alibaba-singles-day-idUSKCN0SZ34J20151112. 15.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

More and more houses are falling into the hands of Wall Street firms and global investors looking to extract rents, fees, and other income streams from every square foot. The biggest transfer of this property wealth has occurred in Sunbelt states whose economies are fueled by an unwholesome cocktail of breakneck growth, hands-off regulation, depressed wages, and real estate speculation. Adding to the money drain is the boom in short-term renting: Airbnb’s “sharing economy” has turned a sizable chunk of the nation’s housing stock into ad hoc hotels, while the surging number of vacation rental homes with faraway owners has also claimed its share. Like other regions dependent on tourism, the nation’s fifth-largest industry, Central Florida lends itself particularly well to this kind of prospecting.

In 2012, the county’s marketing agency renamed itself Experience Kissimmee to distinguish the location from Orlando in the tourist mind and began plugging Osceola’s VHR offerings at every opportunity. This reboot coincided with a widespread surge in renting out private homes (or rooms in them) to travelers. Airbnb, the poster child of the sharing economy, led the pack in urban areas. Other online platforms, such as HomeAway, VRBO, FlipKey, TripAdvisor, Vacasa, and Expedia, made it easy for second-home owners in traditional tourist destinations to book nightly renters. Demand for local property managers and service firms increased. Almost overnight, VHR became an industry, albeit with little in the way of professional norms and standards.

The “ownership society” promoted by George Bush in the early 2000s has steadily lost ground among its middle-class aspirants since then; the meaning of “home” has slipped from the warm, wholesome sense of a haven, lurching more and more in the grubby direction of retail. In the heady lead-up to the housing crash, owners began to treat their homes as assets for leveraging equity. They still lived there, though, and cherished their private space. In the decade since then, as the “renter nation” and the sharing economy took hold, every corner of the home became fair game for being booked as long as the price was right. Suddenly, everyone could be an amateur landlord. By 2020, the sanctity of the owner-occupied home, preached by generations of national moralists openly shilling for the real estate industry, had faded significantly.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

They are shuttled to their corporate campuses—like summer camp, a world of primary colors and playgrounds and cafés and endless amusement to keep them happy at work. For them, all of life’s conveniences can be had at the push of a button; for others, they’ve got to get running every time the bell rings. The sharing economy meets modern sweatshop. The gamification of life in the city doesn’t mean everyone can afford to play. Through its history, San Francisco has stood as something like the nation’s western capital. But it has always been something of a funhouse mirror, reflecting a strange yet sublime potential self back to the rest of the nation.

But these environments are not representative of the rest of the world. And so they can end up with a skewed view of what the world looks like and what kind of problems they’re really capable of solving. Meanwhile, there’s a much bigger structural shift happening in the labor market. It’s going away from employment to this notion of liquefying work. The sharing economy: project-based, as-you-need-it stuff. Now, you can execute on your passions: you earn your income, in a flexible way, with a flexible schedule, so you can go work on the project that you’re really excited about or bootstrap the business that you always wanted to start. I take Lyft into work, and I’ve had some of the most amazing conversations on my morning commute: a Tibetan refugee, or an artist who’s working on something on the side, or people building their own companies.

The ride is only ten minutes, they want to have answers beyond their imagination. I should tell my life story between the Marina and North Beach? It’s arrogance more than ignorance. People nowadays see an Uber driver as an object. He has no value. He just comes with the service. Picks you up at the push of a button. That’s the sharing economy. They think they can use you as an object for a certain specific time—that they can do whatever they want with you. It’s not sharing cars, it’s sharing people. One day maybe human beings will be obsolete. The self-driving car is almost done. It’s not only drivers who will disappear. Brokers of insurance—who’s gonna get insurance when no one is driving?


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Other credits appear in the captions of the respective images. 978-0-698-40941-5 Cover design: Evan Gaffney Cover images: (city background) Merten Snijders/Getty Images; (cyclist) Biederbick & Rumpf/F1 Online/Superstock; (businessman) Massimo Colombo/Getty Images Version_1 To the men and women of the New York City Department of Transportation Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface INTRODUCTION A New Street Code CHAPTER 1 The Fight CHAPTER 2 Density Is Destiny CHAPTER 3 Setting the Agenda CHAPTER 4 How to Read the Street CHAPTER 5 Follow the Footsteps CHAPTER 6 Battle for a New Times Square CHAPTER 7 Stealing Good Ideas CHAPTER 8 Bike Lanes and Their Discontents CHAPTER 9 Bike Share: A New Frontier in the Shared Economy CHAPTER 10 Safety in Numbers CHAPTER 11 Sorry to Interrupt, but We Have to Talk About Buses CHAPTER 12 Measuring the Street CHAPTER 13 Nuts and Bolts CHAPTER 14 The Fight Continues Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Index Preface My six-year, seven-month, eighteen-day tenure as New York City transportation commissioner began with a meeting at City Hall, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, in early spring 2007.

Judged from the street and by the sight of ordinary people riding bikes as basic transportation and not as a political statement, a new road order for cities had become a self-evident fact on the streets of New York. “The biggest mischaracterization about the infamous New York Cycling War is that there’s a war at all,” wrote a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. “Look all around you. The bikes have won, and it’s not a terrible thing.” 9 Bike Share: A New Frontier in the Shared Economy Just after eleven p.m. my e-mail inbox exploded with messages from viewers tuned to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was out that night at an event and had missed the entire show, but quickly figured out that Stewart had just given Citi Bike the full comic treatment. “There are a lot of important stories in the world right now,” Jon Stewart said to open the show, and “one of the most important is happening right here in New York City.”

Under Bloomberg’s successor, Citi Bike would expand far beyond its original launch area, moving up the Upper East and Upper West sides and into Long Island City, Queens, and Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Great Bike Panic could no longer be reported with a straight face. The bikes had truly won, forging a new frontier in the shared economy. 10 Safety in Numbers Early on a Thursday in late February, six-year-old Amar Diarrassouba and his older brother approached the intersection of 116th Street and First Avenue in East Harlem, the final crosswalk in their daily walk to Public School 155. When the light turned green, the driver of a tractor-trailer on 116th Street started to turn right onto First Avenue, into the crosswalk where Amar started crossing with his brother.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

For instance, through digital matching platforms like Airbnb, OpenTable, Uber, or Amazon Marketplace, people are able to satisfy highly specific individual needs or preferences. In some cases, no money is exchanged, not only in the case of Al Roth’s famous kidney exchange described earlier, but also now the numerous, non-profit sharing economy platforms exchanging unwanted goods or sharing equipment, or dogs. As with previous episodes of major innovation, from printing to electricity, enormous value is being created. Yet it is not much of an exaggeration to say these phenomena verge on the invisible in the current framework of economic statistics.

In my research with my co-authors on some aspects of the digital economy, we have looked at the quality-adjusted and data-volume adjusted price of telecommunications services; at the scope and price of businesses’ use of cloud computing; at shifts in activity from market to unpaid household activity thanks to digital innovation; at the sharing economy; and at the use of contract manufacturers by firms which look like big manufacturers but whose main activity is innovation and services. In every case, the absence of the underlying data gathering has been a hurdle, and official statisticians are gradually adjusting their surveys and other forms of data gathering to fill the gaps.

Salais, 1997, Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sugden, R., 2018, The Community of Interest, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sugden, R., 2020, ‘Normative Economics Without Preferences’, International Review of Economics, online 23 July 2020. Sundararajan, A., 2016, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sunstein, Cass R., 2003, ‘Libertarian Paternalism’, American Economic Review, 93 (2), 175–179. Sutton, J., 2000, Marshall’s Tendencies: What Can Economists Know?, London: MIT Press and Leuven University Press.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

Put the brand’s Clever Little Shopper bag in hot water for three minutes and it harmlessly dissolves, so you can pour it safely down the plug. The social accommodation brand Airbnb, the car-sharing service Zipcar and music-streaming site Spotify are all examples of what is variously known, from slightly different angles, as the new trend for dis-ownership, the sharing economy and collaborative consumption. Now, thanks to these trends and the technologies that make them possible, you can enjoy the experience of a room, a house, a car, a CD, a handbag, a lawnmower, a musical instrument or even a dog – without all the hassle that comes with owning them. The success of Zipcar, for instance, reflects the space and cost that comes with keeping a car in a city, and the fact that, if you live in a city, you just do not need a car so much anymore.

As well as giving people the chance to borrow other people’s goods, it also lets them share a good they already own: their own home. Beyond the obvious financial reward, there is also a participatory, social good that comes with Airbnb. It provides the people who let their rooms and their homes, and the people who stay there, with real connections. As a result, they tend to feel part of the new, innovative sharing economy, they feel more connected to other people, and they have more stories to share. Apple has become the world’s leading brand because of its ruthless focus on experience. Think, for a moment, how easy it is to operate an Apple device, and how slim the operating manual is. How different is that to the manual that came with, say, your VHS recorder in the 1980s?

., Resource Revolution: Meeting the World’s Energy, Materials, Food, and Water Needs, a report from McKinsey & Company (November, 2011). Also, “Hitting our Limits?”, The Economist, 14 October 2011. “A technologist…” For examples of technology facilitating the shift from owning material things to experience, consider the success of Spotify, Zipcar, and the Kindle. Various sources, including: “All Eyes on the Sharing Economy”, The Economist, 9 Mar 2013. The Perfect Storm Applied more than 5,000 times Source: Everett M Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962, fifth edition, 2003) Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Krispy Kremes This story draws on a number of reports, including: Peter Laing, “Cops Tackle Krispy Kreme Traffic Chaos – and Pick up a Box of Doughnuts”, Deadline News, 15 February 2013; Shiv Malik, “Krispy Kremes Cause Chaos in Edinburgh Streets”, The Guardian, 15 February 2013; and Harriet Arkell, “Jam Doughnuts: Hundreds of Motorists Bring Traffic Chaos to M8 as They Queue for Opening of New Krispy Kreme”, Mail Online, 15 February 2013.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

This is emblematic of an increasingly unequal economy where, in truth, multibillion-dollar start-ups like Uber and Lyft share none of their stratospheric value with their workers. Indeed, a July 2017 report about the gig economy by the British MP Frank Field alleges that some self-employed UK drivers are earning only £2.50 an hour working for sharing economy companies like Parcelforce and webuyanycar.com.30 “In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task,” that 2017 New York Times editorial argues.31 Or, as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino bluntly put it, commenting on the cult of work celebrated by on-demand companies such as the freelance marketplace Fiverr, “The gig economy celebrates working yourself to death.”32 My own experience as a heavy Uber user chimes with these conclusions.

In 2015, for example, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to approve a bill that allows drivers for ride-hailing apps to form unions.44 In 2016 a London employment tribunal ruled that these drivers are indeed entitled to workers’ rights, including the national minimum wage and paid holidays.45 In 2016 Uber paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco claiming that the rideshare company misled customers with a “false sense of security” about its checks on drivers.46 In Austin, Texas, voters rejected Uber’s and Lyft’s proposal to self-regulate their services. Trust us, this 2016 local referendum asked. No, the voters replied.47 Politicians around the world are also working to responsibly regulate other areas of the sharing economy. Shannon Liss-Riordan’s political ally, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, has taken on Airbnb, claiming that the $31 billion–valued home-sharing start-up is forcing up rents in large cities. In October 2016 Warren established a coalition of lawmakers from more than a dozen cities, urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “help cities protect consumers” and to study how the short-term rental market is affecting the overall rental market.48 In November 2016 regulators in New York City and San Francisco successfully got Airbnb to establish a “one host, one home” rule for new hosts as a defense against rising rents.

The case for a universal basic income is also shared by many technologists and entrepreneurs, who see it as an essential feature—perhaps even the central social security pillar—of tomorrow’s networked society. Robin Chase, the former CEO of both Zipcar and Buzzcar and a leading evangelist for the sharing economy, tells me that universal basic income represents a kind of investment that will allow us to “tap into people’s talents.” There will, she promises me, be a “huge uptick in happiness, creativity, and productivity” after its introduction. More ominously, Stowe Boyd, a Boston-based influential technology commentator and researcher who describes himself as a “post-futurist,” warns me that unless we introduce universal basic income, there will be “homelessness sixteen deep in the streets.”


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Beyond these situations in which a public interest must transcend governmental power structures, other industry sectors and classes can be freed from skewed regulatory and licensing schemes subject to the hierarchical power structures and influence of strongly backed special interest groups on governments, enabling new disintermediated business models. Even though regulation spurred by the institutional lobby has effectively crippled consumer genome services,3 newer sharing economy models like Airbnb and Uber have been standing up strongly in legal attacks from incumbents.4 In addition to economic and political benefits, the coordination, record keeping, and irrevocability of transactions using blockchain technology are features that could be as fundamental for forward progress in society as the Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone.

The same templated altcoin issuance could extend to groups within these communities, like DeltaChiCoin or NeuroscienceConferenceCoin, to support any specific group’s activities. The Campuscoin issuance template could have specific prepackaged modules. First, there could be a module for buying and selling assets within the local community, an OpenBazaar- or Craigslist-like asset exchange module. Second, there could be a sharing economy module, a decentralized model of Airbnb for dorm rooms, Getaround for transportation including cars and bikes, and LaZooz peer-based ride sharing. Third, there could be a consulting or “advisory services” module for all manner of advice, mentoring, coaching, and tutoring related to classes, departments, majors, and careers.

The license would encompass anyone doing anything with anyone else’s Bitcoins, including basic wallet software (like the QT wallet).192 However, on the other hand, regulated consumer protections for Bitcoin industry participants, like KYC (know your customer) requirements for money service businesses (MSBs), could hasten the mainstream development of the industry and eradicate consumer worry of the hacking raids that seem to plague the industry. The deliberations and early rulings of worldwide governments on Bitcoin raise some interesting questions. One issue is the potential practical impossibility of carrying out taxation with current methods. A decentralized peer-to-peer sharing economy of Airbnb 2.0 and Uber 2.0 run on local implementations of OpenBazaar with individuals paying with cryptocurrencies renders traditional taxation structures impossible. The usual tracking and chokehold points to trace the consumption of goods and services might be gone. This has implications both for taxation and for the overall measurement of economic performance such as GDP calculations, which could have the beneficial impact of drawing populaces away from being overly and possibly incorrectly focused on consumption as a wellness metric.


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AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

As with any technological revolution, many workers will find the new tools both imperfect in their uses and potentially threatening in their implications. But these tools will only improve with time, and those who seek to compete against AI on its own terms will lose out. In the long run, resistance may be futile, but symbiosis will be rewarded. Finally, the internet-enabled sharing economy will contribute significantly to alleviating job losses and redefining work for the AI age. We’ll see more people step out of traditional careers that are being taken over by algorithms, instead using new platforms that apply the “Uber model” to a variety of services. We see this already in Care.com, an online platform for connecting caregivers and customers, and I believe we will see a blossoming of analogous models in education and other fields.

We see this already in Care.com, an online platform for connecting caregivers and customers, and I believe we will see a blossoming of analogous models in education and other fields. Many mass-market goods and services will be captured by data and optimized by algorithms, but some of the more piecemeal or personalized work within the sharing economy will remain the exclusive domain of humans. In the past, this type of work was constrained by the bureaucratic costs of running a vertical company that attracted customers, dispatched workers, and kept everyone on the payroll even when there wasn’t work to be done. The platformatization of these industries dramatically increases their efficiency, increasing total demand and take-home pay for the service workers themselves.

The platformatization of these industries dramatically increases their efficiency, increasing total demand and take-home pay for the service workers themselves. Adding AI to the equation—as ride-hailing companies like Didi and Uber have already done—will only further boost efficiency and attract more workers. Beyond the established roles in the sharing economy, I’m confident we will see entirely new service jobs emerge that we can hardly imagine today. Explain to someone in the 1950s what a “life coach” was and they’d probably think you were goofy. Likewise, as AI frees up our time, creative entrepreneurs and ordinary people will leverage these platforms to create new kinds of jobs.


pages: 125 words: 28,222

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

Although facing stiff competition from Groupon, LivingSocial is still very much in the game and well positioned for even greater growth. Sidecar Defining the prevailing zeitgeist at any moment in time can be a powerful but difficult growth hack, but San Francisco-based Sidecar, a major competitor with Uber in the sector of peer-to-peer ride sharing seems to be a good market fit for the rapidly emerging Sharing Economy. In the months following its January 2012 launch in San Francisco, the company experienced 60% month-over-month growth and secured impressive funding starting with $20 million in seed money. Like Uber, SideCar opted for a “proof is in the pudding” approach to demonstrating its value at the influential SXSW tech conference in Austin, Texas from March 8-17, 2013.

For this age group, however, real freedom is simply having ready access to transportation that meets their needs. The fact that Sidecar is smartphone based further caters to this ethos since the basic assumption is that the smartphone is the central hub of activity and means of organization and connection for the current crop of twenty-somethings. Within this age bracket, the sharing economy has gained considerable traction as evidence by the success of other startups with a similar philosophical bent like AirBnB. With services like Sidecar, all parties benefit — riders and drivers. The latest iteration of the Sidecar app lets user tailor their rides by type of vehicle type, driver, and price as well as proximity to their current location.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

That failure was clear in the subsequent Internet 2.0 phase, which unlocked the power of social networks but also allowed first-mover companies to turn network effects into entrenched monopoly power. These included social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and e-marketplace success stories of the “sharing economy” such as Uber and Airbnb. Blockchain technologies, as well as other ideas contained in this Internet 3.0 phase, aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own bonds of trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms. The promise lies not just in disrupting the behemoths of the Internet, however.

Even so, the data suggest that black-hat hackers are among the most financially successful innovators of the Internet era. This colossal failure to protect global commerce is directly attributable to a mismatch between the centralized way in which we process and store information and the decentralizing tendencies of a global “sharing” economy that’s pushing for more peer-to-peer and device-to-device commerce. As more people connect over peer-to-peer social networks and use online services, and as more so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart thermostats and refrigerators and even cars join the network, ever more access points are created.

Once this decentralized trust structure is in place, it opens up a world of new possibilities. Consider this futuristic example: Imagine you drive your electric Tesla car to a small rural town to take a hike in the mountains for the day. When you return you realize you don’t have enough juice in your car and the nearest Tesla Supercharger station is too far away. Well, in a sharing economy enabled by blockchains, you would have nothing to fear. You could just drive up to any house that advertises that it lets drivers plug into an outlet and buy power from it. You could pay for it all with cryptocurrency over a high-volume payments system, such as the Lightning Network, and the tokens would be deducted from your car’s own digital wallet and transferred to the wallet of the house’s electric meter.


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The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

It also holds appeal for the rentier class—which Piketty calls the “enemy of democracy”—as they would be assured of steady profits by collecting rents while the middle class loses independence.39 The younger generations, increasingly destined to be without property of their own, are even losing ownership of their personal data. They hand over large amounts of personal information, often unknowingly, to big tech firms in exchange for free services. Rather than the much-ballyhooed “sharing economy,” we are seeing an economy based on mining personal data for the benefit of a few companies. In this way, the middle class will become digital serfs in what Gaspard Koenig calls “digital feudalism.”40 CHAPTER 12 Culture and Capitalism Close ties and common goals shared between a powerful, wealthy class and a priestly or intellectual class have shaped many cultures throughout history, including the feudal era.1 Today a symbiosis between the economic oligarchy and the clerisy poses the biggest threat to the future of the middle class, as it serves to promote values and advance policies harmful to their well-being.

The instability in employment is widely seen as one reason for the country’s ultra-low birth rate.15 Many of today’s “precariat” work in the contingent “gig” economy, associated with firms such as Uber and Lyft. These companies and their progressive allies, including David Plouffe (who managed Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008), like to speak of a “sharing” economy that is “democratizing capitalism” by returning control of the working day to the individual. They point to opportunities that the gig economy provides for people to make extra money using their own cars or homes. The corporate image of companies like Uber and Lyft features moonlighting drivers saving up cash for a family vacation or a fancy date while providing a convenient service for customers—the ultimate win-win.16 Yet for most gig workers there’s not very much that is democratic or satisfying in it.

Gig workers lack many basic protections that full-time workers might have, such as enforcement of civil rights laws. Workers without representation, or even set hours, do not have the tools needed to protect their own position; they are essentially fungible, like day laborers anywhere. Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, has gone so far as to label the “sharing” economy a “share-the-scraps” economy.18 Rather than providing an “add on” to a middle-class life, gig work for many has turned out to be something closer to serfdom. Cultural Erosion in the Working Class The downward economic trajectory of the working class has been amplified by cultural decline. The traditional bulwarks of communities—religious institutions, extended family, neighborhood and social groups, trade unions—have weakened generally, but the consequences are most damaging for those with limited economic resources.19 Social decay among the working class echoes what occurred in the first decades of the industrial revolution, when family and community structures and bonds of religion buckled and often broke.


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This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

There is one emerging economic model that ties all of these strands together, satisfying regressive nineteenth-century liberals, techno-utopian libertarians, communitarian conservatives, corporate elites and policy pragmatists equally. This is the cluster of platforms and services known as the ‘sharing economy’. These seek to push a rentier mentality into more and more corners of society, making the ownership of assets (homes, bedrooms, cars, capital equipment, free time, and so on) the condition of an income. The opportunities for the precariat to be administered and employed via digital platforms have only just begun to be explored, but have huge potential.

The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy. On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as ‘sharing economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics.

The state’s job was to keep interest rates low on the assumption that people wanted to own assets, and otherwise to maintain a ‘level playing field’ so they could reap the rewards of all that hard work. Clearly most people cannot be conceived of as entrepreneurs in a neoliberal society – though the ‘sharing economy’ is now belatedly pressing that Thatcherite dream more deeply into the fabric of society – but they are assumed to be exerting themselves in order to become something better: richer, happier, healthier and so on. They are optimisers, just as economists assume in their models. May has replaced ‘hard-working families’ with ‘ordinary people’, which includes the ‘working class’.


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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Germany introduced a Kurzarbeit scheme to keep workers in their jobs part-time while using their remaining time to up-skill in programs jointly funded by industry, unions, and government. Is the sharing economy another path to economic salvation? Platforms that enable the rental of assets owned by others such as automobiles or housing have created economic activity that is expected to reach over $300 billion by 2020. Uber and Airbnb enjoy skyrocketing valuations because they provide the marketplace for billions of connected individuals to transact among themselves. Sharing economy is in fact a misnomer: It is rather the full flourishing of self-regulated peer-to-peer capitalism, one in which people get paid for work in micro-increments, but as they do, connectivity becomes the foundation of whatever stability they have.

That same year, Huawei sued fellow Shenzhen-based ZTE in a German court for the same reason! PRINTING, SHARING—AND TRADING The biggest threat to current patterns of global trade comes from the combination of 3-D printing (which allows more products to be manufactured locally at “home”) and the sharing economy (by which fewer goods are purchased but existing goods are consumed as services). Local prototyping and mass production together could bring about a severe long-term contraction in global shipping, inventories, and warehousing. If DHL’s largest clients—the U.S. military and hardware companies such as HP—suddenly printed all their components on-site at bases or client facilities, the courier business could go bust.

A new stage has even entered the supply circle before recycling—up-cycling—by which materials are repurposed in higher-value ways: Plastic becomes furniture, tires become boots, shipping containers become two-bedroom homes for dense cities or refugee camps. A supply chain world could be more sustainable if it follows a principle that animates the sharing economy: Unused value is wasted value. COMING HOME—BUT ONLY TO SELL AT HOME A half century ago, GE manufactured consumer goods at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, an SEZ-like town with its own power plant, fire department, and zip code. Rising costs, labor disputes, and outsourcing pushed down its employment from a peak of twenty thousand workers in the 1970s to only eighteen hundred by 2008.


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The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Parts of the economies of developed countries are being fragmented, or Balkanised, with more and more people working freelance, carrying out individual tasks which are allocated to them by platforms and apps like Uber and TaskRabbit. There are many words for this phenomenon: the gig economy, the networked economy, the sharing economy, the on-demand economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the platform economy, and the bottom-up economy. Is this a way to escape the automation of jobs by machine intelligence? To break jobs down into as many component tasks as possible, and preserve for humans those tasks which they can do better than machines?

Whether or not the new forms of freelancing opened up by Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Handy and so on are precarious is a matter of debate, especially in their birthplace, San Francisco. Are the people hired out by these organisations “micro-entrepreneurs” or “instaserfs” - members of a new “precariat”, forced to compete against each other on price for low-end work with no benefits? Are they operating in a network economy or an exploitation economy? Is the sharing economy actually a selfish economy? Whichever side of this debate you come down on, the gig economy is a significant development: a survey by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found that as many as 7% of US adults were involved in it.[cclxv] But our concern here is not whether the gig economy is a fair one.

mt=2&i=361020299 [cclx] http://uk.businessinsider.com/high-salary-jobs-will-be-automated-2016-3 [cclxi] http://www.fiercefinanceit.com/story/will-regulatory-compliance-drive-artificial-intelligence-adoption/2016-01-05 [cclxii] http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/business/liverpool-fc-sponsor-standard-chartered-11104215 [cclxiii] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/30/artificial-intelligence-making-some-bosses-nervous-study.html [cclxiv] Assuming the work is happening on Earth. Wikipedia offers a more general but less euphonious definition: “Work is the product of the force applied and the displacement of the point where the force is applied in the direction of the force.” [cclxv] http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-sharing-economy-provide-good-jobs-1431288393 [cclxvi] https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium [cclxvii] https://www.singularityweblog.com/techemergence-surveys-experts-on-ai-risks/ [cclxviii] http://uk.businessinsider.com/social-skills-becoming-more-important-as-robots-enter-workforce-2015-12 [cclxix] http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/automated-teller-machines [cclxx] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/a-brief-history-of-the-atm/388547/ [cclxxi] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704463504575301051844937276 [cclxxii] http://kalw.org/post/robotic-seals-comfort-dementia-patients-raise-ethical-concerns#stream/0 [cclxxiii] http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2013/a-virtual-therapist.htm [cclxxiv] http://observer.com/2014/08/study-people-are-more-likely-to-open-up-to-a-talking-computer-than-a-human-therapist/ [cclxxv] http://mindthehorizon.com/2015/09/21/avatar-virtual-reality-mental-health-tech/ [cclxxvi] http://www.handmadecake.co.uk/ [cclxxvii] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15551818 [cclxxviii] http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19322 [cclxxix] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c5cf07c4-bf8e-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf.html#axzz3yLGlrr1J [cclxxx] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm [cclxxxi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky [cclxxxii] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c5cf07c4-bf8e-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf.html#axzz3yLGlrr1J [cclxxxiii] http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/22-inspiring-quotes-from-famous-entrepreneurs.html [cclxxxiv] http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi265.htm [cclxxxv] http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html [cclxxxvi] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35977315 [cclxxxvii] http://fee.org/freeman/the-economic-fantasy-of-star-trek/ [cclxxxviii] https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/16/iain-m-banks-the-hydrogen-sonata-review [cclxxxix] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dfe218d6-9038-11e3-a776-00144feab7de.html#axzz3yUOe9Hkp [ccxc] http://www.brautigan.net/machines.html [ccxci] As noted in chapter 3.4, Anders Sandberg is James Martin Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, and perhaps more important, rapid technological innovations have enabled and empowered individuals like never before (something that we will return to later in the book). Today, so many more people in so many more places are enabled to connect and participate, and, soon, they will also be able to make a lot more things. It is the “sharing economy” in which so many more citizens can be productive entrepreneurs and collaborators, including by deploying existing (underutilized) assets. But it is a world that displaces existing workers and makes the political center weaker. More concerning, it is a world that makes cyberterrorism and nonstate terrorism more meaningful threats.3 Governments that look to the technological revolution to materially improve the welfare of both current and future generations while also countering its dark side need to understand the dual nature of these transformative innovations.

Banque de France, “Macroprudential Policies: Implementation and Interactions,” Financial Stability Review, April 2014. 6. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “3 Steps to Remove Financial System Risk,” Harvard Business School, August 15, 2007, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5745.html. 7. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “Creative Self-Disruption,” Project Syndicate, April 7, 2015, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/consumer-sharing-economy-adaptation-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2015-04. 8. Steve Lohr, “Banking Start-ups Adopt New Tools for Lending,” New York Times, January 19, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/technology/banking-start-ups-adopt-new-tools-for-lending.html. 9. For full disclosure, I have been recently involved in one of these efforts—“Payoff”—as an investor and board member of a start-up seeking to improve the financial services offered to households and small businesses.

Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015). 2. Mohamed A. El-Erian, “Creative Self-Disruption,” Project Syndicate, April 7, 2015, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/consumer-sharing-economy-adaptation-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2015-04. CHAPTER 29: WHAT HISTORY TELLS US 1. Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015). 2. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). 3.


pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

In a society like ours, characterized by extreme concentrations of wealth and income, the market allocates social power in proportion to money—thus producing a society of “one dollar, one vote.” Consider the example of companies like the car-sharing service Uber, the errand-outsourcing website TaskRabbit, and the short-term rental market AirBnB. All represent themselves as part of the “sharing economy,” in which individuals make small exchanges of goods and services under conditions of fundamental equality. The idea is that I might rent out my apartment when I’m on vacation, and hire you to drive me somewhere when you have the spare time, and that we all therefore end up with a bit more convenience and a bit more money.

Ultimately, this means overcoming the capitalist system of resource distribution and approaching a world in which control of wealth is equalized—that is, where “the distribution of the means of payment” (to use Gorz’s phrase cited in Chapter 2) is essentially equal. But short of that, there are ways to turn some of the predatory “sharing economy” businesses into something a bit more egalitarian. Economics writer Mike Konczal, for instance, has suggested a plan to “socialize Uber.”26 He notes that since the company’s workers already own most of the capital—their cars—it would be relatively easy for a worker cooperative to set up an online platform that works like the Uber app but is controlled by the workers themselves rather than a handful of Silicon Valley capitalists.


pages: 127 words: 38,674

Simple Matters: Living With Less and Ending Up With More by Erin Boyle

big-box store, Indoor air pollution, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sharing economy

Other websites like Call2Recyle (call2recycle.org) and Earth911 (earth911.com) have easy-to-use features that allow you to enter the particulars about your electronic device and help you find the best way to get rid of it. As stated above, many manufacturers, like Apple, also accept used and broken items for recycling. The books that we keep in our house are generally true favorites. Everything else gets borrowed from the library or read and then donated. Our neighborhood happens to have an informal book sharing economy, where people leave books on their stoops for others to scoop up. What Do I Need to Keep? A Practical List The list of paper documents that the average person needs to keep at home feels enormous at first pass, but it is much simpler after closer inspection. In an age when most things have gone digital, there’s less need to lug around a paper trail.

Small for my age, I was almost always able to fit into the clothes that my closest friends were outgrowing. Their mothers would cart garbage bags of used and outgrown clothes to our house, and I would rifle through the piles, pulling out what I liked best. Somehow it didn’t dawn on me to be embarrassed that I was wearing my classmates’ castoffs. This kind of sharing economy is definitely something to be encouraged. But it comes with a caveat: I’ve found that when things are given to us as gifts, it can be even more difficult to say no them. But a home overflowing with other people’s discarded items is still a home overflowing. Give yourself permission to say no.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The fact that we no longer trust politicians and the police means not that we have lost trust but that we have placed our trust in other relationships and forms. Rather than signalling the end of trust, instead what we are seeing is its redistribution into other systems such as the proliferation of open source and sharing communities – what Burnham calls a ‘sharing economy’. As a result, as hierarchical trust has declined, a belief in the commons has become more important, as we ‘discover new values, and new ways of creating and extending trust, outside of existing damaged systems’.37 The Sculpt Me Point exhibit by Marti Guixe, Amsterdam, 2008 But, I asked, how does this reflect on the way we build cities?

Yet more importantly than this, Burnham reminded me that trust was not a building, it was not bricks and stones; instead it was the sharing of the process of building that created and nurtured trust. That we no longer trust governments, corporations and police does not mean that we have lost the art of trusting. We are already more trusting than we imagine in a new sharing economy that encompasses car clubs, Airbnb; World Book Night; peer-to-peer platforms; Wikipedia; Instagram; open source software such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser, as well as the Creative Commons code of practice. However, we need to be aware of how the uses of urban spaces can impact on this.

., ‘William Bratton and the NYPD’, Yale School of Management, Yale Case 07-015, 12 February 2008, p. 14. 15. www.economist.com/node/12630201 16. Putnam, R., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2001, p. 115. 17. Ibid., p. 19. 18. Minton, A., Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City, Penguin, 2009, p. 21. 19. Griffiths, R., The Great Sharing Economy, Cooperatives UK, Penguin, 2012, p. 1. 20. Ibid., pp. 4–11. 21. www.shareable.net/blog/policies-for-a-shareable-city 22. www.shareable.net/blog/policies-for-a-shareable-city-11-urban-agriculture 23. www.theuglyindian.com Chapter 6: Trust in the city 1. www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/article1221799 2.


pages: 317 words: 87,566

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

Managers hope that their employees will also act as ‘brand ambassadors’ in their everyday social lives and seek advice on how to influence them to do this. Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond.7 The rise of the ‘sharing economy’, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, and studies such as the pay-it-forward experiment, offer a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible.

See Chicago School of economics divorce of from psychology, 61, 69 evolution of discipline of, 54 exceptional status attributed to, 26 function of, according to Coase, 156 happiness economics, 5, 74, 229, 252 as mathematical problem, 51 neo-classical economists/economics, 113, 123, 181 as phenomenon of the mind, 59 pop-economics, 152 reunion of with psychology, 64, 182 subjective sensation and, 55 as winner take all, 160 economies classical political economy, 49–50, 57 knowledge-based economy, 136 political economy, 50, 56 sharing economy, 188 social economy, 190 Edgeworth, Francis, 60, 84 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 255 Ello, 213 emotion definition, 75 as market research industry’s preferred version of happiness/pleasure, 74 emotional contagion, 225 empiricism, 27, 30, 152, 269 employee engagement, 106–9, 113, 126 employee fitness-tracking programmes, 240 employee-owned businesses, advantages of, 272 end of theory, 237 Enlightenment, 7, 19, 23, 27, 47, 85, 251 ennui, costs of, 108 enthusiasm, 251 entropy, law of, 115 ergonomics, 50, 116, 137 Essay on Government (Priestley), 13 European Commission, 255 European Management Forum, 1 evidence-based policy-making, 17 existentialism, 38 experience medicine, 126 experienced utility, measurement of, 64 experimental psychology, 81 Exxon Valdez oil spill, 62–3 eye tracking, 72, 97 eyes, focus on by Wundt, 79–81 Facebook, 10, 74, 100, 189, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 213, 220, 221, 224, 225, 238, 239, 257, 269 face-reading software, 222 facial coding, 76, 97 facial scanning/face-scanning technology, 72, 222, 276 farm experiences, benefits of, 246 fatigue, businesses’ concern about, 50, 116, 120 Fatigue Laboratory (Harvard Business School), 120, 122 FearFighter, 222 Fechner, Gustav as coining pleasure principle, 29 distrust of language, 32 dualism of, 28, 30, 265 on energy, 29, 115 as influenced by Hegel, 30 as monist, 33 as new age thinker, 28 parallels in English psychology to, 48 psychophysical methods of, 60 psychophysical parallelism, 259 as representing relationships between mind and world as numerical ratio, 35 on solving mind–body problem using mathematics, 27, 28 on theory of psychology, 29 weight-lifting experiments of, 30–1, 38, 49, 50, 59, 78 Federal Drug, Food and Cosmetic Act (US) (1938), 170 feedback loops/feedback mechanisms, 95, 103, 230, 276 feelings, adjustment of, 31–2 Ferriss, Tim, 112 fit notes, 112 Fitbit, 240 fitness-tracking ticket machine, 240 fMRI, 32, 231, 237, 241, 261, 262 focus groups, 102, 125 Foucault, Michel, 280n22 FP7 research (European Commission), 255 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 152 free markets, 19, 49, 57, 69, 140, 154, 181, 185, 274 Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Anderson), 185 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 164, 169, 198, 200, 203 Friedman, Milton, 149, 150, 154, 156–7, 159, 160, 161 friendship, 186, 187, 188, 191, 197, 201, 205, 208, 211, 212, 222, 225, 243, 258 friendvertising, 189 Gale, Harlow, 83, 85 Gallup (poll), 9, 106, 146, 219, 272 Gallup, George, 101 gaming, 205–6 The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 84 General Adaptation Syndrome, 129 General Medical Council (Britain), 110 General Motors (GM), 215–16 General Phonograph Manufacturing Company, 200 General Sentiment, 223 generosity, 185, 196 Georgetown University, 142 German Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, 217 Germany, influx of Americans taking university degrees and research training in, 83 Gershon, Michael, 231 Gilbert, Jeremy, 213 Gladwell, Malcolm, 72 global economic management, 3 Google, 37, 193 Graham, Richard, 205, 206 gratitude, 33, 131, 186, 187, 194, 196, 210, 276 group identity, 123 group psychology, 124, 125 Growing Well, 246, 247, 248, 250 Guze, Samuel, 169 Hague, William, 139–40, 141, 142, 144 Haidt, Jonathan, 73 Hall, G.

See positive psychology promise of practical utility of, 91 reunion of with economics, 64, 182 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 theory of, as balancing act, 67 The Psychology of Advertising (Scott), 86 psychopharmacology, 162 psychophysical parallelism, 259 psychophysics, 29, 30, 31 psychosomatic interventions/management/programmes/theories, 122, 124, 128, 135 psychotherapy, 124, 127 pulse rate, 25, 26, 27, 37, 79 punishment, 16, 19, 22, 23, 179, 183, 239 PwC, 119 Qualia, 36 quality of life measures, 126 quantitative sociological research, 98 quantified community, 233, 234 quantified self apps, 221 quantified self movement, 221, 228 quants, 237 questionnaires, 165, 175, 176 random acts of managerial generosity, 184 randomized sampling methods, 97 Rapley, Mark, 250 Rayner, Rosalie, 93 Reagan, Ronald, 144, 149, 159 Realeyes, 72 real-time health data, 137 real-time social trends, 224 recessions, 67–8, 252 Recognizing the Depressed Patient (Ayd), 164 reductionism, 27, 264 research ethics, 91–2, 225 resilience training, 35, 273 Resor, Stanley, 93–4, 95, 96 retail culture, 58 Ricard, Matthieu, 2, 4 Robbins, Lionel, 154 Robins, Eli, 169 Rockefeller Foundation, 97, 99, 121 Rogers, Carl, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin, 101, 146 Rowntree, Joseph, 99 RunKeeper, 240 Ryanair, 185 Salter, Tim, 110 sampling methods, 97–8 Santa Monica, California, 4 São Paolo, Brazil, Clean City Law, 275 scales, 146, 165, 175, 176 scanning technology, 75–6 scent logos, 73 Schrader, Harald, 44 scientific advertising, 215 scientific management, 118–19, 120, 136–7, 235 scientific optimism, 242 scientific politics, 77, 88, 145 scientists, as source of authority, 147–8 Scott, Walter Dill, 83, 85 screen time, 207 second brain, 231 secular religions, 260 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 163, 166 self-anchored striving, 147, 166, 175 self-anchoring striving scale, 146 self-forming groups, 200 self-help gurus, 210 self-help literature, 247 self-improvement, 212 self-monitoring, 258 self-optimization, 213 self-reflection, 211 self-surveillance, 221, 230 Seligman, Martin, 165, 277n5 Selye, Hans, 128–31, 133, 264 The Senses and the Intellect (Bain), 48 sentiment analysis/tracking, 6, 221, 223, 261 sexual orientation disturbance, 172 sharing economy, 188 shopping, 58, 74, 93, 188, 239 sick notes, 112 Sing Sing prison, 201 Smail, David, 250 smart cities, 220, 224, 239 smart homes, 239 smart watches, 37 smartphones, 10, 207, 222, 230 smiles/smiling, 36–7, 38 Smith, Adam, 49, 50, 52, 55 social, 1, 36, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211–12 social analytics, 188, 191, 193, 196 social capitalism, 212 social contagion, science of, 257 social economy, 190 social epidemiology, 9, 250, 254 social media, 188, 189, 199, 203, 207, 208–9, 213, 224, 261, 274 social media addiction, 206, 207 social network analysis, 204, 208 social networks, 193, 194, 195, 196, 213, 225 social neuroscience, 193, 195, 213, 214 social obligation, 184 social optimization, 181–214 social prescribing, 194, 212, 246, 271 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 social research, 98, 202, 226 social science, as converging with physiology into new discipline, 195 sociology, 254 sociometric analysis, 199 sociometric maps, 202 Sociometric Solutions, 239 sociometry, 199, 201, 202, 203 Spengler, Oswald, 121 Spitzer, Robert, 171–3, 176, 271 sponsored conversations, 189 sport, as virtue for political leaders, 140 sporting metaphors, 141 SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), 163, 166 St Louis school of psychiatry, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179 Stanton, Frank, 99 Stigler, George, 150, 152, 153, 156–7, 158, 160 stress, 37, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 175, 250, 262, 272, 273 Stuckler, David, 252 subjective affect, science of, 6, 7 subjective feelings, relationship with external circumstances, 254 subjective sensation, 30, 45, 55, 61 Suicide (Durkheim), 227 Sully, James, 59, 84 surveillance, 231, 237, 238, 240, 242.


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Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

BioCurious, another Silicon Valley invention, is an open wetlab where enthusiasts take courses, use centrifuges and test tubes, and synthesize DNA. Genspace offers a similar resource in New York City. This rent-not-own philosophy further extends the current craze of collaborative consumption and the sharing economy. There’s less and less need to own a factory, a laboratory or even a scientific tool. Instead, why not rent those assets, reducing up-front investment and leaving the ownership and maintenance of state-of-the-art facilities to someone else? Further, given that the control mechanisms offered by software and the Internet allow the management of these capabilities at a distance, why build your own?

Most have improved a bit in recent years—almost by default, thanks to social media—but even now a company’s online presence is mostly limited to a Facebook page half-heartedly managed by the marketing department. How can companies rise above prosaic participation in the Web 2.0 world and create a truly social business? How can they cooperate with the sharing economy or with peer-to-peer startups to boost innovation internally? How can they build a vibrant community around their products that will enable them to use P2P forums to drive down support costs? Zappos spends a great deal of time and money managing its community, and is an excellent example of a company that has launched a truly social business.

Currently, one hundred twenty business leaders and thirty-four Fortune 500 companies are council members of Crowd Companies and, according to Owyang, over eighty global brands have experimented with these techniques. Owyang isn’t alone in his thinking: Shel Israel, co-author of the book Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, noted recently that there have been many such labels attached to this new movement: the Sharing Economy, the Mesh Economy, Collaborative Consumption and the Collaborative Economy. We actually think Exponential Organizations works quite well as a label. But whatever the ultimate designation, it is clear that ExO attributes can and are being implemented by large organizations. In fact, as we wrote this book we were surprised to see how fast that implementation is occurring.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

We can access these items with very little friction. This reduced friction creates opportunity for temporary connections with goods and services, which, in a physical world, would be too costly and cumbersome. This means where we used to have to buy items, we can now instead pay to use them when we need them. The sharing economy In a sharing economy we can enjoy the benefit of usage and status on a temporary basis. It’s an obvious solution when you consider that we only use much of what we own for a fraction of the time that it’s available to us, excluding such things as furniture and the fridge. Quite often, we now share or purchase collectively whatever we need, paying only for the time we use it.

The interest graph in action The anti-demographic recommendation engine Chapter 7: The truth about pricing: technology and omnipresent deflation Technology deflation Real-world technology deflation The free super computer The crux is human It’s getting quicker Technology curve jumping Technology stacking Omnipresent deflation Consumer price index trickery Connections and the impact on prices Economic border hopping The new minimum wage Notes Chapter 8: A zero-barrier world: how access to knowledge is breaking down barriers So what’s changed? Why do we even own stuff? The sharing economy Personal access Physical access Ownership is a mental state Commercial access Access to everything A personal global factory The clothing company The two-way street The laptop corporation Chapter 9: The infinite store: rebooting retail The physical and virtual challenges Retail was easy The retail revolution What retail forgot The discount death spiral Price and range equalise Same brand, different plan The questions that matter Selling online If you make, you retail (big and small) Border hopping and digital reinvention Experience > item Clues in coffee culture Chapter 10: Bigger than the internet: 3D printing A virtual physical reality The history of technology repeats The home factory Piracy on steroids Dad vs daughter Notes Chapter 11: Screen play: post–mass media Television is no more Device convergence Digital demarcation Mass-media platform fragmentation The legacy media challenge Blogs vs The New York Times Who do you trust?


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Applications ranging from Apple's phones to WhatsApp have started building in forms of encryption that are so strong that even the company writing the software and managing the servers cannot break it. For those who prefer corporations to government as their boogeyman of choice, the advent of “sharing economy 1.0” is increasingly showing signs of failure to fulfill what many had originally seen to be its promise. Rather than simply cutting out entrenched and oligopolistic intermediaries, giants like Uber are simply replacing the middleman with themselves, and not always doing a better job of it. Blockchains, and the umbrella of related technologies that I have collectively come to call “crypto 2.0,” provide an attractive fix.

The blockchain moves the power of transactions closer to the individuals, and it empowers any user on earth to align themselves with a decentralized application or organization, and start generating or moving their own nucleus of crypto value. Another benefit of this phenomenon is to put the sharing economy on steroids, as it melds (crypto) capital and labor with mobile, location-agnostic marketplace environments. We are in the early stages of understanding the movement, distribution and creation of “value” outside of the traditional norms of currency, commodity and property as the main vehicles for value transfer and appreciation.


pages: 149 words: 44,375

Slow by Brooke McAlary

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, imposter syndrome, Lyft, off grid, Parkinson's law, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, uber lyft

Keep in mind that these suggestions won’t always be applicable to your situation, but embracing them where you can means the space you work hard to free up in your decluttering efforts will stay free. Share things The sharing economy is growing at a rapid pace, and the idea of sharing resources is starting to take hold in the mainstream. In her 2012 TED talk, Rachel Botsman spoke of the sharing economy as a way to minimise buying things that have a limited use. Talking of handheld drills, which, on average, are used for a total of 12–13 minutes throughout their entire life, she exclaimed, ‘You need the hole, not the drill!’


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

But the process of “software eating the world,” in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s words, is not just about software: it involves other intangibles in abundance. Consider Apple’s designs and its unrivaled supply chain, which has helped it to bring elegant products to market quickly and in sufficient numbers to meet customer demand, or the networks of drivers and hosts that sharing-economy giants like Uber and AirBnB have developed, or Tesla’s manufacturing know-how. Computers and the Internet are important drivers of this change in investment, but the change is long running and predates not only the World Wide Web but even the Internet and the PC. The rise of intangible investment becomes clear if we look at data for the economy as a whole.

And it’s also possible to think of examples of companies that have invested to create valuable organizational assets outside their own firms. The remarkable Apple supply chain that Tim Cook was responsible for developing is clearly a long-term source of value for Apple, allowing it to bring products to market extraordinarily quickly. A valuable asset of so-called sharing-economy businesses like Uber or AirBnB is typically their network of committed suppliers—Uber’s drivers or AirBnB’s hosts. This too is an asset of lasting value that both companies have invested heavily to develop (and which they invest to protect, for example, against legal actions requiring them to treat their suppliers as employees).

To put it another way, computers are physical devices that become useful and valuable when you fill them with useful, intangible information. Because computers and networks of computers deal in information, they also help make other intangible investment easier or more effective. Consider the network of big sharing-economy companies like Uber or AirBnB. There is nothing about their business models that absolutely requires computers and the Internet. Before everyone had a smartphone, there were networked cab companies, some of which, like London’s ComCab or Radio Taxis, used independent drivers. Before AirBnB, there were house-share clubs with brochures and telephone booking systems.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Moderate reformers will find themselves losing ground to politicians keen to unpick elements of the era of moderation, from the move towards freer trade and capital flows to the elimination of labour-market protections. Politicians will promise to make markets create good jobs: by mandating higher minimum wages, supporting occupational certification and other job protections, and pushing firms to regularize work in sharing-economy sectors – by requiring payment of benefits and the guarantee of a certain number of regular hours, for instance. The global economy probably won’t reward these efforts either. But they benefit from securing the support of portions of the electorate who receive protections from such measures – whose slice of the pie is cut a bit larger.

What’s more, ageing countries are not uniformly old; even in places with highly top-heavy population pyramids, a large share of the population is still of working age and is bound to be resentful of large numbers of people brought in expressly to fill jobs in one of the few sectors that reliably creates new employment. An openness and cosmopolitanism inspired by demographic change would be an encouraging political development. It might one day materialize. It hasn’t yet. THE SHARING ECONOMIES Could there be a constituency for a more benign set of policy innovations: for generous basic incomes tied to sensible work requirements, designed to encourage public-spirited labour contributions but leaving room for the individual’s freedom to live the way he or she wants to live? That might be a lot to ask.

Ray labour abundance as good problem bargaining power cognitive but repetitive collective bargaining and demographic issues discrimination and exclusion global growth of workforce and immigration liberalization in 1970s/80s ‘lump of labour’ fallacy occupational licences organized and proximity reallocation to growing industries retraining and skill acquisition and scarcity and social value work as a positive good see also employment Labour Party, British land scarcity Latvia Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine legal profession Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) Lepore, Jill liberalization, economic (from 1970s) Linkner, Josh, The Road to Reinvention London Lucas, Robert Lyft maker-taker distinction Malthus, Reverend Thomas Manchester Mandel, Michael Mankiw, Gregory marketing and public relations Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism (2015) McAfee, Andrew medicine and healthcare ‘mercantilist’ world Mercedes Benz Mexico Microsoft mineral industries minimum wage Mokyr, Joel Monroe, President James MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) Moore, Gordon mortality rates Mosaic (web browser) music, digital nation states big communities of affinity inequality between as loci of redistribution and social capital nationalist and separatist movements Netherlands Netscape New York City Newsweek NIMBYism Nordic and Scandinavian economies North Carolina North Dakota Obama, Barack oil markets O’Neill, Jim Oracle Orbán, Viktor outsourcing Peretti, Jonah Peterson Institute for International Economics pets.com Philadelphia Centennial Fair (1876) Philippines Phoenix, Arizona Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) Poland political institutions politics fractionalization in Europe future/emerging narratives geopolitical forces human wealth narrative left-wing looming upheaval/conflict Marxism nationalist and separatist movements past unrest and conflict polarization in USA radicalism and extremism realignment revolutionary right-wing rise of populist outsiders and scarcity social membership battles Poor Laws, British print media advertising revenue productivity agricultural artisanal goods and services Baumol’s Cost Disease and cities and dematerialization and digital revolution and employment trilemma and financial crisis (2008) and Henry Ford growth data in higher education of highly skilled few and industrial revolution minimum wage impact paradox of in service sector and specialization and wage rates see also factors of production professional, technical or managerial work and education levels and emerging economies the highly skilled few and industrial revolution and ‘offshoring’ professional associations skilled cities professional associations profits Progressive Policy Institute property values proximity public spending Putnam, Robert Quakebot quantitative easing Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) railways Raleigh, North Carolina Reagan, Ronald redistribution and geopolitical forces during liberal era methods of nation state as locus of as a necessity as politically hard and societal openness wealth as human rent, economic Republican Party, US ‘reshoring’ phenomenon Resseger, Matthew retail sector retirement age Ricardo, David rich people and maker-taker distinction wild contingency of wealth Robinson, James robots Rodrik, Dani Romney, Mitt rule of law Russia San Francisco San Jose Sanders, Bernie sanitation SAP Saudi Arabia savings glut, global ‘Say’s Law’ Scalia, Antonin Scandinavian and Nordic economies scarcity and labour political effects of Schleicher, David Schwartz, Anna scientists Scotland Sears Second World War secular stagnation global spread of possible solutions shale deposits sharing economies Silicon Valley Singapore skilled workers and education levels and falling wages the highly skilled few and industrial revolution ‘knowledge-intensive’ goods and services reshoring phenomenon technological deskilling see also professional, technical or managerial work Slack (chat service) Slate (web publication) smartphone culture Smith, Adam social capital and American Constitution baseball metaphor and cities ‘deepening’ definition/nature of and dematerialization and developing economies and erosion of institutions of firms and companies and good government and housing wealth and immigration and income distribution during industrial revolution and liberalization and nation-states productive application of and rich-poor nation gap and Adam Smith and start-ups social class conflict middle classes and NIMBYism social conditioning of labour force working classes social democratic model social reform social wealth and social membership software ‘enterprise software’ products supply-chain management Solow, Robert Somalia South Korea Soviet Union, dissolution of (1991) specialization Star Trek state, role of steam power Subramanian, Arvind suburbanization Sweden Syriza party Taiwan TaskRabbit taxation telegraphy Tesla, Nikola Thatcher, Margaret ‘tiger’ economies of South-East Asia Time Warner Toyota trade China as ‘mega-trader’ ‘comparative advantage’ theory and dematerialization global supply chains liberalization shaping of by digital revolution Adam Smith on trade unions transhumanism transport technology self-driving cars Trump, Donald Twitter Uber UK Independence Party United States of America (USA) 2016 Presidential election campaign average income Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) Constitution deindustrialization education in employment in ethno-nationalist diversity of financial crisis (2008) housing costs in housing wealth in individualism in industrialization in inequality in Jim Crow segregation labour scarcity in Young America liberalization in minimum wage in political polarization in post-crisis profit rates productivity boom of 1990s real wage data rising debt levels secular stagnation in shale revolution in social capital in and social wealth surpasses Britain as leading nation wage subsidies in university education advanced degrees downward mobility of graduates MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) and productivity see also education urbanization utopias, post-work Victoria, Queen video-gamers Virginia, US state Volvo Vox wages basic income policy Baumol’s Cost Disease cheap labour and employment growth and dot.com boom and financial crisis (2008) and flexibility and Henry Ford government subsidies and housing costs and immigration and industrial revolution low-pay as check on automation minimum wage and productivity the ‘reservation wage’ as rising in China rising in emerging economies and scarcity in service sector and skill-upgrading approach stagnation of and supply of graduates Wandsworth Washington D.C.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The idea was to create a global network through which anyone anywhere could rent a spare room in their home to earn cash. In homage to its roots, they called the company Airbnb, which has grown so large that it is now bigger than all the major hotel chains combined—even though, unlike Hilton and Marriott, it doesn’t own a single bed. And the new trend it set off is the “sharing economy.” When I first heard Chesky describe his company, I confess to being a little dubious: I mean, how many people in Paris really want to rent out their kid’s bedroom down the hall to a perfect stranger—who comes to them via the Internet? And how many strangers want to be down the hall? Answer: a lot!

What we did was give those strangers identities and brands that you could trust. Do you want a stranger staying in your home? No. But would you like Michelle who went to Harvard, works in a bank, and has a five-star rating as a guest on Airbnb? Sure!” Chesky would love to apply what Airbnb has learned about the sharing economy to other realms and experiences, or, as he once put it to me: “There are eighty million power drills in America that are used an average of thirteen minutes. Does everyone really need their own drill?” The distance between imagining something, designing it, manufacturing it, and selling it everywhere has never been shorter, faster, cheaper, and easier—for engineers and non-engineers alike.

.: Social technologies are how we organize to capture the benefits of cooperation—non-zero-sum games. Physical technologies and social technologies coevolve. Physical technology innovations make new social technologies possible, like fossil fuel technologies made mass production possible, smartphones make the sharing economy possible. And vice versa, social technologies make new physical technologies possible—Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the smartphone without a global supply chain. But there is one big difference between these two forms of technology, he added: Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Yes, once again, I’m making myself uncomfortable. I’m an advisor to the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University. Since 2009, the program has embraced a 100% online model. Ironically, I’m here for a face to face meeting. And I’m using this visit to California as an opportunity to dip my toes into the infamous sharing economy. So, I’m not in a cab, and I’m not hitchhiking. I’m in a black town car with an Uber-qualified driver named Gustavo. I hailed him via mobile app. I must admit it was fun watching the little black car icon drive to my location. I already know a bit about my driver. He’s passed Uber’s insurance and background checks and has a 5 star rating.

As my black Uber car cruises the freeways of San José, I’m besieged by the image of urban sprawl. It’s hard to feel at home in a place like this. But it’s not just the office parks and strip malls that are making me uncomfortable. I’m worried about meeting Sophie. Part of the reason I don’t participate in the sharing economy is I’m an introvert, and a shy one too. Hotels are easy. Staff rarely say more than hello. But Airbnb is different. I’m staying in a home with my host. It’s like crashing with a friend you don’t know. Of course, Sophie comes highly recommended. She has a 5-star rating and dozens of glowing reviews.


pages: 186 words: 49,251

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Call them the Access Generation: a growing cohort of mobile, technically savvy young people who value access over assets. They prefer to stay nimble and rent a home rather than own one; listen to a song on Spotify rather than buy it from iTunes; or subscribe to Oysterbooks .com or Scribd rather than buy from a Barnes & Noble store. The Access Generation is behind the explosion of the new “sharing” economy. Sharing stuff has been around since stuff itself, but technology allows sharing to scale: websites like Airbnb match buyer and seller; your GPS-enabled iPhone allows you to find the closest Zipcar; Facebook and LinkedIn enable you to vet anyone you’re thinking of doing business with; and sites like PayPal allow you to safely pay for what you’re renting.

Power & Associates, 186–87 Jobs, Steve, 57 Kassensturz, 88 Kava, Jordana, 93–94 Kelly, Patrick, 35–36, 96, 164 Kerber, Tim, 49 Kirkpatrick & Hopes, 168–70 Klein, Bernard, 93 Køge, 24–25 Koum, Jan, 2, 113 K-Tipp, 88 LA Fitness, 180 laptops, 116 Lapwood, Nev, 171 large companies, 188–89, 194 lawn care, 104 Levine, Mark, 81–83, 87 Liechti, Samy, 83 LifeLock, 140 lifetime value (LTV), 128, 130, 138, 139, 142–43, 146, 151, 173 Ancestry.com and, 136 Constant Contact and, 137 HubSpot and, 133–34 Mosquito Squad and, 138 light-switch reliability, 19–20, 22 Lindt, 93, 94 LinkedIn, 19, 63, 140 Lippitt, Robb, 51 logo churn, 191–93 LoJack Stolen Vehicle Recovery System, 116 long tail, 21–22 Long Tail, The (Anderson), 16, 21 Lore, Marc, 84–85 Luciani, Patrick, 70 Lynda.com, 59 magazines, 16–17, 193 margin, 131–32 Ancestry.com and, 136 HubSpot and, 133–34 Mosquito Squad and, 138 MarketingSherpa, 52, 53 market research, 34–36 Martella, Roberto, 70 Matrix Partners, 129 McCabe, Kathy, 48–49 McDerment, Mike, 27, 144–48, 163 McGrath, Rob, 68 measuring progress, 125–34 Meeker, Matt, 19, 92 MemberGate, 49 membership website model, 47–55 Mequoda Group, 61, 154, 161, 179 messaging services, 2 WhatsApp, 1–2, 108–9, 113, 157 Microsoft, 22 Office, 24 Project, 146n Windows, 57 millennial generation, 18 MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), 111–12 monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 128, 139, 143, 149, 174 Ancestry.com and, 135, 136 CAC payback period and, 140–43 churn rate and, see churn rate Constant Contact and, 136, 137 HubSpot and, 132, 133–34, 135, 149 Mosquito Squad and, 138 SnowboardAddiction.com and, 171 Wild Apricot and, 189–91 Morningstar, 11, 12 Mosquito Squad, 31–32, 103–4, 138, 153–54, 197 Murdoch, Rupert, 16 music business, 57–58 Myspace, 146n National Dance Council of America, 49–50 Nelson, Perry, 165, 171–72, 178–79 Netflix, 35, 59, 63, 154, 155, 159, 166 NetSuite.com, 189 network model, 107–14 New Masters Academy, 59–62, 155, 166 newspapers, 16–17 New York Times, 17, 48, 82 Nicely Noted, 165, 171–72, 178–79 Nicholas, Don, 61, 154, 161, 179 Nightingale Conant, 66 Nike, 89 Nimsoft, 141–42 O’Brien, Chris, 187 onboarding, 132, 140, 142 90-day clock and, 176–82 One Wipe Charlies, 192 online reputation, 117 Onvia, 17 Osler Bluff, 162 Otis, 40 Outdoor Living Brands, 32 Oyster, 59 Panda, Sonu, 33, 158, 197 PayPal, 19 peace-of-mind model, 115–22 pets, 91–92 BarkBox and, 19, 92, 95, 165, 187 PetShopBowl.com and, 38 Tagg and, 115 PetShopBowl.com, 38 pharmacies, 31 photo printing, 156–57 Piranha Marketing System: The Seven Success Multiplying Factors to Dominate Any Market You Enter (Polish), 66 Pitney Bowes, 178 Plugg, 157 Polish, Joe, 66–67, 155 Portrait Software, 178 prioritizing customers, 75 private club model, 65–72 Private Retreats, 68 Procter & Gamble (P&G), 192 productivity applications, 100 profit-and-loss (P&L) statement, 125–28, 138 publishing, 16–17 QSS Group, 101 Qualcomm, 115 Quickbooks, 146n Quidsi, 15, 86 Radian6, 117 radioactive waste and devices, 36–37 Ravindran, Vijay, 12 razor blade business: Dollar Shave Club, 81–83, 84, 87–89, 157, 175–76, 192–93 Raz*War, 157–58, 193, 194 Raz*War, 157–58, 193, 194 Rdio, 58, 155 recession, 39–41 recurring revenue, 4, 6, 78, 104, 128 see also monthly recurring revenue reliability, 19–20, 22 “Renegotiation of Cash Flow Rights in the Sale of VC-Backed Firms” (Broughman and Fried), 147 RestaurantOwner.com, 49 Revolution Dancewear, 50–52 Rhapsody, 58 risk, 119–20, 121 RoleView, 150, 192 roof business, 118–20 Rosen, Lori, 88 Roth, Marcel, 83 Royal Melbourne Golf Club (RMGC), 65–66, 72 Running Room, 13 social status, 68, 69 SafetyNet, 116 sales approaches, 134–38 Salesforce.com, 18, 19, 74–75, 117, 159, 176 salespeople, 135, 167 Salon Speaker Series (Grano Speaker Series), 70–71, 159 scaling up, 171–94 Schwietzer, Robbie, 13 self-employed individuals, 188–89 Sellability Score.com, 3–4, 28, 31, 132, 149, 176, 182 selling subscriptions, see subscription selling “sharing” economy, 18–19 simplifier model, 99–105, 121 Site24x7.com, 117 skiing, 162 Skok, David, 129–30, 131, 150, 151, 185 Snaptracs, 115 SnowboardAddiction.com, 171 social proof, 67 socks: Blacksocks, 83, 84, 88, 151 Foot Cardigan, 165 software industry, 29–32, 74–75, 125–26 Spagnuolo, Marc, 47 SpicySubscriptions.com, 91 Spotify, 58 Springwise, 157 Standard Cocoa, 22, 93–94, 165 StitchFix, 91 Stone, Brad, 85 Strife, Carly, 92 strivers, 72 Stuart Hunt & Associates, 36–37 subscription economy, 11–25 competing in, 22–24 subscription models: all-you-can-eat library, 57–63 automatic payments in, 36–37 business valuation and, 28–32 challenges of adopting, 41–43 consumables, 81–90 convincing employees and partners about merits of, 168–69 customer loyalty and, 38 demand and, 33–34 front-of-the-line, 73–79 history of, 15–18 lifetime value of customer in, 32–33 market research and, 34–36 measuring progress in, 125–34 membership website, 47–55 need for, 27–43 network, 107–14 peace-of-mind, 115–22 private club, 65–72 recession risk and, 39–41 renaissance of, 18–22 sales approaches for, 134–38 simplifier, 99–105, 121 surprise box, 91–98 up-selling in, 38–39 using in your own business, 122 subscription selling, 153–70 burning platform strategy in, 166–67 freemium option in, 161–62, 164 gift offers in, 164–66 rational buying and, 157–59 subscription fatigue and, 154 10x vs. 10% idea in, 155–57 trial in, 161–64 ultimatum in, 159–60 Subscription Site Insider, 52, 53 surfing, 182–83 surprise box model, 91–98 swimming pools, 104 Tagg, 115 Tarence, Zen, 29–30 Target, 13, 89 Subscriptions, 15 TechCrunch, 157 technology, 99 telephone, 107–8 telephone sales, 135 The Live Event (TLE), 53 37signals, 144, 145–46 Thriveworks, 75–77 TIGER 21, 67–68, 72, 149, 159 Time Warner Cable, 23 TrendHunter.com, 91–92 trial offers, 161–64 Tri-State Elevator Co., 40–41 Trojan Horse, 94–95, 98 Twitter, 61, 63, 108, 117 ultimatums, 159–60 underwriting profit, 117, 118 user marketing, 108–9 vacation industry, 68–70, 73–74 Vagonis, Jim, 102–3, 181 valuation of businesses, 28–32 venture capital, 147–48, 151 viability threshold, 129–30 Volcker, Paul, 70 Wall Street Journal, 17, 48, 188 Walmart, 13, 84, 89 Goodies Co., 20–21, 35 Warrillow & Co., 5–6 website monitoring, 117 Wells Fargo, 126 Werdelin, Henrik, 92 WhatsApp, 1–2, 108–9, 113, 157 WhichTestWon.com, 52–53 Whiteman, Brian, 156 Whiteman, Julie, 156 Wild Apricot, 29, 184–85, 189–91 Wired, 16 Women’s Living, 179 Woodward, Bob, 71 Wood Whisperer Guild, 47 Workday, 135 World of Warcraft, 111–12 WP Engine, 177 Wunderlist, 100 Yoga Journal, 179 Zendesk, 77, 79, 163 Zide, Scott, 32 Zipcar, 19, 109–11, 113, 153 * The “first mover advantage” concept is severely overhyped.


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Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Renting carries with it the risk that you will be evicted if you miss a number of rental payments or cannot afford your rent after it has been increased by the landlord. People “self-assess” valuations in difficult circumstances whenever they buy insurance and are required, even if only implicitly, to decide how much money they would need if their house or car is destroyed. The sharing economy—exemplified by Zipcar, Uber, and Airbnb—is helping to accustom us to temporary “possessing” rather than “owning,” and simultaneously consuming and selling (and hence setting a price on) the same product. However, a COST would change life radically, which is why it should be tested in limited public and commercial markets before being applied more broadly.

Leaders, political campaigns, and political scientists have begun to explore whether using QV to elicit public opinions allows them to more accurately answer the questions so crucial to their jobs: how can we form a platform and reach compromises that will respect the strongly held views of a range of citizens? In the coming years, experiments with QV will offer a proving ground for the practical utility of QV. RATING AND SOCIAL AGGREGATION Rating and social aggregation systems fuel today’s digital economy. Reputation systems are the crucial trust mechanisms that allow “sharing economy” services like Airbnb, VRBO, Uber, and Lyft to win consumer acceptance and give providers the confidence to adopt the system.46 They play a core role in the popular search services offered by Amazon, Google, Apple’s app store, and Yelp. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests these systems are badly broken.

., 78 Cabral, Luís, 202 Cadappster app, 31 Caesar, Julius, 84 Canada, 10, 13, 159, 182 capitalism, xvi; basic structure of, 24–25; competition and, 17 (see also competition); corporate planning and, 39–40; cultural consequences of, 270, 273; Engels on, 239–40; freedom and, 34–39; George on, 36–37; growth and, 3 (see also growth, economic); industrial revolution, 36, 255; inequality and, 3 (see also inequality); labor and, 136–37, 143, 159, 165, 211, 224, 231, 239–40, 316n4; laissez-faire, 45; liberalism and, 3, 17, 22–27; markets and, 278, 288, 304n36; Marx on, 239–40; monopolies and, 22–23, 34–39, 44, 46–49, 132, 136, 173, 177, 179, 199, 258, 262; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; property and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; Radical Markets and, 169, 180–85, 203, 273; regulations and, 262; Schumpeter on, 47; shareholders and, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95; technology and, 34, 203, 316n4; wealth and, 45, 75, 78–79, 136, 143, 239, 273 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), xiii Capitalism for the People, A (Luigi), 203 Capra, Frank, 17 Carroll, Lewis, 176 central planning: computers and, 277–85, 288–93; consumers and, 19; democracy and, 89; governance and, 19–20, 39–42, 46–48, 62, 89, 277–85, 288–90, 293; healthcare and, 290–91; liberalism and, 19–20; markets and, 277–85, 288–93; property and, 39–42, 46–48, 62; recommendation systems and, 289–90; socialism and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281 Chetty, Raj, 11 Chiang Kai-shek, 46 China, 15, 46, 56, 133–34, 138 Christensen, Clayton, 202 Chrysler, 193 Citigroup, 183, 184, 191 Clarke, Edward, 99, 102, 105 Clayton Act, 176–77, 197, 311n25 Clemens, Michael, 162 Coase, Ronald, 40, 48–51, 299n26 Cold War, xix, 25, 288 collective bargaining, 240–41 collective decisions: democracy and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; manipulation of, 99; markets for, 97–105; public goods and, 98; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; Vickrey and, 99, 102, 105 colonialism, 8, 131 Coming of the Third Reich, The (Evans), 93 common ownership self-assessed tax (COST): broader application of, 273–76; cybersquatters and, 72; education and, 258–59; efficiency and, 256, 261; equality and, 258; globalization and, 269–70; growth and, 73, 256; human capital and, 258–61; immigrants and, 261, 269, 273; inequality and, 256–59; international trade and, 270; investment and, 258–59, 270; legal issues and, 275; markets and, 286; methodology of, 63–66; monopolies and, 256–61, 270, 300n43; objections to, 300n43; optimality and, 61, 73, 75–79, 317n18; personal possessions and, 301n47, 317n18; political effects of, 261–64; predatory outsiders and, 300n43; prices and, 62–63, 67–77, 256, 258, 263, 275, 300n43, 317n18; property and, 31, 61–79, 271–74, 300n43, 301n47; public goods and, 256; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 123–25, 194, 261–63, 273, 275, 286; Radical Markets and, 79, 123–26, 257–58, 271–72, 286; taxes and, 61–69, 73–76, 258–61, 275, 317n18; technology and, 71–72, 257–59; true market economy and, 72–75; voting and, 263; wealth and, 256–57, 261–64, 269–70, 275, 286 communism, 19–20, 46–47, 93–94, 125, 278 competition: antitrust policies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; auctions and, xv–xix, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57; bargaining and, 240–41, 299n26; democracy and, 109, 119–20; by design, 49–55; elitism and, 25–28; equilibrium and, 305n40; eternal vigilance and, 204; horizontal concentration and, 175; imperfect, 304n36; indexing and, 185–91, 302n63; innovation and, 202–3; investment and, 196–97; labor and, 145, 158, 162–63, 220, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245, 256, 266; laissez-faire and, 253; liberalism and, 6, 17, 20–28; lobbyists and, 262; monopolies and, 174; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 20–21, 41, 49–55, 79; perfect, 6, 25–28, 109; prices and, 20–22, 25, 173, 175, 180, 185–90, 193, 200–201, 204, 244; property and, 41, 49–55, 79; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 304n36; regulations and, 262; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; restoring, 191–92; Section 7 and, 196–97, 311n25; selfishness and, 109, 270–71; Smith on, 17; tragedy of the commons and, 44 complexity, 218–20, 226–28, 274–75, 279, 281, 284, 287, 313n15 “Computer and the Market, The” (Lange), 277 computers: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automation of labor and, 222–23, 251, 254; central planning and, 277–85, 288–93; data and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; Deep Blue, 213; distributed computing and, 282–86, 293; growth in poor countries and, 255; as intermediaries, 274; machine learning (ML) and, 214 (see also machine learning [ML]); markets and, 277, 280–93; Mises and, 281; Moore’s Law and, 286–87; Open-Trac and, 31–32; parallel processing and, 282–86; prices of, 21; recommendation systems and, 289–90 Condorcet, Marquis de, 4, 90–93, 303n15, 306n51 conspicuous consumption, 78 Consumer Reports magazine, 291 consumers: antitrust suits and, 175, 197–98; central planning and, 19; data from, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; drone delivery to, 220; as entrepreneurs, 256; goods and services for, 27, 92, 123, 130, 175, 280, 292; institutional investment and, 190–91; international culture for, 270; lobbyists and, 262; machine learning (ML) and, 238; monopolies and, 175, 186, 197–98; preferences of, 280, 288–93; prices and, 172 (see also prices); recommendation systems and, 289–90; robots and, 287; sharing economy and, 117; Soviet collapse and, 289; technology and, 287 cooperatives, 118, 126, 261, 267, 299n24 Corbyn, Jeremy, 12, 13 corruption, 3, 23, 27, 57, 93, 122, 126, 157, 262 Cortana, 219 cost-benefit analysis, 2, 244 “Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders” (Vickrey), xx–xxi Cramton, Peter, 52, 54–55, 57 crowdsourcing, 235 crytocurrencies, 117–18 cybersquatters, 72 data: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; big, 213, 226, 293; computers and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; consumer, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; diminishing returns and, 226, 229–30; distribution of complexity and, 228; as entertainment, 233–39, 248–49; Facebook and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; feedback and, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245; free, 209, 211, 220, 224, 231–35, 239; Google and, 28, 202, 207–13, 219–20, 224, 231–36, 241–42, 246; investment in, 212, 224, 232, 244; labeled, 217–21, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 237; labor movement for, 241–43; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; network effects and, 211, 236, 238, 243; neural networks and, 214–19; online services and, 211, 235; overfitting and, 217–18; payment systems for, 210–13, 224–30; photographs and, 64, 214–15, 217, 219–21, 227–28, 291; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; Radical Markets for, 246–49; reCAPTCHA and, 235–36; recommendation systems and, 289–90; rise of data work and, 209–13; sample complexity and, 217–18; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; social networks and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; technofeudalism and, 230–33; under-employment and, 256; value of, 243–45; venture capital and, 211, 224; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253; women’s work and, 209, 313n4 Declaration of Independence, 86 Deep Blue, 213 DeFoe, Daniel, 132 Demanding Work (Gray and Suri), 233 democracy: 1p1v system and, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 219; Athenians and, 55, 83–84, 131; auctions and, 97, 99; basic structure of, 24–25; central planning and, 89; check and balance systems and, 23, 25, 87, 92; collective decisions and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; collective mediocrity and, 96; competition and, 109, 119–20; Declaration of Independence and, 86; efficiency and, 92, 110, 126; elections and, 22, 80, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; elitism and, 89–91, 96, 124; Enlightenment and, 86, 95; Europe and, 90–96; France and, 90–95; governance and, 84, 117; gridlock and, 84, 88, 122–24, 261, 267; Hitler and, 93–94; House of Commons and, 84–85; House of Lords and, 85; impossibility theorem and, 92; inequality and, 123; Jury Theorem and, 90–92; liberalism and, 3–4, 25, 80, 86, 90; limits of, 85–86; majority rule and, 27, 83–89, 92–97, 100–101, 121, 306n51; markets and, 97–105, 262, 276; minorities and, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110; mixed constitution and, 84–85; multi-candidate, single-winner elections and, 119–20; origins of, 83–85; ownership and, 81–82, 89, 101, 105, 118, 124; public goods and, 28, 97–100, 107, 110, 120, 123, 126; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105–22; Radical Markets and, 82, 106, 123–26, 203; supermajorities and, 84–85, 88, 92; tyrannies and, 23, 25, 88, 96–100, 106, 108; United Kingdom and, 95–96; United States and, 86–90, 93, 95; voting and, 80–82, 85–93, 96, 99, 105, 108, 115–16, 119–20, 123–24, 303n14, 303n17, 303n20, 304n36, 305n39; wealth and, 83–84, 87, 95, 116 Demosthenes, 55 Denmark, 182 Department of Justice (DOJ), 176, 186, 191 deregulation, 3, 9, 24 Desmond, Matthew, 201–2 Dewey, John, 43 Dickens, Charles, 36 digital economy: data producers and, 208–9, 230–31; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; as entertainment, 233–39; facial recognition and, 208, 216, 218–19; free access and, 211; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; machine learning (ML) and, 208–9, 213–14, 217–21, 226–31, 234–35, 238, 247, 289, 291, 315n48; payment systems for, 210–13, 221–30, 243–45; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; rise of data work and, 209–13; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; spam and, 210, 245; technofeudalism and, 230–33; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253 diversification, 171–72, 180–81, 185, 191–92, 194–96, 310n22, 310n24 dot-com bubble, 211 double taxation, 65 Dupuit, Jules, 173 Durkheim, Émile, 297n23 Dworkin, Ronald, 305n40 dystopia, 18, 191, 273, 293 education, 114; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; data and, 229, 232, 248; elitism and, 260; equality in, 89; financing, 276; free compulsory, 23; immigrants and, 14, 143–44, 148; labor and, 140, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 170–71, 232, 248, 258–60; Mill on, 96; populist movements and, 14; Stolper-Samuelson Theorem and, 143 efficient capital markets hypothesis, 180 elections, 80; data and, 217–18; democracy and, 22, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; gridlock and, 124; Hitler and, 93; multi-candidate, single-winner, 119–20; polls and, 13, 111; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 115, 119–21, 268, 306n52; U.S. 2016, 93, 296n20 Elhauge, Einer, 176, 197 elitism: aristocracy and, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36; bourgeoisie and, 36; bureaucrats and, 267; democracy and, 89–91, 96, 124; education and, 260; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; financial deregulation and, 3; immigrants and, 146, 166; liberalism and, 3, 15–16, 25–28; minorities and, 12, 14–15, 19, 23–27, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110, 181, 194, 273, 303n14, 304n36; monarchies and, 85–86, 91, 95, 160 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, 121 eminent domain, 33, 62, 89 Empire State Building, 45 Engels, Friedrich, 78, 240 Enlightenment, 86, 95 entrepreneurs, xiv; immigrants and, 144–45, 159, 256; labor and, 129, 144–45, 159, 173, 177, 203, 209–12, 224, 226, 256; ownership and, 35, 39 equality: common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; education and, 89; immigrants and, 257; labor and, 147, 166, 239, 257; liberalism and, 4, 8, 24, 29; living standards and, 3, 11, 13, 133, 135, 148, 153, 254, 257; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 264; Radical Markets and, 262, 276; trickle down theories and, 9, 12 Espinosa, Alejandro, 30–32 Ethereum, 117 Europe, 177, 201; democracy and, 88, 90–95; European Union and, 15; fiefdoms in, 34; government utilities and, 48; income patterns in, 5; instability in, 88; labor and, 11, 130–31, 136–47, 165, 245; social democrats and, 24; unemployment rates in, 11 Evans, Richard, 93 Evicted (Desmond), 201–2 Ex Machina (film), 208 Facebook, xxi; advertising and, 50, 202; data and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; monetization by, 28; news service of, 289; Vickrey Commons and, 50 facial recognition, 208, 216–19 family reunification programs, 150, 152 farms, 17, 34–35, 37–38, 61, 72, 135, 142, 179, 283–85 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 50, 71 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 176, 186 feedback, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245 feudalism, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239 Fidelity, 171, 181–82, 184 financial crisis of 2008, 3, 121 Fitzgerald, F.


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Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

The addition of allotments and farms gives shoppers the opportunity to select their own produce for their meal, while a network of waterways will not only offer an alternative route around the shopping centre but also access to watersports – one of the many leisure activities available. Westfield’s ‘Destination 2028’ concept also highlights the rise of the sharing economy, with ‘rental retail’ expected to become the norm for post-millennials seeking to rent everything from clothes to exercise gear. Pop-ups, temporary retail, and co-working spaces are also likely to emerge in the future of retail, according to Westfield. * * * A place to discover, a place to learn Retailers must not overlook the importance of discovery as they aim to create a more meaningful connection with shoppers.

Known for going the extra mile, Lush employees are also empowered to make their own decisions to better connect with the customer, whether that’s giving away a free sample or changing the merchandising mix to reflect the weather (ie putting out more colourful, cheery products on a rainy day). The result is a more meaningful, more memorable experience – and certainly one that goes beyond the transaction. A place to borrow Last but not least, we believe that the store of the future will be a place to borrow. The sharing economy has already disrupted transportation and tourism but has yet to make its mark on the retail sector – shops naturally want to sell, rather than lend, to their customers. Well, the times are a-changing. We are entering an age where access will trump ownership. This is due to the combination of a growing population, unprecedented connectivity and shifts in consumer values and priorities.

Available from: https://uk.westfield.com/content/dam/westfield-corp/uk/Style-Trial-Press-Release.pdf [Last accessed 1/7/2018] 29 Balch, Oliver (2016) Is the Library of Things an answer to our peak stuff problem? Guardian, 23 August. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/23/library-of-things-peak-stuff-sharing-economy-consumerism-uber [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 13 Retail fulfilment: winning the customer over the final mile ‘You do not want to give Amazon a seven-year head start.’ Warren Buffett, US business magnate1 In Chapters 11 and 12, we saw how the store of the future will have to evolve to simultaneously reduce friction and become more experiential.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Investors wanted to believe Adam could fulfill his vision, and at least some of their faith seemed to rest on an expectation that he could convince the next person to kick in even more—the greater fool theory of finance. When Adam approached tech investors, he emphasized the money that could be made in real estate; to more traditional financiers, he talked about the promise of WeWork’s technology. Around 2015, Adam came up with a new pitch: WeWork was a “community company,” part of the sharing economy, with hallways that were designed to be as narrow as possible not because doing so allowed WeWork to squeeze in more paying tenants, but in order to force members to connect. In early 2015, just a few months after WeWork’s Series D, its finance team started approaching investors about another injection of capital that would allow the company to keep up with its escalating costs.

“For a very spiritual country—and I can definitely tell you this is the most spiritual country in the world—I’m surprised a little bit from the amount of talk I heard about valuation and raising money and bubbles.” The crowd laughed nervously. Adam insisted this wasn’t what he was after. He believed that India’s budding democracy and growing economy embodied an idea he had been talking about with increasing frequency: the “We Generation,” an ageless demographic defined by a faith in the sharing economy and a belief that doing well could come from doing good. “I swear to you success will follow; the money will follow,” Adam said. “And you will change the world⁠.” On his last night in India, Adam met Masa at a bar on the top floor of a building in New Delhi. The meeting had been arranged by Nikesh Arora, Masa’s top deputy at SoftBank, who had previously spurned WeWork as a potential investment.

At the end of 2017, Adam and Rebekah spent $35 million to buy four apartments in a single Gramercy building, combining three of the units into a mega penthouse. Adam bought homes for his sister and grandmother, paying them back for the rent and tuition they had covered during his early years in New York. WeWork employees could only roll their eyes when Adam and Rebekah spoke about their embrace of the sharing economy and lack of interest in material wealth. “We believe in this new ‘asset-light lifestyle,’” Rebekah told one interviewer, at a time when the Neumanns owned five homes. “We want to live off of the land. I’m like a real hippie.” WeWork’s 2017 Halloween party had another apt theme: The Great Gatsby.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

It can create entirely new businesses—particularly if, like CLP, you are sophisticated enough to see how the world is changing before others do. Robin Chase founded Zipcar—a car sharing service—in 2000, nearly twenty years ago, years before the rest of us discovered the sharing economy. She saw Zipcar as part of a much larger vision for how the economy might be transformed. In one interview she explained: The collaborative economy is larger than the sharing economy. The sharing economy feels to me like it’s about assets. The collaborative economy is everything. It’s making clear and visceral to us that, if I can have real-time access not just to hard assets, but to people, to networks, to experiences, it means that the way I do my own personal life is completely transformed.


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

Williams, and Stephanie Alexander, “Augur: A Decentralized Oracle and Prediction Market Platform (v2.0),” November 1, 2019, https://www.augur.net/whitepaper.pdf. 2. he wrote on GitHub: Vitalik Buterin, “Standardized_Contract_APIs,” GitHub, June 23, 2015, https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Standardized_Contract_APIs/499c882f3ec123537fc2fccd57eaa29e6032fe4a. 3. with their thoughts: Alex Van de Sande, “Let's talk about the coin standard,” Reddit, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3n8fkn/lets_talk_about_the_coin_standard/. 4. issue being discussed: Fabian Vogelsteller, “ERC: Token standard #20,” GitHub, November 19, 2015, https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/20. 5. ended up implementing: Rune Christensen, “Introducing eDollar, the ultimate stablecoin built on Ethereum,” Reddit, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/30f98i/introducing_edollar_the_ultimate_stablecoin_built/. 6. companies to build on: Jeff Wilcke, “Homestead Release,” Ethereum Foundation Blog, February 29, 2016, https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/02/29/homestead-release/. 7. world had Ethereum: Gavin Andresen, “Bit-thereum,” GavinTech (blog), June 9, 2014, http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2014/06/bit-thereum.html. 19: The Magic Lock 1. Slock.it’s blog posts: Slock.it, “Decentralizing the Emerging Sharing Economy,” Medium, Slock.it Blog, December 2, 2015, https://blog.slock.it/slock-it-decentralizing-the-emerging-sharing-economy-cf19ce09b957?c=20150901_vision%22%20%5Cl%20%220_blog. 2. automating governance rules: Christoph Jentzsch, “Decentralized Autonomous Organization to Automate Governance, Final Draft—Under Review,” 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20180913233456/https://download.slock.it/public/DAO/WhitePaper.pdf. 20: The DAO Wars 1. a blog post about it: Peter Vessenes, “More Ethereum Attacks: Race-to-Empty Is the Real Deal,” Vessenes (blog), June 9, 2016, https://vessenes.com/more-ethereum-attacks-race-to-empty-is-the-real-deal/. 2.

Christoph Jentzsch, a German theoretical physicist, had been working on testing and checking the compatibility among the different Ethereum clients. Christoph was known for being very good at his job, obsessive and meticulous, so when he jumped into a new venture, people paid attention. “With Uber, Airbnb, and others leading the way, we have to ask ourselves, ‘Is this how we want to build the sharing economy?’ Monopolistic companies that take extraordinary fees and have full control of the market?” said one of Slock.it’s blog posts.1 Slock.it cofounders, including Jentzsch’s brother, wanted to make it possible for people to rent, sell, and share their property without having to use intermediaries.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

One of the top holdings in the Impax Environmental Markets fund is DS Smith, a FTSE 100-listed packaging company in the UK that has been expanding in the US, developing environmentally friendly packaging solutions and using recycled paper and cardboard to make new packaging. Companies like this can also help address the issue of so-called scope 3 emissions, which take into account emissions indirectly caused by a company through their supply chain. The sharing economy is also part of the circular-economy movement: the emphasis being on consumers owning fewer things and instead renting or sharing. Lift-sharing services like Uber or Lyft are one obvious example, while in China, start-up YCloset, which allows users to rent clothes and jewellery, attracted investment from Chinese technology giant Alibaba in 2018.

Morgan 82, 86, 88, 188, 189 Just 147–8 Kellogg Company 83, 155, 161–2 Kingspan 170 Kiverdi 159 Kleiner Perkins 114, 152 Kleinman, Gabe 135–6 Korteweg, Jaap 153 L&G Future World ESG UK Index 9 Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) 60–61, 74, 88, 98; Climate Impact Pledge report (2018) 61 lending/loans 66, 67, 73, 82, 83, 118–20, 194, 195 Lenzing 173 Lewis, Michael 11, 180, 181, 186 Lightsource Renewable Energy 116 Lilac 137 London Stock Exchange 25, 56 Looney, Bernard 116, 199 low carbon funds 42, 62, 63, 68, 85, 86, 106 Luke, Horace 127–9 Maersk 76 Make My Money Matter movement 40–41, 201 Mallinda 168 Malta (energy company) 121 Maple Leaf 154 Marks & Spencer 69, 71–2 McDonald’s McVegan burger 151 McKinsey 63–4, 128, 202 meat, alternative 7, 10, 15, 18, 22, 35, 36, 149–66 methane 109, 113, 159, 175 micromobility 127–9 Microsoft 7, 19, 62–3, 91, 127, 197 Mintel 150–51 mis-selling 11–12, 101, 193 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 114, 122 Mitsui 148 Mizuno, Hiro 93 mopeds, electric 127, 128 Morgan Creek Capital Management 35, 152 Morgan Stanley 79, 181, 200 Morningstar 6, 11, 41, 42, 62, 85, 103, 105, 124, 125, 197–8 Mosaic 118–20 MSCI World Index 2, 30, 97, 97n, 100–101, 102, 103, 104, 184, 185, 191 Musk, Elon 15, 119, 132 mutual funds 30, 62, 143, 161 Nest (workplace pension scheme) 91 Nestlé 76, 155, 177 Netflix 157 New Energy Investment Trust 25–6 New York City 47, 173 next-gen investors 170–71 Northvolt 137 Nutmeg 99–102 nutrition fund 161 NXP Semiconductors 143, 166 Obvious Ventures 135–6, 152 oil and gas companies 7, 9, 16–17, 125, 134, 199, 203; alternative energy investment 4, 78, 83, 85, 107–13, 115–20, 140, 142, 154, 187, 196; banks and 82, 188, 194; Big Oil 4, 53, 55, 113, 115, 116–17, 126; billionaires and 16–17; Climate Leadership Council and 188–9; divestment and 45–7, 50, 51, 52–3, 54, 55–6, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68; greenwashing and 78–9, 101, 191–2; lending to 82; liquidity of shares 59; ‘net zero’ pledges 5, 71, 76, 78, 79–80, 116, 126, 186; oil prices 55, 56, 138, 189, 197; public shaming of 60; scope 3 emissions and 185, 186; subsidies 182; transitioning away from/energy transition 19, 21, 36, 39, 76, 84, 107–20, 123; value traps 59 Olympics (2020) 137 ON Semiconductor 166, 167 Oppenheim, Jeremy 63–5, 93, 142, 190, 194 Orsted 108, 125, 137, 154 ‘overweight’ equities 31 palm oil 141, 191 Paris Agreement (2015) 4–5, 10, 42, 73, 74–5, 76, 78, 109, 111, 117, 132, 165, 188, 193 Parish, Billy 118–20 Parr, Adam 38–9 passive funds 30, 31, 41, 74, 96–104 Patagonia 175, 176 PCAF (Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials) 186–7 pension funds ix, 4, 7, 13, 20, 39–41, 44, 46, 54, 58, 59, 61, 67, 74, 76, 88, 92, 93, 98, 105, 122, 137, 140, 180, 181, 184, 185, 195; putting pressure on your pension manager 90–93 PetroChina 76 PG&E 58 Philip Morris 177 Philips 82 Pictet Clean Energy fund 125, 138, 143, 161, 166–7 Pod Point 140 Poulsen, Henrik 108 Prime Coalition 123, 168, 170 Pritzker Simmons, Liesel 170, 171, 182 private equity 3, 20, 34–7, 41, 44, 121, 124, 139, 140, 144, 174, 178–9 Procter & Gamble 174 Proterra 135 Provera, Nino Tronchetti 35 public shaming 60, 61–2 Purcell, James 66, 163–4 Quakers 48, 54 Quantum Energy Partners 140 QuantumScape 137 Quidnet Energy 121, 123 Quigley, Dr Ellen 65–6, 67, 74–5 recycling 15, 24–5, 28, 33, 51, 66, 82, 159, 166, 168, 171–2, 173–4, 175, 176, 184 RE100 initiative 86–7 renewable energy see individual type of renewable energy retail investors 3, 7, 8, 13, 31, 34, 36, 39, 61, 66, 73, 74, 77, 84, 90, 93, 95, 96, 101, 104, 195 Richemont 11 risk 4, 6, 7; agriculture and levels of 161–2; angel investing and 37–8; bonds and 33, 34; disclosure of 58, 80–84, 88, 190–91, 199; energy efficiency and 171, 178–9; energy solutions and 122, 124, 125, 126; equities and 31, 32; ESG/climate change risk 8, 13, 16, 17, 55–9, 62, 63, 81, 89, 93, 103, 178, 180, 181–2, 183, 184, 185–7, 189–91, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199; high-risk investors 126, 144, 162, 178–9; low-risk investors 126, 143, 161, 178; measurement of carbon risk 57–8, 62, 63, 81, 84, 103, 178, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190–91, 193; medium-risk investors 126, 143–4, 161–2, 178; private equity 34, 35; regulation and 130; risk appetite 20, 22, 26, 125, 138; spreading 54, 84, 94; transport and 130, 138, 143–4; understanding 24–30 Risley, John 142 RobecoSAM Sustainable Food Equities fund 161 Roessing, Christian 125, 138, 166–8 Royal Ahrend 173 Royal DSM 173 Royal Dutch Shell 4, 5, 49, 50, 53, 55, 69–71, 72, 76, 78, 108, 115, 116, 117, 142, 186 S&P 31, 196; Global Clean Energy index 124–5, 197 Samsung 115, 143 Sarasin & Partners 75, 77, 90, 161 Schroders 49, 73–4, 134, 143, 144, 189–90 SCM Direct 9, 103 scope 3 emissions 81, 175, 176, 185–7 semiconductor companies 143, 166–7, 178 shale gas extraction 53, 79 ShareAction 33, 67, 73, 75, 78, 87–9, 104, 192 share prices 31, 50–51, 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 65, 75, 132, 138, 154, 199 sharing economy 175 shipping 76, 96, 143, 158 Siam Cement 83 Siemens 90, 103, 125; Gamesa Renewable Energy 103, 125 Silicon Ranch 116 socially responsible investing (SRI) 8, 9, 47–50, 56, 73, 75, 99, 100–102, 123, 147, 200 SolarCity 119 SolarEdge Technologies 125 solar energy 3, 4, 21, 79, 110, 111, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 118–21, 125, 131, 134, 138, 167 solar loans to homeowners 118–20 Sonnen 115–16 Soros, George 18 sovereign wealth funds 74, 122, 148 SSE 125 standards, global sustainability 190–96 start-ups 15, 18, 27, 36–7, 64, 114, 115, 122, 126, 128, 131, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 152, 153, 155–6, 157, 158, 160, 162, 166, 168, 170, 175, 179 subsidies 3, 114, 115, 131, 182, 201 Sustainability Accounting Standards Board 190 Sustainalytics 62, 82, 104 Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania 45 Systemiq 64, 93, 142, 190, 194 Systrom, Nicole 123, 124 Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) 58, 88, 190–91, 199 TCI (activist hedge fund) 13–14 Teekay Shuttle Tankers 96 Temasek 148 Terramera 158 Tesla 7, 15, 103, 115, 119, 132–3, 134, 157, 163 Tetrick, Josh 145–8 Thiel, Peter 148 350.org 46, 82 Thunberg, Greta 6 Timberland 172 tobacco holdings 3, 8, 9, 40, 47, 49, 51–2, 54, 101, 103, 177 Tomra Systems 165–6 Too Good to Go 160 Total 76, 117 Toyota 15, 137, 140, 143 Trafigura 138 ‘tragedy of the horizon’ 193–4 transport 7, 21–2, 33, 85, 120, 125, 127–44, 148, 149, 153, 157, 160, 165, 167, 172; battery, role of 136–8; biofuels and aviation 140–43; electrification of 129–40; high-risk investors 144; Horace Luke/electric mopeds 127–9; infrastructure 138–40; low-risk investors 143; medium-risk investors 143–4; shipping 143; venture capitalist firms and 135–6 Treau 170 trees, planting 5, 28, 79, 150, 203 Trimble Navigation 157 Triodos Investment Management 90, 102–3, 187 T.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

He did not know, however, that they were in for a bumpy ride. CHRISTOPH JENTZSCH, THE C++ developer from Mittweida, Germany, who had, before launch, created the tests that aimed to fork the network, was now working on a new venture. Slock.it was an internet-of-things company to enable a blockchain-based, decentralized sharing economy. As he had demonstrated at DevCon 1 with the electric kettle, the Slock was a device that could be unlocked with an Ethereum transaction so that, for instance, the door to a decentralized Airbnb could open as soon as the guest paid. Christoph, his older brother Simon, and Stephan Tual, who were cofounders, and two employees—Lefteris and an American from Seattle named Griff Green—needed funding for Slock.it.

Or they could do something more interesting: sell a token that conferred voting rights. Even better, they decided, not only would they do that, but Slock.it would not raise the funds itself: the sale would create a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) whose decisions would be controlled by its token holders, and that would pay Slock.it for developing the decentralized sharing economy. If Slock.it alone worked for the DAO, the DAO would function, in effect, like Slock.it’s executive board. As Christoph explained at DevCon, “You fund the development, you are able to vote on major decisions, and very importantly, you control the funds… [T]he money will not just go to us.” Slock.it, however, would hopefully become one of the first “service providers,” or contractors, to the DAO.

He would say Slock.it’s legal point of view was that creating the DAO was the same as gathering thousands of founders to create a company that didn’t need to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Slock.it’s other cofounders had slightly different conceptions, with self-described “crazy anarchist” Griff thinking of it more as a nonprofit governing body for the universal sharing economy that he was obsessed with—one that would allow him to be a nomad who lived out of a backpack and to rent things he needed on occasion. Lefteris and Stephan described it as a traditional company, except with token holders operating a smart contract at the center, which would return profits to them.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

Everything you can do as a customer you can also do as a supplier, even write your own computer game if you so wish. You can sell a seat in your car, a meal in your home, a parking space outside your house, a loan of your bicycle, even time with your dog, along with limitless other services in the newly christened ‘sharing economy’. This new fashion is just one more example of the excluded middle, allowing you as an individual to bypass the conventional suppliers of these services by doing it yourself on the web. It is big business for some. By April 2014 Airbnb was valued by investors at $10 billion, bigger than Hyatt or the Intercontinental hotel groups, while the homeowners each earned an average of $7,530 in 2013 by renting out their rooms.

Employment will drop a bit, particularly in the domestic service sector. The capital goods sector may improve, although much of it will probably be imported. More people will shrink back into their homes rather than go out on the town. Our homes will increasingly become work hubs as we start to exploit all the opportunities of the new DIY and sharing economies. The worrying thought is that we will see less of other people except on the screens of our phones or computers, even if we work in some sort of organisation. It is this aspect of the DIY Second Curve that I will explore in the next essay, because we are all going to have to find our way up this curve, whether we like it or not.


pages: 215 words: 55,212

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

—PETER SCHWARTZ, futurist; cofounder and chairman, GBN, and partner in the monitor group “In this timely and extremely practical book, Gansky not only gives dozens of examples of sharing companies disrupting the status quo and experiencing exponential growth, but she also talks about why they’re successful—what it means to be a Mesh business and what you have to do to thrive as the world moves to a share economy.” —JOHN LILLY, CEO, Mozilla “Lisa Gansky has uncovered a revolution that even most of its perpetrators didn’t know existed. It’s a brave new marketplace, where consumers rule and business models are turned topsy-turvy. Where innovation and inspiration collide to create greener, cooler products and services that are high in value and values.

Firefox’s intellectual property is held under a special type of open-source license. The code, developed by community and incorporated into Firefox, continues to be held by those members, who in return grant access to Mozilla to embed and use it. This “communal IP,” as I call it, is a wonderful example of the share economy ethos that was, and hopefully will remain, at the core of the Internet. Mozilla, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Architecture for Humanity remain strong embodiments of that ethos. The result is continuously organic improvement of the Web experience for all. These open communities and platforms are a terrific demonstration of the culture of gifting and generosity that fueled the “Web economy” in the mid-1990s.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

They can stop working for any one capitalist and go and get another job, but they can never stop working for the capitalist class altogether. You work and are exploited to make your boss rich, or you starve – some ‘freedom’.5 It’s not unusual to hear pundits argue that people who understand class as Marx did are living in the past. In the new ‘sharing economy’, everyone is a winner, they say. But that same struggle between workers and bosses that has defined the last two centuries of our history still defines it today. Society is still predominantly divided into two camps: that small group of people who live off the value produced by others, and that big group of people whose only choice is to work or starve.

Brighton and Hove City Council (2010) Housing costs update Quarter 4 2010. www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/sites/brighton-hove.gov.uk/files/2010%20%284%29%20Housing%20Costs%20%28Oct-Dec%29.pdf; Brighton and Hove City Council (2017) Brighton & Hove housing market report Quarter 4 2017. www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/sites/brighton-hove.gov.uk/files/2017%20%284%29%20Housing%20Market%20Report%20%28Oct-Dec%29.pdf. 3. F. Kooti, M. Grbovic, L. M. Aiello, N. Djuric, V. Radosavljevic, and K. Lerman (2017) Analyzing Uber’s ride-sharing economy, in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference, ACM Press. 4. K. Bryan (2019) Deliveroo and Uber Eats takeaway riders rent jobs to ‘illegal immigrants’. The Times. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/deliveroo-and-uber-eats-takeaway-riders-rent-jobs-to-illegal-immigrants-ml36gvp93. 5. M. Perry (2000) Bread and work: social policy and the experience of unemployment, 1918–39.


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Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, buy low sell high, content marketing, inventory management, Lyft, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, subscription business, TaskRabbit, the scientific method, Uber for X, uber lyft

You just need a napkin, a pen, and the power of observation. There’s a sharing economy service or app for everything these days. You can get paid to lend a set of tools to a neighbor you’ve never met. You can invest in a crowdfunding project led by strangers on a different continent. And now, several services let you rent out your car by the hour, day, or week to someone who needs it. If you have a car that you don’t drive every day, it’s one of the easiest ways to make some extra cash. In Los Angeles, Tahsir Ahsan took this hustle idea several steps further. After creating an account with Turo, one of the sharing economy services that operates as a middleman between renters and car owners, he quickly learned how to optimize his price and listing details to bring him just about as much business as he could handle.


pages: 230 words: 61,702

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

We are instead, Rifkin suggests, seeing the rise of the Collaborative Commons: The IoT [the Internet of Things] enables billions of people to engage in peer-to-peer social networks and cocreate the many new economic opportunities and practices that constitute life on the emerging Collaborative Commons. That platform turns everyone into a prosumer and every activity into a collaboration … allowing social capital to flourish on an unprecedented scale, making a shared economy possible.5 As a result, Rifkin argues, the Internet of Things and the networked nature of our digital form of life are moving us toward “the zero marginal cost society.” In turn, that challenges the central capitalist tenet, that increased human productivity requires increased human labor. “The traditional dream of rags to riches is being supplanted by a new dream of sustainable quality of life”—a life where we can spend more time engaged in pursuits that interest us, such as making music, cooking better food and thinking about philosophy.6 Rifkin thinks the same revolution is happening at the level of knowledge—perhaps especially there, since the wide availability of knowledge is the fuel powering the rest of our economy.

., 173–74 hypothetical loss of, 5 paradox of, 6, 12, 179 pool of data in, 95–100 surveillance and, 89–109 typified and dephysicalized objects in, 69 unequal distribution of, 144–45 see also Internet of Things information theory, 12 infosphere: defined, 10 feedback loop of social constructs in, 72–73 network of, 180 pollution of, 148 vastness of, 128 InnoCentive, 136–37, 141 institutions, cooperative, 60–61 intellectual labor, 139–40 International Telecommunications Union, 135 Internet: author’s experiment in circumventing, 21–24, 25, 35 in challenges to reasonableness, 41–63 changes wrought by, xv–xviii, 6–7, 10–11, 23, 180, 184–88 as a construction, 69 cost and profit debate over, 145 as epistemic resource, 143–45 expectations of, 80–83 as force for cohesion and democracy, 55–63 freedom both limited and enhanced by, 92–93 international rates of access to, 135, 144–45 monopolization and hegemony in, 145–46 as network, 111–13 “third wave” of, 7 see also World Wide Web; specific applications Internet of Everything, 184 Internet of Things: blurring of online and offline in, 71 defined, 7–8 integration of, 10 shared economy in, 140–41 threat from, 107, 153, 184–88 Internet of Us, digital form of life as, 10, 39, 73, 83–86, 106, 179–88 interracial marriage, 54 interrogation techniques, 105 In the Plex (Levy), 5–6 Intrade, 122–23, 136 intuition, 15, 51–53 iPhone, production of, 77–78, 80, 139, 144 IQ, 52 Iraq, 83 Iraq War, 137 ISIS, 128 isolation, polarization and, 42–43 I think, I exist, 127 James, William, 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 143 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 137 joint commitments, defined, 117–18 journalism, truth and, 84 judgment, 51–55, 57 collective vs. individual, 117, 120–25 justice, 54 “just so” stories, 27–28 Kahneman, Daniel, 29, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 58–60, 62, 85 Kitcher, Philip, 182 knowing-which, as term, 171 knowledge: in big data revolution, 87–190 changing structure of, 125–32 common, 117–19 defined and explained, xvii, 12–17 democratization of, 133–38 digital, see digital knowledge; Google-knowing distribution of, 134–35, 138, 141 diverse forms of, 130 economy of, 138–45 hyperconnectivity of, 184–88 individual vs. aggregate, 120–24 information vs., 14 Internet revolution in, xv–xviii minimal definition of, 14–15 as networked, 111–32 new aspects in old problems of, 1–86, 90 personal observation in, 33–35 political economy of, 133–54 as power, 9, 98–99, 133, 185–86 practical vs. theoretical, 169, 172 procedural, 167–74 recording and storage of, 127–28 reliability of sources of, 14, 27–31, 39–40, 44–45, 114–16 as a resource, 38–39 shared cognitive process in attainment of, 114–25 three forms of, 15–17 three simple points about, 14–17 truth and, 19, 126 understanding vs. other forms of, 6, 16–17, 90, 154, 155–73, 181 value and importance of, 12–13 knowledge-based education, 61 Kodak camera, 89 Koran, 48, 61 Kornblith, Hilary, 194 Krakauer, John, 169 Kuhn, Thomas, 159–60 Lakhani, Karim, 137 Larissa, Greece, 13, 15, 182 Leonhardt, David, 122–23 Levy, Steven, 5–6 liberals, 43 libraries, 22, 134, 153–54 of Alexandria, 8 digital form of life compared to, xvi, 17, 20, 44–45, 56, 63, 128 as epistemic resource, 145 Google treated as, 24 “Library of Babel” (Borges), 17 “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking’: The Liberal Media’s Latest Attempt to Control the Discourse” (Hemingway), 46 Lifespan of a Fact, The (D’Agata), 79 literacy, 35, 134 literal artifacts: defined, 69 social artifacts and, 71, 72 lobectomy, 168 Locke, John, 33–36, 39, 60, 67–70, 85, 127, 143 “Locke’s command,” 33–34 London Underground, mapping of, 112–13 machines, control by, 116 “mainstream” media, 32 censorship of, 66 majority rule, 120 manipulation: data mining and, 97, 104–6 of expectations, 80–82 persuasion and, 55, 57–58, 81–83, 86 manuals, 22 manufacturing, 138–39 maps, 21–22 marine chronometer, 137 marketing: bots in, 82 Glauconian, 58 targeted, 9, 90, 91, 105 marriage: changing attitudes toward, 53–54 civil vs. religious, 58–59 as social construct, 72 martial arts, 170 mass, as primary quality, 68 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 150–53 mathematics, in data analysis, 160, 161 Matrix, The, 18–19, 75 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 8, 158–59 measles vaccine, 7, 124 Mechanical Turk, 136, 141 media, 134 diversity in, 42 opinion affected by, 53 sensationalist, 77 memory: accessing of, 114, 115 in educational models, 152 loss of, 168–69 superceded by information technology, xv–xvi, 3, 4, 6, 94, 149 trust in, 28, 33 Meno, 13 merchandising, online vs. brick and mortar, 70 Mercier, Hugo, 54 metrics, 112 Milner, Brenda, 168–69 mirror drawing experiment, 169 misinformation, 6–7, 31–32 in support of moral truth, 78–80, 82 mob mentality, 32–33 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), 150–53 moral dumbfounding, 52 morality, moral values, xvii, 6, 44, 53–54, 195 “Moses Illusion,” 29–30 motor acuity, mastery of, 170–71, 173 motor skills, 167–74 Murray, Charles J., 147 music, as dephysicalized object, 69–70 Nagel, Thomas, 84 naming, identification by, 94 narrative license, truth and falsehood in, 78–79 National Endowment for the Humanities, 61 National Science Foundation, 61 Nature, 158, 161 Netflix, 69, 145 Net neutrality, defined, 145 netography, 112–13 of knowledge, 125–32 networked age, 111 networks, 111–32 collective knowledge of, 116–25, 180 knowledge reshaped and altered by, 125–32, 133, 140 in problem solving, 136 use of term, 111–12 neural system, 26 neural transplants, 3, 5 Neurath, Otto, 128–29 neuromedia, 3–5, 12, 17–19, 113–14, 132, 149, 168, 180–82, 184 limitations of, 174 as threat to education, 153–54 Newton, Isaac, 175 New Yorker, 25, 26 New York Times, 122, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111 Nobel laureates, 149 noble lie, 83, 86 nonfiction, 79–80 NPR, 78, 80 NSA: alleged privacy abuses by, 98–100, 138 data mining by, 9, 91, 95–96, 108, 167 proposed limitations on, 109 Ntrepid, 81 nuclear weapons technology, xvii nullius in verba (take nobody’s word for it), 34 Obama, Barack, 7, 100 administration, 109 objectivity, objective truth, 45, 74 as anchor for belief, 131 in constructed world, 83–86 as foundation for knowledge, 127 observation, 49, 60 affected by expectations, 159–60 behavior affected by, 91, 97 “oceanic feeling,” 184 “offlife,” 70 OkCupid, 157 “onlife,” 70 online identity creation, 73–74 online ranking, 119–21, 136 open access research sharing sites, 135–36 open society: closed politics vs., 144–45 values of, 41–43, 62 open source software, 135 Operation Earnest Voice, 81 Operation Ivy, ix opinion: knowledge vs., 13, 14, 126 in online ranking, 119–20 persuasion and, 50–51 truth as constructed by, 85–86 optical illusions, 67 Oracle of Delphi, 16–17, 171 Outcome-Based Education (OBE), 61–62 ownership, changing concept of, 73 ox, experiment on weight of, 120 Oxford, 168 Page, Larry, 5–6 Panopticon, 91, 92, 97 perception: acuity of, 173 distinguishing truth in, 67–74 expectations and, 159–60 misleading, 29–30, 67 as relative, 67–68 perceptual incongruity, 159–60 personal freedom, 101 persuasion, 50–51, 54–55, 56–58 by bots, 82 phone books, 22 phone data collection, 95, 108 photography: privacy and, 89, 93 sexually-explicit, 99 photo-sharing, manipulation in, 82–83 Plato, 13–14, 16–17, 54, 59, 83, 126, 165–67 polarization, 7 herd mentality in, 66 isolated tribes in, 43–46 politics, 162, 196 accessibility in, 23 activism in, 66, 67 bias in, 43–46 closed, 144–45 elections in, 120–23 of knowledge, 133–54 opposition to critical thinking in, 61–62 persuasion in, 57–58, 82–83 power in, 86, 133 prediction market in, 122–23 Politifact, 46 Popper, Karl, 41–43 Postman, L.


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The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

A further classification is denoted by colour (up to 9,999 points), after which the stars become shooting stars. Those with the highest market reputation (more than a million positive ratings) are distinguished with a silver shooting star. It will come as no surprise that even portals which surround themselves with an aura of freedom, community and independence and are regarded as part of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or Couchsurfing (‘Stay with locals and make travel friends’), are not averse to the use of ratings (Hamari et al. 2015; Lauterbach et al. 2009). On the contrary, these brokering systems would be unlikely to survive without the systematic recording and communication of reputational data, given that the interacting parties enter into a transaction with no knowledge of each other – a potentially high-risk proposition, especially when entrusting someone with your own four walls.

Haas, Peter M. (1992) ‘Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination’, International Organizations 46/1 (pp. 1-35). Habermas, Jürgen (2007) The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity. Haffert, Lukas (2016) Die Schwarze Null. Über die Schattenseiten ausgeglichener Haushalte, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Hamari, Juho, Mimmi Sjöklint and Antti Ukkonen (2015) ‘The sharing economy: why people participate in collaborative consumption’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67/9 (pp. 2047-59). Han, Byung-Chul (2015) The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler, Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press. Han, Byung-Chul (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

This is exactly what a lot of companies have found when they try to bring high-skilled workers onto an Uberised platform: the workers end up going i­ ndependent 1 Srnicek (2016). 14 Two Myths About the Future of the Economy 135 since it makes more economic sense for them. One of the more prominent examples of this is Homejoy, which was a sort of Uber for home cleaning. It collapsed after many of its cleaners decided to leave the platform, because they could make more money elsewhere.2 Growth in the sharing economy and in these lean platforms tends to be premised not on being profitable right now, but on the promise that at some point in the future they will be profitable. At the current moment, most of these companies are losing significant chunks of money. This is a growth before profit model, which dictates that losses are part of the strategy.

Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/uber-china-idUSKCN0VR1M9 Jovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L. (2005). General Purpose Technologies. Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2005). Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w11093 Kosoff, M. (2017, November 9). Why the ‘Sharing Economy’ Keeps Getting Sued. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/ postmates-worker-classification-lawsuit Levine, D., & Somerville, H. (2016, May 10). Uber Drivers, If Employees, Owed $730 Million More: US Court Papers. Reuters. Retrieved from http:// www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-drivers-lawsuit-idUSKCN0Y02E8 Somerville, H. (2018, January 19).


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Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

The economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok highlight online user reviews of platforms and other products as examples of a broad reduction in information asymmetries. This reduction has come about because of the diffusion of powerful technologies like smartphones, sensors, and networks, and because of ever-growing amounts of data. As Cowen and Tabarrok write, “Many of the exchanges in the sharing economy . . . use two-way reputational systems. That is the customer rates the Uber driver, but in turn the Uber driver rates the customer. Dual reputation systems can support a remarkable amount of exchange even in the absence of law or regulation.” In the case of Uber and others, much of this “remarkable amount of exchange” comes from temporary and part-time drivers.

¶ Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky found in an experiment that Airbnb hosts were, on average, 16% less likely to rent to prospective guests whose newly created profiles included a distinctively African American name. Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Ben Edelman.org, September 16, 2016, http://www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-guest-discrimination-2016-09-16.pdf. # See Figure 5 in Chapter 7 (page 156) for an explanation of the p×q (price times quantity, or revenue) rectangle. ** A 2016 study by economists at Uber, Oxford, and the University of Chicago used almost 50 million UberX rides across four US cities to estimate the actual demand curve for the service.

Lodging Industry, but Los Angeles Hotels Continue to Thrive,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-airbnb-hotels-20160926-snap-story.html. 223 Airbnb was responsible for a 10% decline: Gregorios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” last modified November 18, 2016, http://cs-people.bu.edu/dproserp/papers/airbnb.pdf. Chapter 10 THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CROWD 229 the author Robert Wright: Robert Wright, Twitter page, accessed February 6, 2017, https://twitter.com/robertwrighter. 229 “Most newsgroup traffic”: Robert Wright, “Voice of America,” New Republic, September 13, 1993, http://cyber.eserver.org/wright.txt. 230 “The things [the Net] changes”: Ibid. 231 An estimated 130 million books: Leonid Taycher, “Books of the World, Stand Up and Be Counted!


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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Some developers understand the blockchain not primarily as an end in its own right, but as an enabling payment and security infrastructure for capturing the value from situations and settings there’s no efficient way to monetize at present—something capable of “fractionalizing” industries, “liquifying” markets, and siphoning from the world that fraction of gain that has to date remained beyond the reach of the so-called sharing economy. In this vision, it is through the blockchain that the internet of things will acquire the ability to exchange access permission for payment, and via the internet of things that gradients of access will be inscribed on the physical world. Specifically, this means that the smart contract’s property of intrinsic enforcement need not be limited to exchanges of digital assets, or debts denominated in cryptocurrency like Ether, but can be extended to whatever tangible artifacts can be joined to the network.

Specifically, this means that the smart contract’s property of intrinsic enforcement need not be limited to exchanges of digital assets, or debts denominated in cryptocurrency like Ether, but can be extended to whatever tangible artifacts can be joined to the network. A rudimentary version of this proposition is already being trialled by a German startup called Slock.it (tagline: “the future infrastructure of the Sharing Economy”). Slock.it claims that its devices will function as a bridge between the blockchain and objects in the physical world, affording those objects “an identity, the ability to receive payments and the capability to enter complex agreements.” Their first product is a networked lock, that releases if and only if the terms of its contract are met.

Here’s where everything implied by intrinsic enforcement comes into its own, in the real world of apartments, storage lockers, conference rooms and cars: applied to such physical spaces, the smart contract functions as a potent gatekeeping mechanism, supporting ever-finer gradients of payment and remote access control. It’s easy to imagine such a module being retrofitted to doors and gates, replacing the code locks which have sprouted like fungus all over certain high-demand districts in recent years—the telltale sign of a property being rented on AirBnb. What we now know as the sharing economy, then, only begins to suggest what is possible in a world where the smart contract is grafted onto the pervasive fabric of sensing and actuation we think of as the internet of things. By giving blockchain-mediated smart contracts tangible real-world impact, Slock.it’s “smart locks” make something that might otherwise remain an abstraction concrete and easy to understand.


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The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

far outpacing the growth in fossil fuels “Renewable Generation Capacity Expected to Account for Most 2016 Capacity Additions,” “Today in Energy,” US Energy Information Administration, January 10, 2017, https://www.eia.gov/​todayinenergy/​detail.php?id=29492. the interference—and cost—of a middleman Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy,” Medium, December 5, 2014, https://medium.com/​@trebors/​platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad. “capitalism in which profit” Lawrence H. Summers and Ed Balls, “Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity,” Center for American Progress, January 15, 2015, https://www.americ­anprogress.org/​issues/​economy/​reports/​2015/​01/​15/​104266/​report-of-the-commission-on-inclusive-prosperity/.

It was 2011, a time when most Americans distrusted unions, sensing corruption in their well-paid bureaucrats and economic stagnation in their rules. Like LePage, many of us pinned our hopes on a “free-agent nation” of market-driven employment relationships, whereby each of us would be free to negotiate our own best terms based on our perceived value to employers and customers. The idea of a “sharing economy” in which some of us started “sharing” our homes, cars, or other assets for a fee had just taken hold, and some of us felt ourselves well liberated from the yoke of “old-fashioned” employment contracts. But recently that thinking has shifted. In 2017, public support for unions was at a ten-year high, with roughly 60 percent taking a positive view.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Instead, the dawn of the automobile meant that the business owner in a remote locale wasn’t limited to selling to fellow townsfolk; he could deliver his goods to customers far and wide. More recently, the car has turned consumers of automobiles into capitalists of a different kind. Thanks to Uber and the “sharing economy,” cars that we purchase for personal use are increasingly an economic resource we can charge people for rides in. Speaking of computers, does anyone remember brands such as Kaypro, Commodore, and Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80 Micro Computer? Those of us born in the 1960s and 1970s might recall all three from the 1980s, when visionary entrepreneurs started to mass market these items to consumers.

., 34–37, 108, 111, 129, 162, 164–65, 173 Smoot-Hawley Tariff, 142 Snow, John, 118 Solyndra, 59, 60 Soviet Union, 76–78, 80, 94 Splash (film), 22–23 Stanford University, 16–17 stimulus spending, 53, 141 student debt, 173–74 substitution effect and traditional banking alternatives, 105, 106–7 supply-side economics, 48–55, 79–80, 92–94, 141, 144 surge pricing, 12–14, 106–7, 165–66 Swanson, Bret, 143 Swift, Taylor, 9–12, 13, 162–63 Switzer, Barry, 18–19 tariffs, 3 taxes as barrier to economic growth and prosperity, 3 and Laffer curves, 50, 54–55 Smoot-Hawley Tariff, 142 and supply-side economics, 49–51, 79–80, 92–93, 141 technology innovation in Austin, Texas, 123–25 robots and job creation, 176–80 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed), 23 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Texas Instruments, 155 The Theory of Money and Credit (von Mises), 87 Thiel, Peter, 28–29, 59, 150, 168 This Time Is Different (Reinhart and Rogoff), 168 Thwaites, Thomas, 64–65 Timiraos, Nick, 147, 148 toasters, 64–65 Town & Country (film), 23–24, 28 Townsend, Robert, 109 Trammel, Joel, 123–25 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 172–73 Truffaut, François, 24 Trump, Donald, 33–37 The 21st Century Case for Gold (Gilder), 68 The Twilight of Sovereignty (Wriston), 109 2008 financial crisis, 106, 110 Uber and “easy credit,” 115–16 and the “sharing economy,” 57 and surge pricing, 12–14, 106–7, 165–66 Ueberroth, Peter, 34–35 unicorn companies, 28, 148 University of Michigan, 16–17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 79, 103, 127, 148 University of Southern California (USC), 18–20 University of Washington, 20 USAA, 108 U.S. Treasuries market prices and cost of credit, 42 and “money multipliers” myth, 91–92 and mortgage-backed securities, 150–52 venture capital, 28–29, 109 Volcker, Paul, 170 von der Osten, Hans-George, 91 von Mises, Ludwig bank lending practices, 85, 88 dollar devaluation, 117 Human Action, 20 on market forces, 20, 152 on money and capital, 92, 94, 136–37, 161 on price of credit, 9 The Theory of Money and Credit, 9, 85, 87, 135 on why people borrow money, 87, 90, 148 Wachovia, 120 Wall Street bank bailouts, 127–30 Goldman Sachs, 41, 44, 45, 46 housing boom and “easy credit,” 113–14 increased regulation of banks, 119–20 and investment banking, 124–26 involvement with federal government, 129–31 as “price giver,” 126 Wal-Mart checking accounts, 108 Sam’s Club, 105, 106–7 “War on Poverty,” 60, 61 Warren, George, 167 WBH Energy, 73 Wealth and Poverty (Gilder), 118 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 65, 67, 119, 140 wealth, paper currency, and real economic wealth, 1 Wells Fargo, 120 Wharton School of Business, 38 When Money Dies (Fergusson), 91, 121 White, Harry Dexter, 169 Winkler, Henry, 22 The Wire (television show), 135 Woodson, Charles, 16 Woods, Thomas E., Jr., 113–15 Wriston, Walter B., 109 Yellen, Janet, 149, 154, 156 yuan and Chinese economy, 137, 152–53 Zero to One (Thiel), 29, 97 Zuckerberg, Mark, 29 Zuckerman, Gregory, 66, 71, 72, 120


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Yet, to reach new heights of fame and fortune, these newly minted celebrities have been signing with professional middlemen—the talent agents who scout YouTube for clients needing an advocate in negotiating TV deals and endorsement contracts.10 Facebook, Twitter, and other social media make it easy to strike up conversations with strangers, but when big stars use Facebook and Twitter to engage with fans, it is typically through social media marketers, publicists, and other middlemen with the expertise to do the job better and more efficiently than the celebrities could on their own.11 Finally, consider the workings of the so-called “peer-to-peer” or “sharing” economy—people selling bits of unused labor or other form of spare capacity—which wouldn’t exist through buyers and sellers acting alone. Everywhere you look in the sharing economy, from Airbnb to TaskRabbit, Uber, and ZocDoc, right in the center is a middleman business. So much for the end of middlemen. Of course, there is no question that the Internet has shaken up entire industries and caused the loss of many middleman jobs: think of the stockbroker who merely executes your trade or the travel agent who does nothing more than take your order.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

The government started to crack down in 2016–2017, jailing for life the founder of Ezubao, a $9 billion lending platform. In July 2018 alone, China closed down 168 of these dubious lending platforms, according to one industry source.5 In retrospect, most of these platforms were little more than Ponzi schemes, operating under the cover of the “sharing economy.” The discussion of what governments should and should not permit is really about platform regulation. Some platforms have hidden behind their self-definition as “technology companies” to claim that sectoral regulation should not apply to them. Uber claimed it was not a transportation service and should not be regulated like a taxi company.

Forbes, October 17, 2017. 34.Ibid. 35.Noam Scheiber, “Gig Economy Business Model Dealt a Blow in California Ruling,” New York Times, April 30, 2018. 36.Sarah Kessler, “The Gig Economy Won’t Last Because It Is Being Sued to Death,” Fast Company, February 17, 2015. 37.Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright, “The Status of Works and Platforms in the Sharing Economy,” June 20, 2018, http://andreihagiu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Liquidity-constraint-06202018.pdf (accessed September 11, 2018); and Andrei Hagiu and Rob Biederman, “Companies Need an Option Between Contractor and Employee,” Harvard Business Review, August 21, 2015. 38.Kia Kokalitcheva, “Lyft to Pay $12.3 Million as Part of a Proposed Labor Lawsuit Settlement,” Fortune, January 27, 2016. 39.Jeff John Roberts, “Is a Maid an Employee?


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The result for teachers like Barry is that they wind up having to provide, in essence, personal services for their students’ families just to make ends meet. Uber has hailed this arrangement as an “opportunity” for teachers—a chance to boost their earnings while “dedicating their lives to shaping students’ futures” in their teaching jobs. Teachers moonlighting as Uber drivers are supposedly a prime example of the “sharing economy” at work. Yet, stripped of its “generous” veneer, Uber’s teacher-driver campaigns are also sharing in a more twisted Silicon Valley fantasy: low taxes, good schools, and teachers who drive you home after your expense-account meal with a venture capitalist! These conglomerates are gargantuan outfits that offer short-term, cheap services delivered by “independent” contractors.

As employees, they would be entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay, benefits, and basic employee protections—which would strike at the very engine of the Uber business model, costing the company billions of dollars. As independent contractors, they receive none of these benefits. Uber is fueled in part by those trying to make ends meet in an overall economy that devalues their work. The sharing economy helps deny its participants basic worker rights or, in the case of Airbnb, creates more scarcity in the rental market by turning apartments into illegal hotels, in a cruel cycle. Many drivers, along with leading labor advocates, disagree with the company’s classification of its drivers as independent contractors and have begun challenging the company in court.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Uber, the ride-sharing company, saves money by categorizing drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. Uber insists drivers prefer this because they enjoy more freedom. Uber and others in the “share economy” are creating a new form of serfdom, an underclass of quasi-employees who receive low pay and no benefits. As former secretary of labor Robert Reich put it in a June 2015 Facebook post: “The ‘share economy’ is bunk; it’s becoming a ‘share the scraps’ economy.” Tech companies also are pushing the U.S. government to increase the number of skilled foreign workers who can enter the country on H-1B visas.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

These days, Gebbia and Chesky are asking a whole new set of questions about whether it’s feasible to create a “sharing economy.” At the core of this idea is the fundamental question Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things that we really don’t need to own? (Consider, for example, that the average power24 drill in the United States is used a total of thirteen minutes in its lifetime.) As Gebbia notes, we’ve spent decades accumulating “stuff” in the modern consumer age. “What if we spent the next hundred years sharing more of that stuff? What if access trumped ownership?” Whether or not Airbnb, joined by others, will be able to successfully lead that ambitious “sharing economy” movement is an open question, and one that—even more than the earlier questions about whether people would be willing to share homes and beds—aggressively challenges assumptions about how our economy works, the extent to which people are willing to change ingrained behavior, and whether sharing even makes sense as a viable business model.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

It helped inspire and was followed by Double and Quadruple Bottom Lines; Social Return on Investment; multiple capital models; Full Cost Accounting; ESG (a framework focusing investors and financial analysts on Environmental, Social, and Governance factors); the Environmental Profit & Loss approach pioneered by Trucost, Puma, and Kering; Net Positive; Blended and Shared Value; Integrated Reporting; Impact Investment; and a range of proprietary versions, including consultancy BCG’s Total Societal Impact framework. That’s even before we get into next-generation concepts like Carbon Productivity, the Sharing Economy, the Circular Economy, and Biomimicry. Such experimentation is clearly essential and can spur a proliferation of potential solutions. But too often the sheer range of options, this Tower of Babel we have been building, provides business with yet another alibi for inaction. Worse, we have conspicuously failed to benchmark progress across these options on the basis of their real-world potential, impact, and performance.

In the economic domain, recent Green Swan breakthroughs have included the rapid spread of cell phone technology and the internet, linking us in new ways and massively boosting the prospects for self-education, and the staggering cost reductions for solar and wind power systems. The accelerating shift to electric vehicles is a linked example, especially when coupled with the rapid evolution of battery technology and the impact of digitalization on autonomous vehicles, the internet of everything, and the sharing economy. In the social domain, Green Swan trajectories have been followed by universal schooling in many countries, the evolution of vaccine technology (despite recent anti-vaccine rumors and propaganda), and the growth of social movements focusing on environmentalism, social enterprise, and impact investment.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“We will work faster to build China into a manufacturer of quality, develop advanced manufacturing, promote further integration of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence with the real economy,” Xi announced, “and foster new growth areas and drivers of growth in medium-high-end consumption, innovation-driven development, the green and low-carbon economy, the sharing economy, modern supply chains, and human capital services.”7 Then the government got to work, creating a “national AI team” to realize the dream. The ministry of science and technology selected four companies: AI giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, the trio called the BAT, along with voice recognition specialist iFlyTek.

The 5G network promised a high-speed network with blazing-fast data speeds that could sustain AI, smart manufacturing, smart cities, and other emerging technologies. It was the twenty-first century equivalent to building the railroads and airlines of the past—a boon for the economy, the engine and symbol of national economic progress. “Widespread 5G connectivity will eliminate information islands, boost the prosperity of a digitalized sharing economy, promote changes to existing production methods and lifestyles, and finally improve people’s quality of life,” Huawei wrote in a white paper.16 By the middle of 2018, the United States and its allies expressed their reservations over granting a 5G contract to Huawei. The US pressured its European Union allies and Australia to not sign 5G deals with Huawei,17 and later began working with Ericsson and Nokia to see if they could build more secure and trustworthy alternatives.18 “Developing our own secure 5G networks will outweigh any perceived gains from partnering with heavily subsidized Chinese providers that answer to party leadership,” said US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.19 Australia went forward with a ban in August 2018, crippling Huawei’s business there.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Germany: proposals for housing migrants Dagmar Breitenbach, “Creative Housing for Refugees—but a Cemetery?” Deutsche Welle, January 21, 2016, http://www.dw.com/​en/​creative-housing-for-refugees-but-a-cemetery/​a-18996041. “Airbnb for refugees” Aza Wee Sile, “This Non-profit Wants to Use the Sharing Economy to Ease Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” CNBC.com, August 18, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/​2016/​08/​18/​refugees-welcome-aims-to-use-sharing-economy-to-ease-europe-immigration-crisis.html. Refugees Welcome, website, accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.refugees-welcome.net/. New York Times: “the world’s most personal resettlement program” Jodi Kantor and Katrin Einhorn, “Canadians Adopted Refugee Families for a Year.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“One of the things that Uber drivers complain about, jokingly, amongst drivers, is that when you get to pick up an Uber passenger, they make you wait forever…It’s kind of like going off the slogans. ‘Would you make your private driver wait?’ ‘Yeah. Probably.’ ‘Would you make your friend with a car wait?’ ‘Maybe not.’ ” The power of “platform culture” The sum of the relationships between platform, super-participants, and participants makes up what sharing-economy guru Arun Sundararajan has called “platform culture,” those “shared norms, values and capabilities among the providers.” He sees this as the analog of a corporate culture, but “without the directive authority or co-located social systems that traditional firms can take advantage of to manage their employees.”

“nonblack hosts are able”: Ben Edelman and Michael Luca, “Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com,” Harvard Business School Publishing, January 10, 2014, 2. Further research by Edelman, Luca, and Dan Svirsky: Ben Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Harvard Business School Publishing, September 4, 2016. “profile photos are essential”: Sam Levin, “Airbnb Adopts New Rules in Effort to Fight Racial Discrimination by Hosts,” The Guardian, September 8, 2016. Initially created as a workaround: Chris Garces, “People’s Mic and Democratic Charisma: Occupy Wall Street’s Frontier Assemblies,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 2013, no. 66 (Summer 2013): 88–102.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

As presently understood, a smart city is one that strategically uses networked infrastructure and associated big data and data analytics to produce a: •• •• •• •• •• •• smart economy by fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity, competitiveness, and producing new forms of economic development such as the app economy, sharing economy and open data economy; smart government by enabling new forms of e-government, new modes of operational governance, improved models and simulations to guide future development, evidence-informed decision-making, better service delivery, and making government more transparent, participatory and accountable; smart mobility by creating intelligent transport systems, efficient interoperable multi-modal public transport, smart parking and sharing services related to taxis and bikes; smart environments by promoting sustainability and resilience and the development of green energy; smart living by improving quality of life, increasing safety and security and reducing risk; smart people by creating a more informed citizenry and fostering creativity, inclusivity, empowerment and participation (Giffinger et al. 2007; Cohen 2012).

Index abstraction 17, 90, 91, 93, 114, 117, 128, 142, 143, 160, 165, 166, 173, 179 accountability 48, 62, 64, 67, 68, 113, 120, 122, 144, 220 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 22, 86, 94, 161 Acxiom 75, 76 agency 95, 153, 165, 197, 198, 201, 205, 217 algorithm 1, 19, 20, 27, 31, 51, 53, 54, 102, 117, 143, 159, 160, 161, 172, 177, 179, 203, 205, 214, 216 API 7, 46, 99, 113, 116, 130, 135, 157 apps 23, 48, 130, 138 assemblage 19, 20, 22, 22, 78, 85, 158–60, 162, 163, 164, 192, 193, 213, 216 assemblage theory 7, 157 automation 9, 26, 31, 31, 34, 175, 184, 197, 218 auto-spatialization 162 Batty, M. 1, 2, 3–4, 10, 17, 19, 20, 26, 31, 33, 34, 47, 75, 114, 158, 190 bias 63, 65, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 87, 92, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 117, 118, 195, 196, 197, 198 biopolitics 174 bitcoin, 7, 141–3, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154 black-boxed 11, 22, 24, 45, 51, 53, 75, 76, 119, 156, 214 blockchain, 2, 7, 141–57 Borgmann, A. 214, 215, 216, 221–22 boundary object 86, 88, 93 calibration 1, 35, 50, 77, 102, 116, 117, 142, 147 cameras 17, 46, 52, 53, 113, 127, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221 capital 9, 77, 114, 151, 196 capta 60, 68 Castells, M. 25, 26, 156 census 31, 32, 33, 45, 99, 113, 120, 173 Chicago school 18, 24 CitiStat 121 citizen science 2, 9, 11, 21, 46, 209, 213, 216–19, 222 citizenship 2, 9, 11, 203, 207 city operating systems 1, 46, 47, 48 Clery Act 67, 68 code/space 22, 76–77, 159 Cohen, J. 204, 205 communities of practice 86, 88 community 9, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 63–4, 91, 100, 123, 145, 204, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222 context 5, 6, 8, 21, 22, 23, 50, 51, 60, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 79, 80, 92, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103–05, 115, 122, 163, 166, 179, 191–7 contingency 49, 51, 52, 76, 86, 87, 90, 92, 122, 160, 181 control 10, 11, 44, 48, 51, 54, 60, 62, 76, 122, 166, 202, 203, 214, 217 control rooms 1, 7, 17, 46, 47, 111 counter-narrative 6, 9, 68, 120, 122 crime 5, 53, 59–69, 141, 202 critical data studies 72, 75, 80, 81, 91, 173, 179 crowdsourcing 46, 68, 69, 105, 113, 222 culture 18, 24–7, 49, 60, 64, 68, 95, 100, 104, 114, 153, 159, 191, 193 Customer Relationship Management 153 cybernetics 19, 48, 92, 165, 202, 207 cyberspace 158, 160, 201–07 dashboard 2, 6, 7, 17, 47, 111–124, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 154, 190, 197, 198 data: access 11, 17, 23, 45, 50, 51, 60, 61, 64, 68, 99, 105, 113, 115–17, 122, 226 Index 123, 131, 138, 139, 158, 174, 190, 205, 207, 208; administration 2, 45, 46, 47, 78, 88, 111, 113, 127; analytics 1, 19, 45, 47, 48, 53, 59, 60, 74, 75, 127, 196, 197; assemblage 4, 6, 11, 50, 51, 53, 86, 181; big 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 32, 33–39, 41, 42, 44, 45–9, 50, 51, 52, 72, 75, 78, 104, 113, 115, 116, 118, 122, 127, 135, 138, 139, 159, 175, 184, 189–91, 213, 216; brokers 1, 9, 10, 46, 53; citizens 9, 10, 11, 201–10; control 4, 45, 51; coverage 4, 45, 50, 103; crime 4, 59–69; cube 4, 32–33; culture 1, 2, 8–9, 10, 11, 189–198; derived 5, 44, 53, 113; determinism 53; encounter 5, 73, 79–81; financial 76, 77; framework 51, 116, 184; friction 2, 6, 93, 99, 101, 103; governance 8, 189, 196; indexical 2; infrastructure 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 77, 78, 85, 156–66, 172, 173, 180, 182, 193; integrity 4, 45, 52, 66, 67, 68, 73, 144; journey 5, 85, 93; lineage 73, 80, 116, 117; linked 184; management 59, 174, 177; minimization 52; mining 31, 38, 42, 47, 114; model 8, 45, 102, 171, 173, 175–77, 178, 179, 180–82; open 1, 4, 10, 47, 48, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 77, 99, 113, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 193, 196, 198; ownership 4, 45, 51, 80, 202, 208; politics 10, 49–51; portal 7, 99, 123, 139, 193; power 8, 11, 189–98; practice 2, 8, 10, 75, 76, 91, 92, 93, 94, 189, 191, 193–7, 198; protection 4, 45, 64, 207, 208; provenance 2, 5, 72–81, 85, 95, 180, 184, 202; proxies 6, 98, 99, 115, 138, 153; quality 2, 5, 45, 50, 61, 65, 89, 90, 103, 116–18, 194; re-use 66, 116, 128, 134, 190, 193; science 4, 10, 32, 47, 139; security 4, 45, 52; sharing 4, 7, 63, 78, 116, 127, 128, 134, 139; small 4, 32, 33, 41, 46; spatial 32, 72, 73, 79, 80, 117, 118, 131, 175; statistical 47, 61, 64, 113; sticky 6, 98–105; threads 5, 11, 85–95 database 7, 8, 19, 23, 45, 80, 81, 87, 87, 141, 145, 145, 153, 159, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 181, 184 data-driven urbanism 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 44, 48, 113 dataveillance 4, 10, 45, 49, 52, 197 democracy 2, 9, 11, 122, 190, 222 demographic 60, 63, 100, 101, 104, 192, 196 device paradigm 9, 214–16, 217, 218 Dodge, M. 21, 22, 46, 48, 49, 52, 76, 79, 157, 159, 175, 204, 205, 214 Dublin Dashboard 6, 113, 117, 118, 120, 122 dynamic nominalism 8, 11, 181, 182–85 efficiency 11, 19, 48, 72, 75, 123, 127, 190, 196, 197, 213, 222 embodiment 92, 159, 203, 209, 210 empowerment 19, 48, 147 epistemology 2, 3, 6, 7, 10–11, 17, 18–21, 22, 27, 59, 77, 78, 85, 113–15, 121, 123, 160, 162, 163, 194, 214 error 5, 88, 89, 99, 117, 118, 120, 154, 180, 217 essentialism 4, 75, 114, 115, 158 ethics 2, 10, 27, 45, 49, 52–3, 95, 122–123, 190, 198 Euclidean space 7, 161, 162, 164 Evans, L. 23 fab lab 219 Facebook 76, 130, 153, 156, 214, 215 feminism 94, 202 focal practice 9, 214–16, 217, 218, 219–221, 222 Foucault, M. 50, 51, 78, 174, 178, 179, 181, 203, 205 Foursquare 46, 77, 78, 156 Fuchs, C. 206, 207 gender 63, 68, 196 geodemographic 19, 53, 76, 78, 123 geoservices 7, 128, 131–4, 135, 136 geosurveillance 49, 52 Github, 164 Google 73, 76, 104, 130, 135, 160, 210, 216, 217, 220 governance 1, 2, 8, 9, 44, 45, 48, 49, 72, 78, 85, 95, 104, 115, 121, 122, 123, 191, 192, 193, 197, 202; algorithmic 48, 54; anticipatory 4, 45, 49, 53; technocratic 9, 49, 78, 121 government, 9, 10, 19, 21, 22, 48, 59, 64, 79, 88, 111, 113, 116, 141, 174, 189, 190, 192, 193, 205, 208, 222 GPS 46, 53, 80, 149, 152, 160, 165, 217, 219 gravity model 36 hacking 4, 45, 48, 49, 52, 105, 219, 221 Hacking, I. 8, 172, 178, 179, 181–83 Hägerstrand, T. 141, 144, 145, 153 HarassMap 68 heterogeneity 19, 27, 39, 50, 160, 179 Index 227 IBM 19, 47, 189, 190, 218 ideology 5, 20, 21, 49, 86, 95, 114, 115, 205, 206, 214 immutable mobile 86, 162, 163 indicators 5, 51, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 113, 115, 116, 117, 122, 138, 139, 194 inequality 49, 62, 100, 101, 146, 158 infant mortality 86–9 infrastructure 1, 3, 22, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 66, 72, 77, 85, 86, 91, 92, 111, 127, 136, 157, 158, 159, 162, 172, 179, 184, 184, 189, 192, 195, 205, 214 innovation 48 institution 1, 5, 9, 10, 19, 20, 22, 50, 60, 61–2, 68, 78, 98, 99, 116, 174, 179, 182, 183, 210 instrumentally 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 23, 54, 72, 121, 122, 123, 222 intelligent transport systems 2, 48 interface 22, 25, 26, 51, 93, 114, 130, 131, 133, 134, 158, 166 internet of things 46, 127 interoperability 6–7, 45, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 139, 184 interpretation 5, 33, 34, 60, 68, 79, 80, 87, 117, 119, 150, 194, 209, 210, 214 ISO 37, 120 51, 89, 90, 91 Judgement 5, 10, 60 Kitchin, R. 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 34, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 60, 74, 75, 76, 78, 85, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 157, 159, 171, 178, 179, 180, 189, 190, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 204, 205, 214 labour 10, 100, 153, 190 Latour, B. 22, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 208 ledgers 141–57 Lefebvre, H. 165, 206, 209 Lessig, L. 204, 205 licensing 45, 53, 85, 95, 116, 123 lightings 101–03 literacy 113, 119–20, 123, 158, 194 living labs 21, 148 loose coupling 7, 128, 129, 137 machine learning 3, 19, 42, 47, 145 management 3, 4, 6, 10, 17, 25, 34, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 61, 62, 95, 111, 113, 115, 120, 121, 122, 127, 134, 135, 144, 153, 190, 193, 197, 214 Map Knitter 220 mapping 2, 10, 45, 46, 64–66, 116, 119, 135, 172, 174, 210, 216, 217, 220, 222 Marx, K. 141, 142 materiality 5, 7, 8, 85, 91, 93, 95, 157, 158, 159, 163–65 media 22, 26, 31, 44, 45, 66, 100, 116, 156, 159, 160 metadata 5, 6, 7, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 90, 98, 99, 116, 118, 123, 134, 135 metaphysics 27, 94, 114 Microsoft 47, 130, 135, 191 misinterpretation 74 mobile; devices 39, 52, 99, 184; phone 23, 46, 51, 76, 158, 159, 160, 210 model 4, 17, 19, 35–9, 78, 104, 119, 145, 147, 172, 173, 180, 184 modelling 19, 35–9, 40, 47, 100, 114, 118, 120, 132, 172, 180, 181, 184, 213 Modifiable Areal Unit Problem 119 money 39, 40, 141–4, 148, 153, 190, 196 Mumford, L. 24–5 MySpace 26 NASA 102, 103 neoliberalism 63, 65, 78, 196 network 1, 7, 19, 22, 23, 40, 45, 46, 52, 53, 86, 93, 129, 135, 142, 143, 150, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 173, 193, 203, 205; society 26, 156; topology 161 networked; locality 22; urbanism 44, 48, 52, 54 neutrality 4, 5, 8, 10, 22, 48, 49, 51, 54, 60, 78, 79, 86, 87, 114, 115, 134, 135, 166, 179, 202, 214 normative 2, 3, 4, 11–2, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 54, 115 objectivity 5, 8, 10, 18, 49, 51, 54, 60, 61, 69, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 103, 114, 115, 123, 144, 172, 179, 181, 194, 195, 206, 209 object-oriented model 8, 179 ontology 3, 4, 8, 23, 72, 79, 80, 81, 86, 113, 162, 165, 171, 174, 175, 177, 182, 183, 184, 194, 209, 214 Open Street Map 46, 217 Ordnance Survey Ireland 8, 173, 174–8, 183–5 organizational service layer 136–8 participation 2, 9, 10, 48, 48, 68, 122, 203, 214, 216–19, 221, 222 pavement management system 173 228 Index performance 26, 62, 86, 120, 121, 141, 164; metrics 74, 88–91, 122, 197 performativity, 23, 206, 207, 209 phenomenology 23 planning 18, 34, 47, 54, 60, 72, 74, 78, 89, 90, 184 platform 6, 27, 49, 51, 100, 101, 104, 127, 129, 130, 142, 143, 148, 150, 154, 173, 174, 175, 179, 198, 208, 209, 210, 215; independency 7, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137; society 26 policy 5, 6, 12, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 64, 74, 89, 90, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 190, 192, 196 political economy 8, 49, 114, 173, 181, 185, 197 politics 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 27, 49, 50, 52, 54, 78, 86, 91, 95, 99, 102, 114, 115, 120, 124, 157, 193, 196, 201, 202, 203, 208, 209, 213 post-human 164–5 post-political 12 power 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 49, 73, 143, 144, 160, 161, 166, 189–98, 201–208, 210, 222 power/knowledge 8, 51, 179, 180, 185 prediction 7, 35–7, 47, 52, 53, 76, 100, 102, 104, 114, 139, 153 predictive policing 2, 5, 53, 104 privacy 4, 9, 45, 52, 65, 68, 72, 105, 122, 201, 202, 207, 208 privatization 51, 63, 68, 116 profiling 2, 19, 77 protocols 1, 7, 76, 81, 93, 130, 133, 135, 157, 163, 205 public; good 8, 49, 77, 78; space 26, 27, 100, 152, 205 Public Lab 219, 222 race 63, 64, 67, 196 realism 21, 22, 50, 79, 103, 114, 121, 146, 158, 172, 194, 197, 215, 216, 217, 222 real-time 1, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, 23, 34, 39–41, 44, 46, 47, 48, 54, 72, 75, 113 regulation 9, 10, 11, 22, 50, 50, 51, 52, 54, 142, 192, 203, 205, 206, 207 relational space 79, 94, 161 relationality 5, 7, 17, 51, 85, 86, 93, 122, 156, 173 representation 23, 25, 42, 59, 60, 68, 72, 75, 76, 89, 92, 92, 93, 98, 105, 114, 117, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 153, 158, 184, 195, 197, 206, 216, 217 Research Data Alliance 191 resistance 10, 183, 197 resource allocation 66 RESTful service 7, 128, 129–36, 138 RFID 39, 53 sampling 2, 4, 36, 45, 50, 89, 99, 113, 116, 118 scalable 7, 128, 130, 135, 139 scale 11, 37, 38, 76, 80, 81, 86, 95, 99, 103, 119, 158, 171, 173, 175, 184 science and technology studies 157, 159 security 2, 5, 9, 46, 48, 63, 64, 67, 72, 130, 134, 135, 164, 202, 213 Senseable City Lab 19 sensors 2, 19, 34, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 60, 62–3, 102, 103, 113, 116, 127, 213, 214, 216, 219, 221, 222 service orientation principles 7, 128–9 sharing economy 48 simulation 2, 47, 48, 114 smart: card 34, 39, 40, 53, 116; cities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 18, 19, 20, 21, 42, 44, 45–9, 52, 54, 68, 75, 78, 80, 113, 122, 123, 127–139, 148, 190, 197, 202, 213–222; smartphone 52, 53, 54, 80, 116, 127, 215, 218, 219, 221 social: media 42, 46, 48, 49, 76, 99, 100, 101, 104, 113, 206; network 17, 26, 35, 100, 215; sorting 2, 4, 45, 52, 123, 172 socio-technical: assemblage 4, 7, 8, 10, 49, 49, 50, 161, 172, 178, 179, 184, 185, 202; practices 80 space 25, 52, 65, 79, 92, 93, 94, 100, 115, 144, 145, 153, 157, 158, 162, 163, 165, 183, 191, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206; production of 3, 8, 21, 22, 25, 206 space of flows, 7, 156 spacetime 93, 94, 165 space-time compression, 7, 156 spacetimematter 94, 165 spatial: imaginaries 86, 92–4; interaction 32–3, 42; media 2; sorting 49, 123; structure 95; urban 18, 21–4, 68, 156, 157, 173, 196, 209, 213; video 46 spatiality 7, 24, 85, 91, 92, 93, 94, 143, 161, 163 standards 1, 5, 6, 46, 51, 62, 64, 73, 74, 75, 80, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 116, 117, 118, 123, 129, 130, 134, 173, 184, 195, 195 statistical analysis 47 statistics 33, 44, 45, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 85, 87, 88, 89, 115, 118, 184, 213 subjective 5, 22, 49, 60, 166, 196, 198, 201, 207, 210 Index 229 subjectivity 2, 10, 60, 165, 202, 203, 208 surveillance 2, 9, 10, 46, 52, 78, 100, 102, 144, 202, 210 survey 2, 45, 49, 61, 64, 66, 74, 89, 89, 89, 90, 99, 113, 210 sustainability 11, 48, 122, 123, 127, 148, 197 truth 49, 77, 78, 114, 123, 174, 184 Twitter, 6, 46, 49, 99–101, 103, 113, 218 TCP/IP 93 technicity 159 territory 7, 174 Thrift, N. 144, 158 time-spaces 7, 163, 164, 164–65 topology 7, 11, 157, 160, 161–4, 165, 166, 173, 175, 176, 181, 183, 184 Toyota 147, 154 transduction 8, 22, 159, 162, 171, 173 transparency 20, 48, 60, 64, 66–8, 113, 120, 122, 164, 181, 193, 216, 221 transponder 46, 53, 113, 127 transport 4, 20, 33, 34–41, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53, 76, 90, 184, 215 trust 5, 7, 24, 25–6, 27, 52, 62, 73, 74, 85, 103, 111, 117, 118, 148, 150, 151, 154, 195 values 8, 9, 10, 33, 78, 88, 91, 98, 142, 143, 146, 191, 192, 193, 195–7, 202, 213 veracity 5, 6, 33, 45, 76, 95, 113, 117–19, 120, 123 virtual 142, 157, 158, 159, 201, 204 visualization 4, 6, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 44, 47, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 103, 111, 113, 114, 120, 154, 213, 216 volunteer computing 218 volunteered geographic information 1, 46 Uber 26, 76, 156 urban: entrepreneurship 48; informatics 18, 47, 48, 114, 123; modelling 2, 33; science 4, 10, 18, 48, 47, 114 Web Services 7, 128, 129–131, 134, 135, 136, 138 wicked problems 20, 49, 122 wifi 53 World Council on City Data 90–1


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Most important of all, these deliveries stop me from taking a trip by car several times a month—and even after accounting for the diesel-spewing trucks that bring this stuff home for me, we all end up way ahead on the carbon counter. I tell myself this self-delusional story often, though I stop short of wrapping this remote-controlled retail extravaganza in labels like the sharing economy. It’s hard to imagine anything less communitarian than renting haute couture, outsourcing storage for a household hoard, or breaking down bulk foodstuffs into millions of little plastic pouches. And then the rebound effect enters the analysis, and blows away all these incremental gains in ecological efficiency.

Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 1880–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1. 175companies merely joined forces: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 172. 175the most powerful, reviled traction monopoly: Walt Crowley, “City Light’s Birth and Seattle’s Early Power Struggles, 1886–1950,” History Link, April 26, 2000, https://www.historylink.org/File/2318. 175enjoyed decades of unrivaled power: Owain James, “We Miss Streetcars’ Frequent and Reliable Service, Not Streetcars Themselves,” Mobility Lab, April 17, 2019, https://mobilitylab.org/2019/04/17/we-miss-streetcars-frequent-and-reliable-service-not-streetcars-themselves/; combination of technological change and federal intervention: “Jersey Trolley Merger,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1905, 2. 176$100 billion Vision Fund: Katrina Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person in Silicon Valley,” Fast Company, January 14, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90285552/the-most-powerful-person-in-silicon-valley. 176its total commitment to some $9 billion: Pavel Alpeyev, Jie Ma, and Won Jae Ko, “Taxi-Hailing Apps Take Root in Japan as SoftBank, Didi Join Fray,” Bloomberg, July 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/softbank-didi-to-roll-out-taxi-hailing-business-in-japan. 177$2 billion into Singapore-based Grab: Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber with Local Strategy, Billions from SoftBank,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank. 177Ola downloaded $2 billion: Saritha Rai, “India’s Ola Raises $2 Billion from SoftBank, Tencent,” Bloomberg, October 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/india-s-ola-is-said-to-raise-2-billion-from-softbank-tencent. 17715 percent stake in Uber: Alison Griswold, “SoftBank—not Uber—Is the Real King of Ride-Hailing,” Quartz, January 23, 2018, https://qz.com/1187144/softbank-not-uber-is-the-real-king-of-ride-hailing/. 177Uber picked off Dubai-based Careem: Adam Satariano, “This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/technology/bolt-taxify-uber-lyft.html. 177The damage to consumers: Justina Lee, “Singapore Fine Is ‘Minor Bump’ in Grab’s Ride-Hailing Dominance,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Sharing-Economy/Singapore-fine-is-minor-bump-in-Grab-s-ride-hailing-dominance. 177Grab cornered more than 80 percent: Ardhana Aravindan, “Singapore Fines Grab and Uber, Imposes Measures to Open Up Market,” Reuters, September 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-singapore/singapore-fines-grab-and-uber-imposes-measures-to-open-up-market-idUSKCN1M406J. 177all launched antitrust investigations: Mai Nguyen, “Vietnam Says Eyeing Formal Antitrust Probe into Uber-Grab Deal,” Reuters, May 16, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-grab-vietnam-idUSKCN1IH0XNiAikaRey, “Antitrust Watchdog Fines Grab P16 Million over Uber Deal,” Rappler, October 17, 2018, https://www.rappler.com/business/214502-philippine-competition-commission-fines-grab-philippines-over-uber-deal; Yoolim Lee, “Singapore Watchdog Fines Uber, Grab $9.5 Million over Merger,” Bloomberg, September 24, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/singapore-fines-uber-grab-s-13-million-for-merger-infringement. 177another fare-slashing battle with Ola: “Steering Group: A Bold Scheme to Dominate Ride-Hailing,” The Economist, May 10, 2018, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/10/a-bold-scheme-to-dominate-ride-hailing. 177“SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing”: Alison Griswold, “Softbank Has Spread Its Ride-Hailing Bets and Didi Looks Like an Early Win,” Quartz, April 24, 2018, https://qz.com/1261177/softbanks-winner-in-ride-hailing-is-chinas-didi-chuxing-not-uber/. 177“driver incentives, passenger discounts”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/. 178“locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch”: O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem.” 178The Vision Fund’s biggest investor: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178the proceeds of an earlier liquidation: Catherine Shu, “Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Fund Will Also Invest $45B in SoftBank’s Second Vision Fund,” Tech-Crunch, October 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/07/saudi-arabias-sovereign-fund-will-also-invest-45b-in-softbanks-second-vision-fund/. 178Uber’s multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses: “Aramco Value to Top $2 Trillion, Less Than 5 Percent to Be Sold, Says Prince,” Reuters, April 25, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-plan-aramco-idUSKCN0XM16M. 178the House of Saud: Brooker, “The Most Powerful Person.” 178thwart municipal officials’ attempts at enforcement: Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. 179“Even if that means paying money”: Dara Khosrowshahi, “The Campaign for Sustainable Mobility,” Uber, September 26, 2018, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/campaign-sustainable-mobility/. 180Five-cent nickel fares: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 174–75. 180cities . . . grant a ride-hail monopoly: “Free Exchange: The Market for Driverless Cars Will Head towards Monopoly,” The Economist, June 7, 2018, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/06/07/the-market-for-driverless-cars-will-head-towards-monopoly. 180“corrupt and contented”: Cheape, Moving the Masses, 177. 180Jay Gould’s Manhattan Railway Company: Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Live-right, 2014), 135. 180took over Puget Sound’s streetcar: Crowley, “City Light’s Birth.” 181Public transit was the competition: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement under the Securities Act of 1933: Uber Technologies, April 11, 2019, 25, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc. 181deploy predatory pricing: United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Registration Statement. 182“have been created based on cash flows”: “Asset-Backed Security,” Investo-pedia, accessed December 7, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset-backedsecurity.asp. 183Amazon’s body-tracking technology: “The Learning Machine: Amazon’s Empire Rests on its Low-Key Approach to AI,” The Economist, April 11, 2019, https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/13/amazons-empire-rests-on-its-low-key-approach-to-ai. 8.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In person in Leimert Park, he was a dreamy and optimistic organizer who espoused a sort of socialist utopianism where you had neighborhoods full of Sister Christina–style land trusts and cooperatives and local work requirements and government programs to allow tenants to buy their own apartments—“a real shared economy, not the screwed-up definition of shared economy where your apartment is now a hotel and your car is now a taxi.” Civil Rights icons like William Byron Rumford had fought for equal opportunity to a capitalist system that they still basically believed in. Damien Goodmon did not believe capitalism was capable of being equal opportunity, so instead of fighting for access to the suburbs, he was fighting, in essence, to keep the suburbs out.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Jodi Kantor, “Working Anything but 9 to 5,” The New York Times, August 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html. 79. Packer, “Change the World.” 80. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 186. 81. Natasha Singer, “In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty,” The New York Times, August 16, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-economy-workers-find-both-freedom-and-uncertainty.html. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 186. 86. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 2012. 87. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 155. 88. Ibid., 17. 89.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

An intriguing study found that companies that smoothed earnings had a much greater incidence of subsequent stock-price crashes.11 Another careful study found “no relation between earnings smoothness and average stock returns over the last 30 years.”12 The evidence is that managers and analysts prefer smoother earnings. But the stock market doesn’t really care. Manipulating earnings to be smoother messes up accounting results and wastes time and energy. Spend your IQ on something else. NO EARNINGS AT ALL The rise of the Web economy and, especially, the “sharing” economy has created a number of growing firms with no earnings at all. The premise is that they are playing the Amazon game of “get big fast” and will then, at some future time, make a profit. I cannot honestly say “Don’t do this” because you might fool people long enough to become a billionaire. Back in 1999 we discovered that the market tolerated losses at the newly minted dot-com companies as long as revenue grew smartly.

SoftBank backed away from the IPO. The board wanted Neumann out, giving him a payoff of $185 million to just step aside. SoftBank reentered the deal with $5 billion, valuing the company at $8 billion, a long way down from $47 billion. The gloss on WeWork was that it was a “tech” company building the sharing economy. It actually seems more like an office-space lessor in a competitive world with excess office space. Yet billions were thrown around. Supposedly sober Goldman Sachs investment bankers claimed that it might have a path to a $1 trillion valuation. Their fees on a successful IPO would have bought many new homes in the Hamptons.


pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

The City by the Bay is no stranger to challenging times. Between earthquakes and dot-com crashes, residents have rebuilt the city several times over. And it always bounces back better than ever. And little wonder; pioneering is in the blood. SF (only tourists say “San Fran”) was built on the Gold Rush, and has blazed many a trail: LGBTQ+ rights, sharing economies, and revolutionary politics, to name a few. It’s a small city with big ideas; a place where anything seems possible. Some say the big tech invasion has tamed SF’s subversive side. But scratch below the surface and you’ll find free- thinking, flamboyant ’Frisco alive and kicking. And that’s exactly where this book will take you.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Analysts such as Jeremy Rifkin believe that today’s emerging horizontal networks of renewable energy generation and 3D printing are set to amplify this trend. If they do, it could result in a great deal of economic value that was once sold at a profit in the marketplace being shared for low or no cost in the collaborative commons. The sharing economy is also growing, in which the culture of ownership – with every household equipped with its own washing machine and car – is giving way to a culture of access, with households sharing laundry facilities and renting cars by the hour from a local car club. Rather than go shopping for new clothes, books and children’s toys, a growing number of people are swapping – or ‘swishing’ – them with friends and neighbours.41 In such an economy, plenty of economic value will still be generated through the products and services that people enjoy, but far less of that total value will flow through market transactions.

., 6 micro-businesses, 9, 173, 178 microeconomics, 132–4 microgrids, 187–8 Micronesia, 153 Microsoft, 231 middle class, 6, 46, 58 middle-income countries, 90, 164, 168, 173, 180, 226, 254 migration, 82, 89–90, 166, 195, 199, 236, 266, 286 Milanovic, Branko, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 33–4, 73, 97, 250, 251, 283, 284, 288 Millo, Yuval, 101 minimum wage, 82, 88, 176 Minsky, Hyman, 87, 146 Mises, Ludwig von, 66 mission zero, 217 mobile banking, 199–200 mobile phones, 222 Model T revolution, 277–8 Moldova, 199 Mombasa, Kenya, 185–6 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 94 money creation, 87, 164, 177, 182–8, 205 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 Monoculture (Michaels), 6 Monopoly, 149 Mont Pelerin Society, 67, 93 Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, The (Friedman), 258 moral vacancy, 41 Morgan, Mary, 99 Morogoro, Tanzania, 121 Moyo, Dambisa, 258 Muirhead, Sam, 230, 231 MultiCapital Scorecard, 241 Murphy, David, 264 Murphy, Richard, 185 musical tastes, 110 Myriad Genetics, 196 N national basic income, 177 Native Americans, 115, 116, 282 natural capital, 7, 116, 269 Natural Economic Order, The (Gessel), 274 Nedbank, 216 negative externalities, 213 negative interest rates, 275–6 neoclassical economics, 134, 135 neoliberalism, 7, 62–3, 67–70, 81, 83, 84, 88, 93, 143, 170, 176 Nepal, 181, 199 Nestlé, 217 Netherlands, 211, 235, 224, 226, 238, 277 networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6, 174–6 neuroscience, 12–13 New Deal, 37 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 New Year’s Day, 124 New York, United States, 9, 41, 55 Newlight Technologies, 224, 226, 293 Newton, Isaac, 13, 15–17, 32–3, 95, 97, 129, 131, 135–7, 142, 145, 162 Nicaragua, 196 Nigeria, 164 nitrogen, 49, 52, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 226, 298 ‘no pain, no gain’, 163, 167, 173, 204, 209 Nobel Prize, 6–7, 43, 83, 101, 167 Norway, 281 nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 O Obama, Barack, 41, 92 Oberlin, Ohio, 239, 240–41 Occupy movement, 40, 91 ocean acidification, 45, 46, 52, 155, 242, 298 Ohio, United States, 190, 239 Okun, Arthur, 37 onwards and upwards, 53 Open Building Institute, 196 Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE), 229–32 open systems, 74 open-source design, 158, 196–8, 265 open-source licensing, 204 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 38, 210, 255–6, 258 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 14 Ormerod, Paul, 110, 111 Orr, David, 239 Ostrom, Elinor, 83, 84, 158, 160, 181–2 Ostry, Jonathan, 173 OSVehicle, 231 overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 ownership of wealth, 177–82 Oxfam, 9, 44 Oxford University, 1, 36 ozone layer, 9, 50, 115 P Pachamama, 54, 55 Pakistan, 124 Pareto, Vilfredo, 165–6, 175 Paris, France, 290 Park 20|20, Netherlands, 224, 226 Parker Brothers, 149 Patagonia, 56 patents, 195–6, 197, 204 patient capital, 235 Paypal, 192 Pearce, Joshua, 197, 203–4 peer-to-peer networks, 187, 192, 198, 203, 292 People’s QE, 184–5 Perseus, 244 Persia, 13 Peru, 2, 105–6 Phillips, Adam, 283 Phillips, William ‘Bill’, 64–6, 75, 142, 262 phosphorus, 49, 52, 212–13, 218, 298 Physiocrats, 73 Pickett, Kate, 171 pictures, 12–25 Piketty, Thomas, 169 Playfair, William, 16 Poincaré, Henri, 109, 127–8 Polanyi, Karl, 82, 272 political economy, 33–4, 42 political funding, 91–2, 171–2 political voice, 43, 45, 51–2, 77, 117 pollution, 29, 45, 52, 85, 143, 155, 206–17, 226, 238, 242, 254, 298 population, 5, 46, 57, 155, 199, 250, 252, 254 Portugal, 211 post-growth society, 250 poverty, 5, 9, 37, 41, 50, 88, 118, 148, 151 emotional, 283 and inequality, 164–5, 168–9, 178 and overseas development assistance (ODA), 198–200 and taxation, 277 power, 91–92 pre-analytic vision, 21–2 prescription medicines, 123 price-takers, 132 prices, 81, 118–23, 131, 160 Principles of Economics (Mankiw), 34 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 17, 98 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 288 ProComposto, 226 Propaganda (Bernays), 107 public relations, 107, 281 public spending v. investment, 276 public–private patents, 195 Putnam, Robert, 76–7 Q quantitative easing (QE), 184–5 Quebec, 281 Quesnay, François, 16, 73 R Rabot, Ghent, 236 Rancière, Romain, 172 rating and review systems, 105 rational economic man, 94–103, 109, 111, 112, 126, 282 Reagan, Ronald, 67 reciprocity, 103–6, 117, 118, 123 reflexivity of markets, 144 reinforcing feedback loops, 138–41, 148, 250, 271 relative decoupling, 259 renewable energy biomass energy, 118, 221 and circular economy, 221, 224, 226, 235, 238–9, 274 and commons, 83, 85, 185, 187–8, 192, 203, 264 geothermal energy, 221 and green growth, 257, 260, 263, 264, 267 hydropower, 118, 260, 263 pricing, 118 solar energy, see solar energy wave energy, 221 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 rentier sector, 180, 183, 184 reregulation, 82, 87, 269 resource flows, 175 resource-intensive lifestyles, 46 Rethinking Economics, 289 Reynebeau, Guy, 237 Ricardo, David, 67, 68, 73, 89, 250 Richardson, Katherine, 53 Rifkin, Jeremy, 83, 264–5 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The (Kennedy), 279 risk, 112, 113–14 Robbins, Lionel, 34 Robinson, James, 86 Robinson, Joan, 142 robots, 191–5, 237, 258, 278 Rockefeller Foundation, 135 Rockford, Illinois, 179–80 Rockström, Johan, 48, 55 Roddick, Anita, 232–4 Rogoff, Kenneth, 271, 280 Roman Catholic Church, 15, 19 Rombo, Tanzania, 190 Rome, Ancient, 13, 48, 154 Romney, Mitt, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 37 rooted membership, 190 Rostow, Walt, 248–50, 254, 257, 267–70, 284 Ruddick, Will, 185 rule of thumb, 113–14 Ruskin, John, 42, 223 Russia, 200 rust belt, 90, 239 S S curve, 251–6 Sainsbury’s, 56 Samuelson, Paul, 17–21, 24–5, 38, 62–7, 70, 74, 84, 91, 92, 93, 262, 290–91 Sandel, Michael, 41, 120–21 Sanergy, 226 sanitation, 5, 51, 59 Santa Fe, California, 213 Santinagar, West Bengal, 178 São Paolo, Brazil, 281 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 43 Saumweder, Philipp, 226 Scharmer, Otto, 115 Scholes, Myron, 100–101 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich, 42, 142 Schumpeter, Joseph, 21 Schwartz, Shalom, 107–9 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 163, 167, 204 ‘Science and Complexity’ (Weaver), 136 Scotland, 57 Seaman, David, 187 Seattle, Washington, 217 second machine age, 258 Second World War (1939–45), 18, 37, 70, 170 secular stagnation, 256 self-interest, 28, 68, 96–7, 99–100, 102–3 Selfish Society, The (Gerhardt), 283 Sen, Amartya, 43 Shakespeare, William, 61–3, 67, 93 shale gas, 264, 269 Shang Dynasty, 48 shareholders, 82, 88, 189, 191, 227, 234, 273, 292 sharing economy, 264 Sheraton Hotel, Boston, 3 Siegen, Germany, 290 Silicon Valley, 231 Simon, Julian, 70 Sinclair, Upton, 255 Sismondi, Jean, 42 slavery, 33, 77, 161 Slovenia, 177 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 42 smart phones, 85 Smith, Adam, 33, 57, 67, 68, 73, 78–9, 81, 96–7, 103–4, 128, 133, 160, 181, 250 social capital, 76–7, 122, 125, 172 social contract, 120, 125 social foundation, 10, 11, 44, 45, 49, 51, 58, 77, 174, 200, 254, 295–6 social media, 83, 281 Social Progress Index, 280 social pyramid, 166 society, 76–7 solar energy, 59, 75, 111, 118, 187–8, 190 circular economy, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226–7, 239 commons, 203 zero-energy buildings, 217 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84 Solow, Robert, 135, 150, 262–3 Soros, George, 144 South Africa, 56, 177, 214, 216 South Korea, 90, 168 South Sea Bubble (1720), 145 Soviet Union (1922–91), 37, 67, 161, 279 Spain, 211, 238, 256 Spirit Level, The (Wilkinson & Pickett), 171 Sraffa, Piero, 148 St Gallen, Switzerland, 186 Stages of Economic Growth, The (Rostow), 248–50, 254 stakeholder finance, 190 Standish, Russell, 147 state, 28, 33, 69–70, 78, 82, 160, 176, 180, 182–4, 188 and commons, 85, 93, 197, 237 and market, 84–6, 200, 281 partner state, 197, 237–9 and robots, 195 stationary state, 250 Steffen, Will, 46, 48 Sterman, John, 66, 143, 152–4 Steuart, James, 33 Stiglitz, Joseph, 43, 111, 196 stocks and flows, 138–41, 143, 144, 152 sub-prime mortgages, 141 Success to the Successful, 148, 149, 151, 166 Sugarscape, 150–51 Summers, Larry, 256 Sumner, Andy, 165 Sundrop Farms, 224–6 Sunstein, Cass, 112 supply and demand, 28, 132–6, 143, 253 supply chains, 10 Sweden, 6, 255, 275, 281 swishing, 264 Switzerland, 42, 66, 80, 131, 186–7, 275 T Tableau économique (Quesnay), 16 tabula rasa, 20, 25, 63, 291 takarangi, 54 Tanzania, 121, 190, 202 tar sands, 264, 269 taxation, 78, 111, 165, 170, 176, 177, 237–8, 276–9 annual wealth tax, 200 environment, 213–14, 215 global carbon tax, 201 global financial transactions tax, 201, 235 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 non-renewable resources, 193, 237–8, 278–9 People’s QE, 185 tax relief v. tax justice, 23, 276–7 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 202, 258 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 61, 63, 93 Texas, United States, 120 Thailand, 90, 200 Thaler, Richard, 112 Thatcher, Margaret, 67, 69, 76 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 96 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 180 3D printing, 83–4, 192, 198, 231, 264 thriving-in-balance, 54–7, 62 tiered pricing, 213–14 Tigray, Ethiopia, 226 time banking, 186 Titmuss, Richard, 118–19 Toffler, Alvin, 12, 80 Togo, 231, 292 Torekes, 236–7 Torras, Mariano, 209 Torvalds, Linus, 231 trade, 62, 68–9, 70, 89–90 trade unions, 82, 176, 189 trademarks, 195, 204 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 transport, 59 trickle-down economics, 111, 170 Triodos, 235 Turkey, 200 Tversky, Amos, 111 Twain, Mark, 178–9 U Uganda, 118, 125 Ulanowicz, Robert, 175 Ultimatum Game, 105, 117 unemployment, 36, 37, 276, 277–9 United Kingdom Big Bang (1986), 87 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 free trade, 90 global material footprints, 211 money creation, 182 MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), 64–5, 75, 142, 262 New Economics Foundation, 278, 283 poverty, 165, 166 prescription medicines, 123 wages, 188 United Nations, 55, 198, 204, 255, 258, 279 G77 bloc, 55 Human Development Index, 9, 279 Sustainable Development Goals, 24, 45 United States American Economic Association meeting (2015), 3 blood donation, 118 carbon dioxide emissions, 260 Congress, 36 Council of Economic Advisers, 6, 37 Earning by Learning, 120 Econ 101 course, 8, 77 Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989), 9 Federal Reserve, 87, 145, 146, 271, 282 free trade, 90 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 87 greenhouse gas emissions, 153 global material footprint, 211 gross national product (GNP), 36–40 inequality, 170, 171 land-value tax, 73, 149, 180 political funding, 91–2, 171 poverty, 165, 166 productivity and employment, 193 rust belt, 90, 239 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 92 wages, 188 universal basic income, 200 University of Berkeley, 116 University of Denver, 160 urbanisation, 58–9 utility, 35, 98, 133 V values, 6, 23, 34, 35, 42, 117, 118, 121, 123–6 altruism, 100, 104 anthropocentric, 115 extrinsic, 115 fluid, 28, 102, 106–9 and networks, 110–11, 117, 118, 123, 124–6 and nudging, 112, 113, 114, 123–6 and pricing, 81, 120–23 Veblen, Thorstein, 82, 109, 111, 142 Venice, 195 verbal framing, 23 Verhulst, Pierre, 252 Victor, Peter, 270 Viner, Jacob, 34 virtuous cycles, 138, 148 visual framing, 23 Vitruvian Man, 13–14 Volkswagen, 215–16 W Wacharia, John, 186 Wall Street, 149, 234, 273 Wallich, Henry, 282 Walras, Léon, 131, 132, 133–4, 137 Ward, Barbara, 53 Warr, Benjamin, 263 water, 5, 9, 45, 46, 51, 54, 59, 79, 213–14 wave energy, 221 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 12, 281 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 74, 78, 96, 104 wealth ownership, 177–82 Weaver, Warren, 135–6 weightless economy, 261–2 WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), 103–5, 110, 112, 115, 117, 282 West Bengal, India, 124, 178 West, Darrell, 171–2 wetlands, 7 whale hunting, 106 Wiedmann, Tommy, 210 Wikipedia, 82, 223 Wilkinson, Richard, 171 win–win trade, 62, 68, 89 wind energy, 75, 118, 196, 202–3, 221, 233, 239, 260, 263 Wizard of Oz, The, 241 Woelab, 231, 293 Wolf, Martin, 183, 266 women’s rights, 33, 57, 107, 160, 201 and core economy, 69, 79–81 education, 57, 124, 178, 198 and land ownership, 178 see also gender equality workers’ rights, 88, 91, 269 World 3 model, 154–5 World Bank, 6, 41, 119, 164, 168, 171, 206, 255, 258 World No Tobacco Day, 124 World Trade Organization, 6, 89 worldview, 22, 54, 115 X xenophobia, 266, 277, 286 Xenophon, 4, 32, 56–7, 160 Y Yandle, Bruce, 208 Yang, Yuan, 1–3, 289–90 yin yang, 54 Yousafzai, Malala, 124 YouTube, 192 Yunnan, China, 56 Z Zambia, 10 Zanzibar, 9 Zara, 276 Zeitvorsoge, 186–7 zero environmental impact, 217–18, 238, 241 zero-hour contracts, 88 zero-humans-required production, 192 zero-interest loans, 183 zero-marginal-cost revolution, 84, 191, 264 zero-waste manufacturing, 227 Zinn, Howard, 77 PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of: archive.org


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

As post-war national labour regimes, established after intense political struggles to protect workers and their families from market pressures, are being subverted by international competition, labour markets in leading capitalist countries are changing to precarious employment, zero hours jobs, freelancing and standby work, not just in small local but also and often in large global firms. An extreme case in point is Uber, a giant of the so-called ‘sharing economy’, which with the help of new communication technologies functions almost entirely without a workforce of its own. In the United States alone, more than 160,000 people depend on Uber for their livelihood, only 4,000 of whom are regular employees.37 For the rest, employment risks are being privatized and individualized, and life and work become inseparably fused.

See also indebtedness as apocalyptic horseman of contemporary capitalism, 18 cause of growing level of, 114, 116 as convenient functional equivalent of inflation, 82 devaluation of, 82 explosion of (1980s), 16 increase in, 53 kinds of, 124 plundering of as systemic disorder, 68–9 replacement of with private debt, 84, 85 rise of, 82–3 sales of to sovereign investors, 117 public domain, plundering of, 28, 65, 68, 69 public goods, 107, 140 ‘Public Goods and Private Status’ (Monsen and Downs), 95 public infrastructure, 6, 15, 115 Public Interest (journal), 95f public-sector reforms, 106 public services, 49, 53, 60, 89, 104, 119, 124, 130, 132, 141, 186, 193, 228 public sociology, 237, 241, 245–9, 250, 251 public spending, relation of tax revenue to, 116, 135 public sphere, as marketized, 103–5 Puma, 101 Pumpkapitalismus (capitalism on tick), 149 Q quantitative easing, 19, 51, 57, 72 R Rathenau, Walther, 242 Reagan, Ronald, 79, 81, 83 real estate, expectation of open-ended increase in value of, 84 regional peculiarities, in European currency issues, 172–3 regulatory law/regulation, 58, 62, 70, 138, 183, 186, 189, 193, 196, 207, 232, 233 resilience, use of term, 38, 39–40 resource shortages, 6 Ricardo, David, 3 Riesman, David, 210 robot owners, capitalist class of, 10 Rubin, Robert, 31 Rupert, Murdoch, 104 S Sachzwang, 22 Sachzwänge, 146 Sarrazin, Thilo, 238–9 Sattelzeit, 249 sauve qui peut, 41 Schattschneider, Elmer Eric, 170 Schmitt, Carl, 151–63 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 3, 57, 115, 201, 204, 232, 245 self-destruction, escapes that have hitherto saved capitalism from, 10 Sen, Amartya, 149 Sennett, Richard, 27 sequential displacements, 89–90 sharing economy, 26 shopping, 42, 44–5 Simmel, Georg, 102, 249 single currency system (Europe), 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183 Single Market, 157, 161 Smelser, Nail, 166 Smith, Adam, 1, 165, 166, 169, 201, 204 social assistance/entitlements, 8, 75, 82, 89, 119, 135, 137, 215 social change, 208 social character, 38 social-conflict management, 83 social-democratic capitalism, 4 social division, 149–50 social entropy, 13, 39, 43 social integration, 14, 15, 38, 41, 45, 46, 58, 91, 102, 168, 212, 218, 242, 246 socialism, 11, 60 social justice, 75–6, 213–14 social life, 14, 35, 40, 41, 45, 46, 77, 100, 103, 202, 205, 208, 209, 216, 218, 221, 229, 235, 237, 248, 249 social market economy, 186, 227 social media, 41, 45, 103 social protection, 190, 207, 215 social regulation, 207, 233 social solidarity, 63, 107 social structure, 28, 38, 77, 102, 188, 208, 245 sociation, by consumption, 100–3 society lite, 13, 38 sociology.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

When I first set out to write this book, my plan had been in part to seek out positive stories – the individuals and companies acting to make changes to our wasteful economy. And I saw and met many of them: companies like Apeel Sciences, in California, which is working to coat fruit and vegetables with a wax-like surface that negates the need for plastic wrapping. Sharing economy apps like Olio and Too Good to Go, which are helping people and businesses cut down on food waste and increase charitable donations. Greyparrot, a British AI company, is using artificial intelligence to increase robotic sorting on recycling lines, to prevent materials being lost to incineration.

See used goods Seghill 40–1 Sellafield nuclear facility 294–318, 319 Sentinel 5-P satellite 33 Severnside Energy Recovery Centre (SERC) 93–110 sewage 12, 13, 35, 145–69, 214–16, 220–1, 223, 224, 225, 239–40, 243, 245, 331 sewers 4, 12, 27, 47, 49, 50, 145, 148–9, 152–69, 196, 225, 235 sharing economy apps 192, 324 SHEIN 121, 137 Shen Lu 120–1 shipping 5, 6, 46, 67, 72, 75, 76, 83–92, 105–6, 118–19, 187, 196, 261, 284, 296–7, 310, 329–30, 332 Singh, Rahul 231 Skinner, Branson 133 skip-diving 171 Slade, Giles: Made to Break 257 slaughterhouse waste 47, 84, 215 Smith, Jamie 2–3, 11, 14, 42, 277, 335 Snow, John 150–1, 155–6; On the Mode of Communication of Cholera 150–1 Society of the Plastics Industry 53, 54, 59, 64 soil 3, 19n, 20, 26, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 81, 90, 99, 105, 146–7, 163, 186, 190, 192, 193, 196–8, 199, 201, 202, 206, 208, 210, 211, 216, 237, 240, 262, 268, 280, 287, 292, 293, 296–7 solid mine waste 276–7 South Africa 18, 291 South East Asia 5, 79–81, 84–5, 90, 91 South Korea 207, 253 space littering 3–4 Spanish Armada 147 Spencer, Kate 332 spolia 46 Starlinger extruder 66 starlings 32 steel 1, 44, 51–2, 76, 158, 164, 165, 253 Steinbeck, John: The Pastures of Heaven 194; Travels with Charley 54 Stouffer, Lloyd 53, 54 Street Cleaning Department, Manhattan 50 Stuart, Tristram: Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal 176, 213 SUEZ 7, 29–30, 32, 39, 40–1, 83, 94, 107 Sumani, Yakubu 269 Suntory 208 Superfund National Priority List 34, 281 supermarket 111, 116–17, 122, 175, 178–82, 186–9, 191, 212, 323, 324–5 surfactants 219–20, 241 Swachh Bharat 24–5 tailings 273–6, 279, 282, 284, 292–3, 295–6 Tanum, Sweden 215 Tar Creek Superfund site 278–93, 333 Teflon 241 tells 20 Tesco 72, 75, 117, 126, 175, 180, 323 Thailand 11, 79, 84, 85, 270 Thames, river 149–53, 158, 161, 162, 163–7, 331, 332–3 Thames Water 158, 161, 162, 164–5, 166–7 Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) 299–300, 303–4, 305–6 thermoplastic 56, 68 Thomas, Larry 64 Thompson, Richard 210 Three Mile Island 295 threshold theory 227–8, 239, 242 Tideway Tunnel 164–7 toilet 5, 68, 74, 98, 146, 147–9, 156, 157, 160, 168, 169, 200–1, 214–15, 268 Tokyo 19 Too Good to Go 192, 324 tote bags 320 toxic colonialism 6, 85–6 Toxic Substances Control Act (1976) 228 Toyama prefecture, Japan 239 Tri-State district, US 277–93 trimethylamine 22 trommel machine 207–8 Turnbull, Chris 184–5 Turnbull, Sue 184–5 Umicore 249 Unilever 65n, 71–2, 323, 331 United Nations 87, 197, 224, 331; Environment Programme 101, 173, 267; Food and Agriculture Organization 186; Stockholm Convention 240; University 249 University College London Plastic Waste Innovation Hub 210 University of Arizona 35 University of California 59, 198 University of Oklahoma 280 University of Plymouth 210 Unnao, India 234–7, 244 uranium 288, 291, 295–6, 298, 303–4, 305, 306, 317 urban mining 77, 249 urine 145, 146, 160, 215, 230, 268 used goods 5, 111–41, 262–4, 271, 272, 328; charity shops 111–14, 126, 135, 136, 138, 250; colonialism and 123–4, 138; donation, motive behind 137–8; economics of 112–13; fashion as business of waste 120–1; fashion industry’s recycling drive 135; fast-fashion industry and 116–18, 120–2, 126, 128, 131, 133–41; Kantamanto market, Accra 122–30; No More Fast Fashion Lab 133–7; online reuse and resale apps 135; Pink Elephant Recycling 113–20; The Revival 138–41; waste management, Accra and 129–37 Varanasi, India 221, 237–8, 245 Vegware 209, 211 Veolia 83, 204, 215 vermicomposting 198–9 Vermont, sale of non-refillable bottles banned (1953) 62 Vescovo, Victor 54 Vibrio cholerae 150 Vincenz, Jean 31 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) 33 vultures 17, 32, 289 Walmart 179 Wang Jiuliang 78–9 Waring, Colonel George E. 49–50 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) 34, 76–7, 89, 104, 247–72; data and 253–4; deadstock 254–5; Electronics Recyclers International, Inc (ERI) 247–54; export of 261–72; planned obsolescence and 255–9; recycling of 247–72; repair and 259–61; size of market 248–9; urban mining 249 waste influencers 320–3, 339 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), New Mexico 310–11, 314 Waste Management Inc. 7, 81–3 waste mismanagement 11, 79 waste pickers 5, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26–7, 47–8, 49, 58, 244, 330 wastewater 21, 77, 120, 148, 156, 157, 175–6, 215–16, 220–1, 231–2, 233, 234, 241, 244, 275, 296 Wen’an, China 77, 78 West London Waste Authority 93, 107 wet blue 231–2 wet wipes 12, 161–3 whale blubber 35, 240 white stork 32 Wiens, Kyle 254 Windscale 298–300, 310 wishcycling 58, 60 Wong, Steve 87, 89 World Bank 4, 19, 24, 130, 195, 283–4 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 76 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 175, 186 Worn Again 135 WRAP 174–5 Wyeth, Nathaniel 56 X-Press Pearl 68 Yakuza 7, 82 Yamuna river, India 219–24 Yara 215 yellowcake 295 Yeo Bee Yin 79–80 Yiwu, China 76–7 Yucca Mountain Depository 312–13 Zara 120–1, 128, 132 zero waste 12, 131, 179, 181, 212, 321–3, 326, 329, 339 Zhang Yin 76 zinc 34, 278–9 First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2023 Copyright © Oliver Franklin-Wallis, 2023 The right of Oliver Franklin-Wallis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Today we can mine the social graph in an instant by simply taking a photo. Algorithms churn in the cloud, telling the little things in our pocket where we should eat and whom we should date. It’s a jarring transformation. But even as old norms fade into the past, we’re learning new ways to thrive on mass connectedness. A sharing economy has mushroomed overnight, as people swap everything from spare bedrooms to cars, in a synergistic exploitation of new technology and more earth-friendly consumption. Online social networks are leaking back into the thriving urban habitats where they were born in countless promising ways. These developments are our first baby steps in fashioning a new civics for smart cities.

., 79–80, 111, 260, 265, 269–70 defense industry, 77, 79 de Forest, Lee, 129 de la Peña, Benjamin, 174 Deng Xiaoping, 24 “dependable computing,” 299 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 308 Detroit, Mich., 51, 295 Digital Cellular Radio (Calhoun), 52 digital divide, 189–93 issues of access and agency in, 190–91 digital identity, biometrics in, 310 Digital Media City, 28 digital networks, 7, 53 sharing economies in, 16 to transform cities with, 7–9 digital technology: for democratizing cities, 9–10 in design of smart leisure facility, 22 as solution to urban problems, 8 urbanization intersection with, 4, 6–7 digital video camera, 115 Division of Vital Statistics, U.S., 59 DIYcity.org, 155–59, 164–65, 202 Challenges for, 156–58 DIYtraffic, 157 Dodgeball, 121–26, 134, 146, 233 Dominican Republic, 176–77 Donteat.at, 150 dontflush.me, 139–40 doomsday scenarios, 276–81 Doppler radar, 68 Downtown Alliance (Manhattan), 132–33 Dreadnought, 21 Dr.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

For instance, they can reduce costs by optimizing inventory levels; “to have the right amount of stock in the right place at the right time.”28 Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can rely on sensors to track products and components throughout the supply chain from 8 Setting the Scene production to point-of-sale. Moreover, online platforms can unleash economic value on several levels. The sharing economy, for example, promises to increase efficiency through greater transparency and disintermediation. People can immediately profit from assets currently being underutilized—our cars, houses, power tools, or spare time. As more people rely on ride-sharing apps, fewer people will need to buy cars.

We are particularly grateful to the organizers and participants of the following conferences and hearings: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development hearing “Across Platform Parity Agreements”; the House of Lords hearing “Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market”; the Canadian Competition Bureau’s “Workshop on Emerging Competition Issues: Keeping Pace in a Changing World”; the European Data Protection Supervisor & Academy of Eu ropean Law’s conference “Competition Rebooted: Enforcement and Personal Data in Digital Markets”; the Federal Trade Commission’s workshop “The ‘Sharing’ Economy: Issues Facing Platforms, Participants, and Regulators”; Bar Ilan University’s conference “Fairness in Antitrust”; the British Institute of International and Comparative Law’s event “The Role of ‘Big Data’ in Competition and Privacy Law”; Lund University’s conference “21st Century Challenges and Antitrust: Thinking Ahead”; and Loyola University Chicago and University of Haifa’s joint event “Antitrust in Transitional Markets.”


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Just four years old, WeWork was already the billion-dollar company Neumann had envisioned when he was opening the first building. Still, he wasn’t close to being done. Airbnb would soon nab a $10 billion valuation, and Neumann saw himself in that stratosphere. More and more, he was portraying WeWork as a tech company. WeWork was part of the sharing economy; it needed offices just as Uber and Airbnb needed cars and apartments, he told investors. Its tech was cutting edge, he’d say. The entrepreneur who could barely use a MacBook managed to pepper references to technology effortlessly into his pitch. WeWork was offering “space as a service”—a play on the “software as a service” business model that was taking off in Silicon Valley.

Baker, one of the star portfolio managers at the giant mutual fund manager Fidelity Investments, had just heard from a banker that his biggest rival fund manager, Henry Ellenbogen, had recently invested in a shared office space company he’d never heard of: WeWork. Ellenbogen’s firm, T. Rowe Price, had valued it at $5 billion. The deal marked the end of a swift Series D fund-raising round put together by Neumann. Armed with his tech-saturated slide deck, Neumann had sold Ellenbogen on his idea that WeWork was a bet on the sharing economy—not some humdrum real estate concern. Ellenbogen was so impressed by the rapid growth that he boasted to The Wall Street Journal that anyone who saw WeWork’s finances would “compare it to a brand or tech company—maybe Chipotle or Uber.” Uber had become red hot, with its valuation soaring to $41 billion by the end of 2014, making it the most valuable private, venture-backed startup in the United States.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Pavol, a mildly secretive hacker who uses several pseudonyms, was organising a gathering of programmers, libertarians and crypto-anarchists. The theme, according to the programme that he emailed over, was decentralised. ‘The concept of the authoritative state is gradually becoming obsolete,’ it read. ‘The rise of sharing economies with reputation models, digital contracts and cryptocurrencies makes the role of central governments useless.’ The Institute of Cryptoanarchy is housed in a large three-storey building in central Prague called ‘Parralel Polis’. It was set up in 2014 by a handful of artists and cryptography enthusiasts who wanted to explore ways of using technology to carve out more space for individual freedom.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

For my generation, our living space (a student room and later something more spacious) was ‘personalised’ by books, CDs, and pictures. Now that books and music can be accessed online, we will perhaps become less sentimental about ‘home’. We will become nomadic—especially as more business and socialising can be done online. Consumerism could be replaced by a ‘sharing economy’. If this scenario transpires, it will be crucial that developing nations transition directly towards this lifestyle, bypassing the high-energy, high-consumption stage through which Europe and the United States have passed. Effective campaigns need to be associated with a memorable logo. The BBC’s 2017 TV series Blue Planet II showed an albatross returning from wandering thousands of miles foraging in the southern oceans—and regurgitating for its young not the craved-for nutritious fish, but bits of plastic.


pages: 190 words: 50,133

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

Polar Expeditions’ most popular expedition is the ‘Last Degree’ trip, a 14-day ski tour that covers the last 100km or so, and includes a helicopter ride back to civilisation. See www.polarexplorers.com. • By Will Cockrell The North Pole is the Ultimate Terrain for feats of Endurance Martin Hartley © GETTY IMAGES The World’s Most Extraordinary Sleepovers Sheer inventiveness and the sharing economy have opened up a new world of sublime and ridiculous places to spend the night. 1 Dog Bark Park Inn, Idaho, USA When in Idaho, where you do feel like staying? In the stomach of an enormous beagle? You’re in luck: we have just the place. Dog Bark Park Inn is the brainchild of two artistic dog lovers, and is an enormous structure – rather like a Trojan horse, but a dog, if you see what we mean.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The intellectual potential of the 1990s’ internet was exploited by stock traders looking to sell new stories to investors. The unprecedented possibilities for connection offered by social media in the 2000s were surrendered to the more immediately profitable pursuits of surveillance, data mining, and user control. And the sharing economy of the 2010s was handily put down by venture capitalists, who used these same principles to establish incontestable and extractive platform monopolies. Possibilities for renaissance are lost as our openness to fundamental change creates footholds for those who would exploit us. Innovations are instrumentalized in pursuit of short-term profit, and retrieved values are ignored or forcibly quashed.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

A global pioneer is Italy’s Enel, the state-owned energy utility, which has deployed more than 30 million smart meters to its customers since 2001.552 The internet is also making it easier to connect people who want to rent out rooms, cars and all sorts of other things with those who want to borrow them – a new sharing economy that offers huge potential for growth. Airbnb, a company based in San Francisco, allows people to rent out accommodation for the night; by the end of 2013 ten million people had used its services, many of them in Europe.553 It now has several European rivals: Wimdu and 9flats, both based in Berlin, and London-based onefinestay, which also offers upmarket services.

Ending the tax bias towards debt in general and property speculation in particular would make a big difference. When financial crashes do occur, governments should tackle excessive debts head on and support the economy fiscally rather than exclusively by monetary means. Both labour and capital need to be more versatile to cope with reasonably predictable variability, and the new sharing economy offers huge potential for growth. As workforces shrink and societies age in pretty predictable ways, economies need to adjust by getting more people into work, admitting more newcomers and reforming pension systems. Last but not least, to cope with radically uncertain climate change, Europe needs better incentives for research and a tax on carbon consumption.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Before the Luddites: Custom, Community, and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Randall, Adrian. Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ravenelle, Alexandrea J. Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Raynes, Francis. An Appeal to the Public: Containing an Account of Services Rendered during the Disturbances in the North of England in the Year 1812 (1817). Rede, William Leman. York Castle in the Nineteenth Century: Being an Account of All the Principal Offences Committed in Yorkshire from the Year 1800 to the Present Period, with the Lives of the Capital Offenders.

To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” 17. “fauxtomation” Astra Taylor, “The Automation Charade,” Logic, no. 5 (August 1, 2018), https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/. 18. “The gig economy promises flexibility” Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 15. 19. The economic historian Louis Hyman The story of the rapid corporate assault on workers’ benefits and the transition to part-time work is the focus of Louis Hyman’s book Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018). 20.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Nor is the gig economy dominated by millennials. Britain has more pensioners doing independent work than people under thirty. In America, the labour force participation rate for people aged between sixty-four and seventy-five has jumped by 4.7 per cent in the last decade, a time when the overall rate has dropped.66 We like to call it the sharing economy. But the fact that older people are doing such a large share of the work suggests a less charitable force is at play. As the real value of pensions and social security goes down, the pressure to postpone retirement grows. Again, we should be careful not to generalise: some older people are working because they enjoy it.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

In 2007 he started working within the company on mobility solutions and urban transport options beyond cars. “The idea that we are going to create a middle class in BRIC economies doesn’t make sense. Not everyone wants or should have 2.2 cars.” In the future, Berdish imagines a world where cars are more of a shared resource and more functional. “Cars will have to be more stripped down. In a sharing economy or mega-city, you don’t need satellite radio and fancy navigation systems; you just need cars to serve a function.” Berdish helped develop mobility solutions at Ford, which meant showing the company the value of business models built around car sharing and mass urban transport options like rail, metro, buses, and bicycles.


pages: 219 words: 59,600

The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own by Joshua Becker

clean water, follow your passion, helicopter parent, mortgage debt, sharing economy

As many Millennials will tell you, it is difficult to live a mobile lifestyle with a house full of stuff. This generation is the most environmentally conscious of all age groups, and this influences their buying habits significantly. Technological connectedness has brought new opportunities for the “sharing economy” in which assets (bikes, cars, housing) are not owned by individuals but shared communally. Access has replaced ownership. Additionally, the Internet has established a worldwide flea market. When nearly every product available to humankind can arrive at my doorstep in less than twenty-four hours with just the click of a button, I have less need to stockpile an inventory of items in my house.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Gross Domestic Product (GDP). United States Census Bureau, 2011. Web. 7. “The 2012 Statistical Abstract.” Gross Domestic Product (GDP). United States Census Bureau, 2012. Web. 8. Sutton, Mark. “Social Media Revenue to Reach $16.9bn.” Http://www.itp.net. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2013. 9. “The Rise of the Sharing Economy.” The Economist. 9 Mar. 2013. N.p. Web. 10. Larsen, Janet. “Plan B Updates.” Earth Policy Institute. N.p., 25 Apr. 2013. Web. 11. Frier, Sarah. “Etsy Tops $1 Billion in 2013 Product Sales on Mobile Lift.” Bloomberg.com. 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 12. “Navigant Research.” Navigant Research. N.p., n.d.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

For now, they use the accumulated data to sell ad space—who knew the epitome of high technology would be getting the right people to see ads for novelty “I have a Polish husband and I know how to use him” T-shirts?—but the possibilities are much broader. Uber and other media darlings of the “sharing economy” combine sussing out information with finding new ways to lower transaction costs. Good capitalists that they are, they’re doing it at the expense of workers and democracy (and other capitalists, namely the venture financiers who continue to pump money into a business like Uber even though it has so far failed to turn a profit).


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Uber’s direct counterparts on the capital side are platforms such as Turo, which enable private car owners to rent out their vehicles – but not their labour. The archetypal capital platform, of course, is Airbnb, through which ‘guests’ search for and book homes for short-term rent listed by ‘hosts’. The ‘sharing economy’ label often given to the capital platform subsector is, needless to say, a misnomer, at least when applied to Airbnb and its ilk: if the Airbnb ‘host’ is ‘sharing’ her asset with her ‘guest’, it is only because she is being paid to do so. The third category is similar to the second, except that what are being sold – and it is generally sale rather than letting in this case – are not capital assets, but commodities.

The political obstacles to taking on rentier capital in the court of public opinion may therefore not be as great, in the British case at any rate, as Bregman fears. As William Davies has recently observed, in another insightful essay: The young people of Generation Left are now habituated to an economy organised around rents, which they experience not just as tenants but through the dubious opportunities afforded by the ‘sharing economy’. Work space, spare bedrooms, cultural ‘content’ and vehicles aren’t things to be owned, but hired on a time-limited basis. Conversely, with the demise of the ‘career’ as the dominant way of organising working life, a young person comes to view him or herself as a rentable asset, which finds its price on the market.


pages: 218 words: 65,422

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

Plenty of excellent movies have languished in semioblivion because of poorly conceived or executed marketing campaigns, and others, good and bad, owe some of their success to the intelligence and intuition of marketing executives. You look skeptical. Q: I’m a little surprised to hear you praising your natural enemies. And isn’t connecting with an audience really the responsibility of the artist? A: That’s the digital-Utopian pipe dream of our time, isn’t it? The sharing economy. “Makers” will peddle their wares in an old-fashioned, artisanal manner, assisted by new technologies. “Just put it out there!”—whatever it is. Your self-published e-book, your Web series, your hand-knit scarves and home-brewed bitters. People will find it. How will they find it, though? How will they know what to do with it?


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Grover Norquist, the libertarian antitax advocate who vowed to “shrink the government to the size that he could drown it in a bathtub,” told Vox’s Ezra Klein that the only things keeping Silicon Valley money in the Democratic Party were cultural issues. With “gay marriage off the table,” he said, “it could be a very easy case” to persuade the big Silicon Valley players to give money and support to the Republicans, who oppose teachers’ unions, oppose regulating the sharing economy, and are wholeheartedly in favor of free trade. 5. The unreality of the world of tech billionaires came home to me when I spent two days in 2015 at an invitation-only conference with Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, and the swells of Silicon Valley in San Francisco. The conference, called the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, left me wondering whether there isn’t a kind of bubble in the Valley that has nothing to do with the inflated valuations of the “unicorns” (private companies worth more than $1 billion), which were so much a focus of conversation onstage and envy offstage—especially from established Hollywood moguls, who are drawn to Graydon Carter like moths to a flame.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In the long run, of course, this proved impractical, and new laws were required to regulate cars. Coinbase has many of the same backers as Airbnb, Uber, and other Silicon Valley companies that built their business on what some call “regulatory arbitrage”—exploiting regulatory loopholes while also unleashing feel-good PR that includes fluffy phrases like “the sharing economy.” The strategy had worked well for those other startups, letting them grow big enough to fight every court battle and curry favor with politicians. But Brian knew that for the crypto industry to catch a break, it would need new laws. And that meant going to Congress to help lawmakers make good ones.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

Participating on Twitter does not involve much risk for either side, but participating on a platform for discovering – and ordering – home-cooked food may have higher associated risks. Depending on the degree of risk involved, the platform may have to invest heavily in offering centralized guarantees and insurance. Most ‘sharing economy’ platforms, like Airbnb and Uber, invest in creating insurance and trust mechanisms to ensure that users are not discouraged from participating. PLATFORM SCALE IMPERATIVE A scaling strategy cannot be restricted simply to acquiring new users and keeping them engaged. A scaling strategy for platforms should involve: 1.Scaling of production 2.Scaling of consumption 3.Strengthening of filters through ongoing data acquisition 4.Scaling social curation 5.Scaling community culture 6.Minimizing interaction risk There are significant management challenges when scaling a network effects platform, which are often underestimated.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

These extra rooms essentially become hotel rooms for people looking for accommodations (except they’re usually a lot cheaper). AirBnB has more rooms available in New York than all the hotels combined. Uber and AirBnB are hard to invest in right now because they are private. But figuring out how to piggyback on, or use, their model—which is becoming widely known as “the sharing economy”—will provide ways for people to make money. In essence, people are taking what they already have—homes, cars, time—and using these assets to create wealth. Or, we can take it one step back: creating an information product that studies this trend and gives suggestions on how to make money is another way to generate income


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

In one of these articles, I had read about his strict Catholic upbringing, his break with the faith in his teens, and his subsequent investment of his energies into “the passion, the fervor, the desire to optimize the future” through the power of rationality. Nate’s rhetoric in these writings seemed to me a heightened performance of the Silicon Valley house style, in which every new social media platform or sharing economy start-up was announced with the fervent intention to “change the world.” At fourteen, he wrote, he became aware of the chaos of all human things, of a world around him “that couldn’t coordinate,” and he made a promise to himself. “I didn’t promise to fix governments: that was a means to an end, a convenient solution for someone who didn’t know how to look further out.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Many companies make a business of selling on information about their customers. This means you may be contributing to growth in ways that only the National Security Agency truly understands. Something else was going on that night in New York. You were participating in what has become known rather glibly as the sharing economy. Before Airbnb, if you were out of town, you would normally have left your apartment vacant. Post Airbnb, you can effectively exchange your apartment for one in Baja California by finding a third person to rent it on the online marketplace. Congratulations, you are helping to sweat the world’s physical assets.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Weeden, Kim A. 2002. “Why Do Some Occupations Pay More Than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 108: 55–101. Weidenbaum, Murray L. et al. 1980. “On Saving the Kingdom.” Regulation, November-December: 14–35. Weitzman, Martin L. 1984. The Share Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weller, Christian. 2012. “Unburdening America’s Middle Class.” Challenge, January-February: 23–52. Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Western, Bruce. 2012. “Crime and Punishment.” Boston Review, March-April: 5–6.


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

Rent-seeking is usually thought about in terms of an industry group or interest group lobbying politicians in order to secure monopoly power. The classic example is taxi drivers securing and defending a taxi licensing scheme. This is a good example, and very contemporary in these days of the “sharing economy.” Taxi licensing is a good analogy for the carry regime to the extent that in a growing city the taxi owners benefiting from the monopoly power endowed by their license will benefit not only from higher incomes but also from the increasing market value of the license, the fundamental value of which depends on the discounted future income stream deriving from taxi fares.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

We held long and impassioned meetings about partnerships and design, and ordered in pizza when these meetings crossed into night. Everything felt urgent, high stakes. One afternoon, the CEO summoned us into a conference room to demo the pitch deck he was making for meetings with publishers. He opened by stating that ours was the era of the sharing economy. Millennials, he said, as if he were not one of them, weren’t into ownership, but experiences. This was not just a new market strategy, but a cultural ideology. Pioneering digital platforms in the sharing and subscription economies enabled people to stream films and albums and video games, rent cocktail dresses and three-piece suits, reserve bedrooms in strangers’ houses, and ride shotgun in strangers’ cars.


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Job security has become an antiquated idea, a luxury most people today do not enjoy, whether they are aware of it or not. Corporate loyalty has given way to uncertainty; companies that seem too big to fail have collapsed, along with many smaller ones. New ones take their place. With the advent of app marketplaces, crowdfunding, the maker revolution, and sharing economies, we now see billion-dollar valuations for companies that would not have existed ten years ago, and many smaller businesses cropping up in parallel. To add to the upheaval, a recent Gallup study revealed that almost 90 percent of workers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged from their jobs.”


pages: 245 words: 78,125

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness by Michelle Ogundehin

clean water, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Indoor air pollution, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, McMansion, microplastics / micro fibres, Own Your Own Home, placebo effect, sharing economy

THE PRACTICAL BUT SELDOM USED An item bought because you felt you ought to, but which you either don’t use regularly enough to justify its existence or have lost the manual so you haven’t a clue how to operate it now anyway. Here things often fall into the but-I-might-need-it-one-day camp. To which I say, okay, then hang on to it for another year and if you still haven’t used it, get rid of it. After all, if it really came to it, you could probably borrow one through the ever-expanding sharing economy, or buy a new one (and then sell it on), as newer models will inevitably exist by the time you might actually need said very specific item, and they’ll undoubtedly be far superior to whatever you have mouldering away in storage. ANYTHING THAT ANNOYS YOU That jug which always dribbles. A cup that’s hard to hold because the handle is too small.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

Back at the RTR, I caught up with Peter Fox, sixty-six, whom I’d met the year before. Then he’d been a vandweller in training, staying at the RTR in a borrowed Westafalia camper. After twenty-eight years in the San Francisco taxi industry as a driver, dispatcher, medallion holder, and manager, he had gotten squeezed out by Uber. “The sharing economy—the step-on-the-backs-of-the-little-people economy—has arrived,” he announced glumly. “I was at the point where I could no longer both pay my rent and eat.” He had tried to sell his medallion, which he thought would bring in about $140,000 after taxes, to retire on the proceeds. But sales were brokered by the city and demand for medallions was low.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

The goal is to ensure that Airbnb innovates faster than the competition and, in so doing, prevents others from doing what Airbnb is now doing to traditional hotels with its peer-to-peer model. Airbnb is constantly testing new ideas within its current model, such as hosts picking up their guests at the airport or providing them with walking tours and other experiences (for example, dinners or cultural events). It has also considered other areas in the “sharing economy” outside of its current business. The problem, of course, is that firms invest in a particular operating model and, especially if successful, are slow to recognize when that model is at risk. Being rigidly focused on a narrow set of priorities, if not balanced with an ability to consider creative alternatives, can hurt a company over the long term.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Barnes (2014), Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. 35. S. Lansley (2015), ‘Tackling the power of capital: The role of social wealth funds’, Compass Thinkpiece No. 81. London: Compass. 36. S. Lansley (2016), A Sharing Economy. How Social Wealth Funds Can Tackle Inequality and Balance the Books. Bristol: Policy Press, Chapter 2. 37. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism. 38. UK Treasury (2016), Shale Wealth Fund: Consultation. London: HM Treasury. 39. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism. CHAPTER 8: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR WORK AND LABOUR 1.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The end result is better matches, more matches, and happier owners, not to mention happier pets and more pets who manage to stay alive. These days, matching is for everyone, not just human beings. And by the way, don’t think that these days you have to own a dog to get the benefits. Just use the app Bark‘N’Borrow, an Uber-like sharing economy service to help you spend some time with a dog—and then, when you are done, send it back to its owner. The dog’s owner feels less guilty about keeping the pet in her apartment all day while she is working, the dog gets to go for a walk, your seven-year-old is delighted by the experience, and at the end of the day, everyone’s carpet remains fully unsoiled.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

For a discussion of a Linux Foundation report that is one source of this figure, see Tom Slee’s blog post, “Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job,” April 19, 2008, http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/04/linux-grows-up.html. 34. Quotes from p. 3 of the introduction to Tapscott and Williams’s wikinomics. The use of social production for less-than-revolutionary ends is also on display in Lawrence Lessig’s often commendable work. In an essay about the benefits of what he calls the “sharing economy,” he describes the tens of thousands of volunteers who “make Microsoft richer by solving its customers’ problems” through a variety of online newsgroups. The riches accrued to Microsoft, though “great,” shouldn’t be shared with the volunteers, Lessig says, because money would be “harmful” to the community by confusing incentives.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

BLITZSCALING IN SOCIETY Responsible blitzscaling matters because successful blitzscalers often reach a point where they are more than just a business; they actually affect the fabric of the society in which they operate. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have changed how we consume information and how we communicate. Marketplaces like Alibaba and eBay provide economic opportunity—some dedicated sellers even rely on them for their livelihoods. Sharing economy services like Airbnb can bring more tourism and diversity into the cities in which they operate. And Amazon is changing the entire retail industry, which affects everyone. As Spider-Man teaches us, with great power comes great responsibility. We believe that the responsibilities of a blitzscaler go beyond simply maximizing shareholder value while obeying the law; you are also responsible for how the actions of your business impact the larger society.


pages: 267 words: 81,144

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

butterfly effect, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, rolodex, sharing economy, Skype, TED Talk

In fact, I would love nothing more than to conduct a sort of literary salon in which all my beloved friends bring their comfort blankets from childhood to the table and we discuss the gender identities of all of them. I would, believe it or not, find that completely compelling. I know what it is to collaboratively set up and run a home. I know what a shared economy of trust is; to know there will always be someone who will lend you £50 until pay day and that as soon as you’ve paid it back they might need to borrow the same off you (‘We’re like primary school kids constantly swapping sandwiches,’ Belle once said of our salaries. ‘One week you need my tuna and sweetcorn, the next I want your egg and cress’).


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

Christopher Steiner, $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009), 141. 38. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129151987 39. Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: HarperBusiness, 2010), xx 40. http://www.fastcompany.com/1747551/sharing-economy 41. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, introduction, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), xvii. 42. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 9. Big Opportunities 1. Eamon Grennan, “Could This Be It?”


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

., ‘A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions,’ Environmental Research Letters, 2020. 37 ‘Survey of young Americans’ attitudes toward politics and public service,’ Harvard University Institute of Politics, 2016. 38 Edelman Trust Barometer, 2020. 39 According to the same 2015 YouGov poll mentioned earlier in the paragraph. 40 Yale Climate Opinion Maps, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. 41 Stefan Drews et al., ‘Challenges in assessing public opinion on economic growth versus environment: considering European and US data,’ Ecological Economics 146, 2018, pp. 265–272. 42 The New Consumer and the Sharing Economy, Havas, 2015. 43 ‘The EU needs a stability and well-being pact, not more growth,’ Guardian, 2018. 44 William Ripple et al., ‘World scientists warn of a climate emergency,’ BioScience, 2019. 45 World Inequality Database. 46 The lead scenario in the IPCC’s 2018 report relies on declining material and energy throughput.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

“Expensive cable subscriptions and record albums in part fueled the rise of streaming companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu,” Flint wrote. “High, inflexible costs for contract labor and stagnant wage growth in parts of the economy gave birth to the gig economy and startups like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and DoorDash. And some macroeconomic forces—like the recession—created the sharing economy. It’s no coincidence that Airbnb and Lyft popped up in the years following the financial crisis.”2 For one more example, look to Plaid, a financial technology company that was last valued at over $5 billion. Using a set of application programming interfaces (APIs), Plaid helps app developers collect financial data from a user’s bank with the user’s permission.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

As with mutual aid groups, the strength of the collective evokes “communal luxury.” At a time when we’re saturated with stories of both individual achievement and individual suffering, worker co-ops can show us communal endeavor. But you needn’t have to join a worker co-op to participate in a sharing economy. Nembhard pointed out that “I lend you sugar, and you lend me sugar” while not “hard economics is economics all the same,” and so is, “We carpool, and I babysit for you, and you babysit for me.” Many of us unwittingly already were and will continue to be part of such exchanges. Worker cooperatives were simply the next step.


pages: 315 words: 93,522

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

With their venture capital drying up, many operators in the peer-to-peer space began secretly bundling their supposedly “free” applications with gray-market adware, flooding the desktops of the unsuspecting with pitches for low-credit loan consolidations and penis-enlarging pharmaceuticals. Investors predictably rebelled, as did users, and for a time the file-sharing economy faced a return to the days of the pre-Napster IRC underground. But the underlying potential of peer-to-peer technology was still tremendous, and, even as mainstream capitalists abandoned it, the more idiosyncratic programming talent stuck around. And that was how an offbeat 25-year-old code warrior at a short-lived peer-to-peer start-up called MojoNation ended up using his spare time at a doomed job to rewrite the rules of Internet architecture.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

But none of this helps us grasp the imperatives that issue from the systemic drives of capitalism — the imperative of cheapening labor and expanding markets, the imperative of economic growth, the imperative of constant renovations in production (and now in financial instruments) to generate profit, and so forth. Certainly, neoliberalism ushers in a new order of economic reason, a new governing rationality, new modes and venues of commodification, and of course, new features of capitalism C h a r t in g N eo l ib e r a l P o l i t i c a l R at i o n a l i t y 75 and new kinds of capital — from sharing economies to Bitcoin, from derivatives to human capital — but its systematic imperatives cannot be reduced to any of these things. These imperatives can be radically refashioned and reorganized (as financialization itself makes clear), and they are not matters of instinct or of hydraulics, yet they are fundamental life drives no less fierce than those of a living being.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If other scientists decide to follow suit and we get an open source outflowing of scientific ideas and collaboration, science could go through the same explosion that we have had in entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, and human progress will again be accelerated. Look for industries to improve: healthcare, entertainment, real estate, insurance, fashion and banking. Look for new technologies to improve them with: the shared economy, social media, programmable stem cells, CRISPR, microsatellites, virtual reality, Bitcoin, solar economies, self-driving cars, electronic clothes, bioelectronics, robot brains, prosthetic limbs, Pokémon derivatives, offline massively open online courses (MOOCs), enterprise software, and multivariable authenticators.


pages: 293 words: 90,714

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism by Mikael Colville-Andersen

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

And yet my own neighbors will see these bikes, wait for a while, and then start recycling the parts for personal use. You and I can share our anger and frustration about bike theft, but I remain fascinated about how, on some deep, social level, bicycles are perceived as things that belong to all of us. How they became some binding element and a democratic tool for sharing—long before the sharing economy was a thing. Maybe it’s just the world’s largest bike-share system. I have a little pocket full of poetic to pepper up my indignation. It’s all very confusing. I have also confused others by saying that you can measure the success of reestablishing the bicycle as a mainstream transport form by counting how many bikes end in the harbors, lakes, and rivers of a city.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

In the early stages of capitalism the rise of the industrial city epitomised such agglomeration economies in action. In more recent times much has been made of the rise of ‘Marshallian’ industrial production districts like Silicon Valley or the ‘Third Italy’ centred around Bologna, where many small firms have come together to share economies of production and marketing. In the financial world today, having legal, accounting, tax advice, information, media and other activities alongside the core financial functions produces the typical profile of the great financial centres such as the City of London and Wall Street. Very early on, capitalist enterprises also drew on a vast network of spatially disparate market connections.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

There are tens of millions of millennials coming of age behind us buried in even more student debt, knowing full well that home prices can fall, and, thus far at least, not generally wedded to the notion of ownership. The rental companies’ executives, as well as their investors, are giddy with the idea of high-earning, cash-poor, sharing-economy-steeped millennials making babies and alighting to the suburbs in search of nice schools and granite countertops. Many of these young adults will appreciate that they can live in a well-maintained, family-sized suburban home and send their children to good public schools without committing to decades of mortgage payments, tying up their savings in down payments, or risking entrapment in another market collapse.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Theory and Evidence,” American Economic Review 84, no. 3 (1994): 600–21. 51 Ai-jen Poo in discussion with the authors, October 2019. 52 Lauren Hilgers, “The New Labor Movement Fighting for Domestic Workers’ Rights,” New York Times, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/national-domestic-workers-alliance.html. 53 Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The Worldwide Uber Strike Is a Key Test for the Gig Economy,” Vox, May 8, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/5/8/18535367/uber-drivers-strike-2019-cities. 54 For more data on electricity co-ops in the United States, see the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s fact sheet at: https://www.electric.coop/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Co-op-Facts-and-Figures.pdf. 55 Juliet Shor, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How To Win It Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 56 “What’s American for Mitbestimmung?: Most of the World Has Yet to Embrace Co-determination,” The Economist, February 1, 2020, https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/01/most-of-the-world-has-yet-to-embrace-co-determination. 57 John Addison, The Economics of Codetermination: Lessons from the German Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2009). 58 Isabelle Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities. 59 Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda, “Let’s Democratize and Decommodify Work,” The Boston Globe, May 2020.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Having to worry so much about where the next bit of bread is coming from means people losing control over their lives.”24 Or, as one Uber driver told Rosenblat, “you don’t have a boss over your head—you have a phone over your head.”25 Freelancing is exhausting and anxiety-building enough. But that’s compounded by the widespread refusal to see what you do as work. Just as the work of teachers or mothers is devalued (or unvalued), jobs within the sharing economy aren’t figured as jobs at all—they’re attempts to monetize your hobby, to have fun conversations while driving around the city, to invite people into your home. Even calling these jobs “gigs,” with all the inherent connotation of brevity and enjoyability, elides their status as labor. It’s not the gig economy after all; it’s the always-frantically-seeking-the-next-gig economy


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This was a major blow against the online strategy of “aggregate and advertise,” which was widely alleged to be Google’s path to permanent near-monopoly. Since the iPhone is the source of some 75 percent of all Google’s mobile ad revenues, Apple’s move struck at the heart of Google’s mobile strategy. Beyond its free, open source, “sharing-economy” Android platform, Google’s response did not arrive until a year later. Then it chose deceptively to copy Apple. Google’s industry-leading advertising Analytics tools apparently revealed that its users liked the idea of blocking ads. Customers come first, so in its Chrome browser, Google introduced its own ad-blocker.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Is it really the right thing to sign a 20-year contract for a huge office? With a short-term and flexible contract, you can work from a place close to your house, you know you can not concentrate on your work at home when your family members and children are making noise, that’s tough. You have to have Zoom meetings so often, too. In this sense, the new sharing-economy, such as WeWork, shared offices, shared cars, shared travel, or gig-workers, food delivery, Zoom as well, brings about a new lifestyle and work style, and the pandemic is accelerating the penetration of the new styles for sure. So, in post-COVID, that (implying the lifestyle and working style before the pandemic) will be reviewed as a matter of fact.’


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

CIRCULATING RESOURCES The advantage of having a global population concentrated in megacity safe havens is the opportunity for efficiencies. Community resources – including transport, children’s toys, office equipment, heat, light and power – can be shared rather than owned, reducing raw materials used and waste. We already see the seeds of this sharing economy – I am a member of my local toy library and have ZipCar membership. Cities are not autonomous, they feed on the outside world. Swedish cities, for example, import 20 tons of fossil fuel, water and minerals per person per year. With many of the sources of our minerals and natural materials set to be, within decades, physically inaccessible to humans – because of dangerous temperatures or rising sea levels – we will have to find alternatives or use robotic labour.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Capitalism has always experimented with every available kind of labor system simultaneously. Hence the persistence today of slavery—which counts more people at the time of writing than were transported across the Atlantic as slaves72—and of wartime work camps in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, alongside new kinds of work in “the sharing economy.” In each case, management looks just beyond the horizon of current labor practice to reimagine and reinvent how our working lives might link with one another, and with nature beyond them. Capitalism, however, could not survive a day without a third moment of work: the appropriation of human reproductive labor, conducted largely outside the cash nexus.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

About 58 per cent of these dwellings were in the prime tourist areas by the sea. The number of English people owning a second home abroad doubled in the decade after 1997, reaching a quarter of a million in 2007; that of Norwegians quadrupled between 2002 and 2008.77 Of course, champions of the sharing economy might respond that, nonetheless, online services such as airbnb provide shared, alternative lodging that makes more efficient use of existing resources, meaning that fewer hotels are required. On New Year’s Eve in 2014, more than half a million people on this planet stayed on sofas and in flats rented via airbnb.

This is the hope many attach to a sharing and leasing economy. The internet, in this view, will not only bring greater efficiency but wean people off ownership and socialize them into a sharing lifestyle characterized by collaboration, long product-cycles, maintenance and reuse and a low carbon footprint. So far, the sharing economy has been limited to very specific sectors, especially car travel and accommodation, while leasing mainly takes place between businesses.17 We need to have a sense of proportion. In 2014, 92,000 vehicles belonged to carsharing programmes – in the entire world. By comparison, 2.5 million new cars were registered in the United Kingdom alone that year, the fourth largest figure on record.

See United Nations, Economic Commission for Europe, Economic and Social Council, ECE/CES/GE.20/2015: ‘Vacation Home Ownership in a Globalized World’, and see the UNECE’s http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/groups/wggna/GuideByChapters/Chapter_12.pdf. 78. A study of Austin, with data from 2008 to 2014, estimated that each 10% increase in airbnb supply resulted in a 0.35% decrease in monthly hotel-room revenue; for this and further references: see Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio & John W. Byers. ‘The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry’ (Boston, 2014). 79. Sean O’Connell, The Car and British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998), 34–6. 80. Alison Clarke, ‘Mother Swapping: The Trafficking of Nearly-new Children’s Wear’, in: Commercial Cultures: Economics, Practices, Spaces, eds.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

From commercial lighting systems and airplane engines to jeans, carpets and cars, the question has become: why buy when you have the option of ‘renting’ a product that is upgradeable, maintained and available on demand? There is increasing innovation towards making cities more liveable and less polluting, with the revamping of transport systems and the built environment and the promotion of the ‘sharing economy’, in which ICT-enabled communication allows citizens to share goods, either through a centralised, fee-paying service, such as a car club, or using direct peer-to-peer exchange for such items as household tools and garden equipment. And lifestyle aspirations are stimulating industries in the areas of personal health and individual fulfilment—from innovations in local food networks to high-tech ICT and bio-science-driven preventive and personalised medicine, and the championing of the ‘collaborative’ and ‘creative’ economies.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

The event was a thrillingly democratic contrast with Summit at Sea and other MarketWorld forums. Trebor Scholz stepped up to the podium and explained why, a few years earlier, he had written a short essay on an idea that he coined as platform cooperativism. As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

‘Digital can be a tool to overcome discrimination,’ Mahjoubi told me, explaining the trouble he had getting a job because of his ‘Arab-sounding name’ and how this prompted him to launch his own start-up. Thanks to a maths prize he won at the age of 13 run by a children’s magazine, he bought a computer and taught himself to code. After earning degrees in law and business, Mahjoubi went on to co-found La Ruche qui dit Oui, a sharing-economy start-up that links farm producers and online consumers. That technology could be a way to get round discrimination was a principle that Macron had seen for himself as economy minister. He often used to comment then that it was easier for young people in the banlieues to ‘get a client than a job’.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Since WordPress software is also free, Zola was able to customize it, with help from other members of the global WordPress developer community, adding special technical features that would enable his readers to connect to his site securely, allowing people to leave comments anonymously on his site. WordPress, and the community of bloggers who use it and improve upon it, is just one small part of a much larger phenomenon known as the “sharing economy” or the “digital commons”: an important reason the Internet is so revolutionary and disruptive. A robust digital commons is vital to ensure that the power of citizens on the Internet is not ultimately overcome by the power of corporations and governments. In the early 1800s, when the United States was still a novel political experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his classic book Democracy in America that the key to functional democracy was a vibrant “civil society.”


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

More than half of global respondents in Edelman's 2015 Trust Barometer survey felt that greed, money, or growth were the primary motives behind business innovation—that's two times more than those who thought companies innovated in order to make the world a better place.10 This puts Microsoft's impressive feat of reputation into perspective. As we lose faith in large organizations and their ability to make the world better, we're experiencing a rise in business founded in grassroots communities, especially online. The explosion of the sharing economy, which is based on reciprocity and reputation between strangers, shows us just how much our thinking about trust has shifted. Everything your parents taught you about not getting into cars with strangers has become obsolete. You can hail a ride through an app instead of a using a taxi service.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Indeed, the entire appeal of companies such as Uber is that they do not have a large workforce that subjects them to expensive labor taxes, costs, and regulations. Instead, the most important fact about the modern gig economy is its preoccupation with sweating capital as much as humanly possible—maximizing the profits from capital assets that a “sharing-economy” entrepreneur already owns—while investing as little as possible in labor. The central premise of Uber or Lyft or Airbnb or many other sharing platforms is that the app will allow a micro-entrepreneur (or the platform itself) to extract maximum profits from personal assets like a car or an apartment that otherwise would sit idle for large parts of the day.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Thrift means, simply, “being careful with money.” Living that way is not new. What’s different today is how many conveniences of modern society have, critically, made it easier to stretch a dollar—which, in turn, has allowed the thrift class to grow. We now have tons of retailers who compete at IKEA prices. Sharing economy platforms defray the cost of having to buy things. Thrift-store shopping is now a $7 billion business. Cheap, unlimited entertainment like Netflix, Spotify, and Fortnite is filling thousands of hours of people’s time. People read so much now, for free on their phones, that we call it an addiction.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level. Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status.37 The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs.

See economic stagnation security dilemma (Hobbesian trap), 164, 173, 315 Seinfeld, Jerry, 374 Selin, Ivan, 148 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 63 Sen, Amartya, 245, 248, 264, 265, 442 Senegal, 203 Sennett, Richard, 456n1 September 11, 2001, attacks conspiracy theories about, 336, 358 high death toll of, 193, 194, 194 resilience of people and, 305–6 success of, as uncommon, 303 as theater, 196 uptick in anti-Islam hate crimes and, 219, 220 used as analogy in dystopian rhetoric, 343, 449 Serbia, 203 Serengeti wilderness park, 123 service organizations, 287, 432, 450 Seven Years’ War, 484n77 sewerage, 63, 67 sex differences anxiety, 285 depression, 476n74 educational parity, 239–40 happiness, 284, 285 suicide rates, 278, 279 See also sexism; women sexism, 214–15 definition of, 214 education of girls and women and, 239–40, 239 Internet searches, as index of, 217–19, 218 public opinion in the U.S., 216–17, 216 romantic heroism and, 444 See also equal rights; sex differences; women Sex, Lies, and Videotape (film), 286 Shakespeare, William, 433 shaming campaigns, global, 222, 443 Shapiro, Scott, 163–4 sharing economy, 135 Shaw, George Bernard, 287, 341, 400, 446, 447 Shellenberger, Michael, 122, 141–2, 147 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 295 Shermer, Michael, 455n10, 457n32, 458nn19,21, 464n45, 471n3, 472n26, 487n63, 488n34 Sheskin, Mark, 101–2 Shiite Muslims, 162 Shtulman, Andrew, 356 Shultz, George, 316, 319 Sidgwick, Henry, 487n5 Sierra Club, 465n76 Sierra Leone, 238, 238 Sikkink, Kathryn, 207 Silent Generation, 225 emancipative values and, 226 and populism, 341–2, 342 secularization and, 43 suicide and, 280 Silicon Valley, quest for immortality, 60 Silver, Nate, 339, 367 Simmel, Georg, 165 Simon, Julian, 126 Simon, Paul, 284 Simon & Garfunkel, 257 Simpson, Wallis, 270 Sinatra, Frank, 218, 265–6 Sinclair, Upton, 186 Singapore, 85, 85, 171, 207, 457n8 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 284 Singer, Peter, 429 Sino-Japanese War, 484n77 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 91 slavery abolition of, 11 arguments defending, as corrected errors, 408–9 historical ubiquity of racism and, 397 utilitarianism and laws against, 417 smallpox, 64–5, 386 smartphones, 94–5, 257, 331 Smith, Adam and human psychology, 8–9, 353 on market exchange, 83 on paradox of value, 82 and poverty as default human condition, 25 on real price as the trouble of acquisition, 253 and self-interest working for common good, 13 on specialization, 12–13 Smith, Lamar, 387 Smith, Logan Pearsall, 328 smoke and fire deaths, 182–3, 182 Smokey the Bear, 183 Snopes (Web site), 260 Snow, C.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of old structures after the 2008 crisis. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past ten years, which the media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzzterms such as the ‘commons’ and ‘peer-production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a massive change in what governments do.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

Starbucks prevented efforts by the Ethiopian government to trademark three of its local coffee beans, which would have allowed Ethiopian growers to claim a greater share of profits on international sales. 3  ‘Coca-Cola gives a bit of charity …’ ‘Coca-Cola accused of funding Columbian death squad’, TeleSUR, 1 September 2016. 4  ‘By implying that debtors have …’ This moral framing around debt is a complete inversion of what every ancient philosophical tradition proclaims: that usury is the sin, not indebtedness. 5  ‘This sounds like a lot …’ NEF, Debt Relief as if Justice Mattered (London: New Economics Foundation, 2008). 6  ‘Another recent report finds that …’ Save the World’s Resources, Financing the Global Sharing Economy (London: Share the World’s Resources, 2012), p. 145. 7  ‘Instead of requiring across-the-board …’ Joseph Stiglitz has made interesting proposals for reforming this imbalance. 8  ‘For countries where wages are …’ See Thomas Palley, ‘A global minimum wage system’, Financial Times, 18 July 2011.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Microsoft eventually implemented its own version of Firefly’s “digital passport” technology.2 Ringo turned out to be the progenitor of an evolutionary lineage. Finding new books, movies, or music is a popular pursuit, but it represents only one form of the myriad webs of trust that support markets, scientific enterprises, businesses, and communities. Consider the history of online knowledge-sharing economies. One of the most seductive aspects of social cyberspace is the way virtual communities share useful information. I remember how excited I became in the 1980s, when the never-ending “Experts on the Well” discussion inspired people in the Well, a virtual community of a few thousand, to compete for the honor of providing the fastest and most accurate answers online to questions posed by other members of the community.3 This custom is more sophisticated than automated word-of-mouth systems like Ringo because it requires each human recommender to keep in mind many other people’s intellectual preferences, gleaned solely from online conversations.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Code, I would assert, has been responsible for the creation of more value than that one.”75 But among defenders of Section 230, there is a tendency to paint even the smallest reconsideration as if it would lead to the shuttering of the Internet, the end of digital culture, and the collapse of the sharing economy. Without Section 230 in place, some say, the risk of liability will drive platforms to either remove everything that seems the slightest bit risky, or turn a blind eye. Entrepreneurs will shy away from investing in new platform services because the legal risk would appear too costly. I am sympathetic to these concerns, but there is a whole lot of room between all and nothing.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

People still care about how they’re perceived, but the idea of privacy counts much less. Everybody is broadcasting themselves constantly!” There is a body of evidence supporting the notion that privacy is losing popularity. In the studies he’s overseen for Lippincott, chief content and strategy officer John Marshall believes the sharing economy advanced by social networks like Facebook and Snapchat has helped dramatically alter the attitudes of the young toward privacy. “As you start to connect seven billion people together much more seamlessly, you’re moving toward a connected state being the natural state and the private state being the exception.”


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Robert Reich, a public-policy professor and former secretary of labor for Bill Clinton, once estimated that by 2020 up to 40 percent of Americans would have “uncertain” work like this, the sort of work that makes up the “gig,” “share,” “irregular,” or “precarious” economy, and by 2025, most workers will. This is likely to turn out to be an overestimate, though; in 2017, only 10 percent worked in so-called alternative work arrangements, a slight decline from 2005. Robert Reich, “The Sharing Economy Will Be Our Undoing,” Salon, 25 August 2015; Ben Casselman, “Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All,” New York Times, 7 June 2018. 39.  Andy Haldane, “Labour’s Share,” speech at the Trades Union Congress, London, 12 November 2015; Richard Partington, “More Regular Work Wanted by Almost Half Those on Zero-Hours,” Guardian, 3 October 2018. 40.  


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

And so in the first two decades of the 2000s, venture capitalists and investors eagerly poured billions into startups that were designed from the ground up to be powered by loose groups of independent, self-employed contractors. Those startups included Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, and innumerable other “sharing economy” and “gig economy” businesses which have no workers and own no property but instead use APIs to outsource all front-line functions that require a human. The deliberate conversion of employees into contractors has allowed these companies to externalise labour costs to the rest of society, giving them an edge over every competitor.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2003. Born to Buy. New York: Scribner. ———. 2007. “In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 (1): 16–30. ———. 2016. “Debating the Sharing Economy.” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics 4 (3): 7–22. Schulz, Jeremy. 2012. “Talk of Work: Transatlantic Divergences in Justifications for Hard Work among French, Norwegian, and American Professionals.” Theory & Society 41 (6): 603–634. Schwartz, Pepper, Davis Patterson, and Sara Steen. 2012.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Symbols of democratic flatness do persist in west coast companies, and chief executives behave less like feudal overlords – but more like oracles, prophets or deities, their pronouncements treated with reverence. As the economist Tom Hazlett put it to me after reciting some of the wide-eyed optimism being expressed about the new sharing economy we are supposedly inventing: ‘There sure are a lot of billionaires in the new wiki-economy.’ In filing for Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg stated his desire that the world’s information infrastructure should be ‘a network built from the bottom up, or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top–down structure that has existed to date’.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

Dukes won at the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, a decision that was overturned at the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision—the highest court found that her case should not be certified as a class, but disagreed as to the legal rationale. More recently, Boutrous is representing Uber in its ongoing labor dispute with its drivers. The case, known as O’Connor v. Uber, represents a major landmark in a rising tide of legal decisions and ongoing litigation in the so-called sharing economy. The four drivers, who now represent a class (like the Dukes case) are seeking to push Uber to recognize the service’s workers as employees rather than contractors. This case, along with dozens of similar ongoing lawsuits filed against Uber and other tech firms, seeks to answer a simple question: Are the workers (here, the Uber drivers) adequately labeled contractors or should they be properly classified as employees?


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Notes INTRODUCTION: DRIVING AS A HUMANISM 1.Uber’s then chief executive Travis Kalanick was named to the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum, and Trump selected Elaine Chao for transportation secretary. The driverless car industry is “salivating over Elaine Chao’s light touch when it comes to regulations and her vocal support for the ride-sharing economy,” according to the Hill. Paul Brubaker, a spokesperson for the industry, said, “She has a keen understanding that technology presents a great opportunity to . . . create new mobility paradigms.” Melanie Zanona, “Driverless Car Industry Embraces Trump’s Transportation Pick,” Hill, December 4, 2016, http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/308590-driverless-car-industry-embraces-trumps-transportation-pick. 2.See Neal E.


pages: 405 words: 112,470

Together by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.

Airbnb, call centre, cognitive bias, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, gentrification, gig economy, income inequality, index card, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, medical residency, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, stem cell, TED Talk, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Think Again,” NPR, October 2, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794. 10Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work,” Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 08, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072. 11Clay Skipper, “Why the Sharing Economy Is Making All of Us More Lonely,” GQ.com, August 10, 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/sharing-is-not-caring. 12Ibid. 13Ibid. 14Catherine de Lange, “Sherry Turkle: ‘We’re losing the raw, human part of being with each other,’” Guardian, May 4, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/may/05/rational-heroes-sherry-turkle-mit. 15Andrew K.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Digital Media Policy Options for Europe (and Beyond),” Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, Nov. 25, 2019, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/what-can-be-done-digital-media-policy-options-europe-and-beyond. 19. Will Oremus, “There’s a Smarter Way to Make Tech Pay for News,” Pattern Matching (newsletter), OneZero, Medium, Feb. 21, 2021, https://onezero.medium.com/a-smarter-way-to-make-tech-pay-for-news-9255e3b8dccb. 20. Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York, 2016, 26, https://rosalux.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RLS-NYC_platformcoop.pdf. 21. Liz Pelly, “Protest Platforms: Streaming Co-Op Restores Agency to Artists,” Shadowproof, Nov. 1, 2017, https://shadowproof.com/2017/11/01/protest-platforms-resonate-streaming-co-op-agency-to-artists. 22.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

The book builds on some of my published articles, including “We Are All Gig Workers Now: Online Platforms, Freelancers and the Battles over Employment Status and Rights During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (San Diego Law Review, 2020); “Biopolitical Opportunities: Datafication and Governance” (Notre Dame Law Review Reflection, 2021); “Exit, Voice and Innovation” (Houston Law Review, 2020); “Knowledge Pays: Reversing Information Flows and the Future of Pay Equity” (Columbia Law Review, 2020); “Coase and the Platform Economy,” in The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2018); (with Kenneth Bamberger) “Platform Market Power” (Berkeley Law and Tech Journal, 2018); and “The Law of the Platform” (Minnesota Law Review, 2016). Colleen Laurie, my brilliant editor, made this book deeper, stronger, and simply better. The entire production team at PublicAffairs is creative and smart, and they made this book beautiful inside and out.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Besides the positives, there’s the disappearance of privacy and the tracking of humans to better control their movements and desires. We’re willingly submitting to unprecedented social connection—a seeming triviality that may extinguish all ideas of solitude and selfhood. Ideas of economics are changing under the guise of robotics and the sharing economy. We’re building new intelligent beings, but we’re building them within ourselves. It’s only artificial now because it’s new. As it becomes dominant, it will simply become intelligence. The machines of AI Island are also what we fear may be ourselves within a few generations. And we hope those machine-driven people feel kinship with us, even down to our loneliness and distance from the world, which is also our wellspring of human creativity.


pages: 960 words: 125,049

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

For example, a token can simultaneously convey a voting right, an access right, and ownership of a resource. As the following list shows, currency is just the first “app”: Currency A token can serve as a form of currency, with a value determined through private trade. Resource A token can represent a resource earned or produced in a sharing economy or resource-sharing environment; for example, a storage or CPU token representing resources that can be shared over a network. Asset A token can represent ownership of an intrinsic or extrinsic, tangible or intangible asset; for example, gold, real estate, a car, oil, energy, MMOG items, etc.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Rather, we should also be thinking about how to structure the world of work in such a way as to make it possible for people to derive a sense of identity and belonging from their jobs—and to remind the winners of globalization of the links they share with their less fortunate compatriots. There is, as yet, barely any thinking on this topic, especially as it relates to the millions of new jobs that are already being created in the sharing economy. Take the example of Uber. It seems relatively clear that governments should neither forbid the service, as some countries in Europe are proposing, nor allow it to circumnavigate key protections for their workforce, as most parts of the United States have effectively done. Rather, they should steer a forward-looking middle course—celebrating the huge increase in convenience and efficiency that ride-sharing offers while passing new regulations which ensure that drivers earn a living wage.65 But even if policymakers get that mix right, it seems unlikely that Uber drivers will ever derive the sense of identity and meaning from their work that factory workers once did.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

By multinationals, for instance, that are buying up water supplies and patenting genes, by governments that are privatising whatever they can get a buck for, and by universities that are selling off their knowledge to the highest bidder. Also by the advent of platform capitalism, which is enabling the likes of Airbnb and Facebook to skim the fat off the prosperity of the Homo cooperans. All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy – we all get fleeced. For the moment, we’re still locked in a fierce and undecided contest. On one side are the people who believe the whole world is destined to become one big commune. These are the optimists – also known as post-capitalists, presumably because communism is still a dirty word.40 On the other side are the pessimists who foresee continued raids on the commons by Silicon Valley and Wall Street and ongoing growth in inequality.41 Which side will turn out to be right?


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The dilemma suggests that politicians are paralyzed by a fundamental conflict between the environment and the economy that arises from the deeply held, mistaken belief that freedom and regulation are incompatible. Hardin’s paper was remarkable because it offered such a sound rebuttal to the ideas of the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whose collaborator and mentor was David Hume. In 1776 Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that in a shared economy, an individual, who “intends only his own gain,” was in effect “led by an invisible hand” to promote the greater public interest, since willing buyers and willing sellers will always arrive at a natural price for things, and the highest value and efficiency will be obtained. “Nor is it always the worse for the society that [the individual’s intention to do social good] was no part of it.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Like Flickr (Yahoo’s photo-sharing site), Twitter, or Linux, they are part of what Lawrence Lessig, in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, refers to as hybrids—companies that take the shared efforts of many and build communities that help create commercial value. They are not strictly part of a “commercial economy,” as Google, Amazon, and Netflix are, according to Lessig, nor are they strictly part of the not-for-profit “sharing economy,” as Wikipedia and the open-source Linux operating system are. The hybrids, wrote Lessig, are those that combine making money with sharing—as Red Hat did by offering Linux for free but selling consultant services to corporations; as Craigslist does by offering 99 percent of its listings for free; as YouTube does by allowing users to freely share videos; and as community-building sites like Facebook do.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Others will not necessarily share them. The “gift,” so to speak, is what we do for others when we put our ideas out there and make ourselves vulnerable to criticism, which can easily on Facebook be directed at us under our real names. In Zuckerberg’s view, you are in essence making a gift into this free-sharing economy of ideas if you comment on Facebook about, for example, President Obama’s health-care reform efforts. Think of it as a gift of opinion into the polity, a gift of ideas that may ultimately strengthen the polity. Joining a protest group on Facebook is unlike standing in a crowd and holding up a sign at a protest.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Gezi Park protests, like many other protests around the world, favored self-organization and rejected formal politics and organizations. Volunteers ran everything, including communal kitchens, libraries, and clinics that cared both for protesters with minor ailments and those with life-threatening injuries. The park had a sharing economy where nothing was purchased and nothing was sold. People exchanged whatever they had and received whatever they needed. Many protesters told me that these money-free exchanges were among the most pleasurable, fulfilling aspects of their Gezi experience. It may seem counterintuitive but many protesters also treasured what happened after they were teargassed, pepper-sprayed, water-cannoned, and otherwise attacked by police: strangers helped and protected them.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

His focus on the links between debt and economic malaise and his analysis of how finance (which is mostly short term) has broken the link between saving and real economy investment (which are nearly always long term) are particularly persuasive. Mason believes that we are at a tipping point in the process of financialization, which has allowed capitalism to grow, like a virus, beyond its useful life span. He thinks that the technology-driven “sharing economy” in which information is freer and capital is less important will empower workers to fight financial capitalists in a new and more powerful way.62 But I’m less optimistic. In my own reporting experience, I’ve found Silicon Valley titans at the heart of the technology revolution to be just as rapacious and arguably even more tribal than many financiers.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

It is the reactionary Right that has historically been associated not just with resistance to new family constellations, new immigrants and secularization, but also with new technologies; however, in the conservative Left you also find a rejection of new technologies when they happen to dislike them, such as genetically modified crops, nuclear power and many of the platforms of the sharing economy. Technocrats who reject dynamism are also of both the Left and the Right – those who want to control the future to ensure progress is equitable and doesn’t hurt labour interests, and those who want to do so to protect culture and social cohesion. Leftist Democrats want to plan the economy to create the right jobs, like the Green New Deal (which ‘wasn’t originally a climate thing at all’, but ‘a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing’, as one of its originators has admitted).27 National conservatives want to plan the economy and restrict foreign competition to create stable employment in traditional industries like manufacturing.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

He didn’t care a great deal more about his colleagues’ criticism than he did about some of his neighbours’ gossip when he settled into a new home, as part of an openly gay, interracial couple, in one of the most conservative small towns in Virginia. Turnbull’s descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First, they revealed how the ‘sharing’ economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.


Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, intentional community, land reform, off grid, search costs, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, urban sprawl

The common treasury pays the mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and other costs, and all members’ basic needs for food, shelter, monthly stipends, and so on. All members decide how their common assets are spent. Relatively few communities do income-sharing, however members of Skyhouse subcommunity at Dancing Rabbit and the Tekiah pod at Abundant Dawn organize their economies this way. Meadowdance has a hybrid income-sharing economy. Everyone works for Meadowdance’s community-owned businesses, and their basic expenses are paid from business profits. Members can also earn money they can use as they please by working at outside jobs or working extra hours for their community-owned businesses. carve out the time and energy to set up a new community and a business, much less keep relationships intact with your partners and children?


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

When they started showing up at the early anti-lockdown protests, they were presented as if a great secret was being revealed. What was strange, though, was that the Great Reset wasn’t hidden—it was a branding campaign that the World Economic Forum had kicked off to repackage many of the ideas it has long advanced: biometric IDs, 3D printing, corporate green energy, the sharing economy. All were hastily positioned as a blueprint for reviving the global economy post-pandemic by “seeking a better form of capitalism.” Through a series of videos, the Great Reset brought together heads of transnational oil giants to opine about the urgent need to tackle climate change, as well as politicians pledging to “build back better” and bring about a “fairer, greener, healthier planet.”


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It turns out that nearly all the arguments I have made or could make in this area can be modified and applied in other economic arenas – in fact almost any arena that involves big banks or multinational corporations.33 And that’s for a simple reason: the benefits to corporations of any particular policy are usually much easier to measure than many of the costs to other actors. It’s child’s play, for instance, to generate numbers showing how cutting workers’ wages and benefits will boost company profits. But those cuts inflict costs such as more family breakdowns, higher inequality, less spending power, increased drug use, weakened faith in our shared economy and society. Most of these things are unmeasurable and long-term but no less important, so cost-benefit analyses based on numbers will systematically favour corporations against people. The result is, as the former IMF economist Simon Johnson put it, that ‘the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country … A whole generation of policymakers has been mesmerised.’34 Perhaps the most important arena where the evidence machine works this way involves finance.


pages: 811 words: 160,872

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

., abbot of Montserrat, (i) España, Carlos, Count of, (i) Espartero, General Baldomero, (i) , (ii) Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Estates: Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalonia, (i) , (ii) Estatut, (i) ; see also Autonomy, Statutes of ETA (Basque movement), (i) European Commission: bars unilateral secession, (i) European Union ( formerly Community): promotes liberal democracy, (i) ; Spain joins, (i) ; Scottish policy on, (i) ; attitude to breakaway states, (i) ; and British referendum, (i) ; Britain votes to leave, (i) ; danger of independent Catalonia losing membership, (i) ; member states fear internal separatist movements, (i) ; Puigdemont supporters denounce, (i) Ewing, Winifred, (i) Exclusion Crisis (England, 1679–81), (i) ‘exempt provinces’, (i) , (ii) , (iii) exhibitions: Barcelona, (i) , (ii) ; Glasgow, (i) ; Paris (1937), (i) Faculty of Advocates (Scottish), (i) , (ii) fadristerns , (i) , (ii) ; see also mas (farmstead) fascism, (i) , (ii) federalism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) felipistas , (i) , (ii) Feliu de la Peña, Narciso, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Fénix de Cataluña , (i) Ferdinand of Antequera, (i) Ferdinand (the Catholic), King of Aragon and of Spain: marriage and rule, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; death, (i) , (ii) ; as king of Aragon after Isabella’s death, (i) ; and Sentence of Guadalupe, (i) ; captures Granada, (i) Ferdinand VII, King of Spain ( earlier Prince of Asturias), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Ferguson, Adam, (i) Feria, Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba, 2nd Duke of, (i) Ferrer i Guárdia, Francesc, (i) Ferro, Víctor, (i) feudalism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) First World War see Great War (1914–18) fiscal-military state, (i) , (ii) flags: Scottish, (i) ; British (union flag), (i) , (ii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) Flanders, (i) Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, (i) Flodden Field, battle of (1513), (i) foral law (Catalonia), (i) , (ii) Forcadell, Carme, (i) France: ‘auld alliance’ with Scotland, (i) ; rescues and supports Mary Queen of Scots, (i) ; wars with England, (i) ; Catalonia becomes protectorate of, (i) , (ii) ; war with Spain (1635–59), (i) , (ii) ; Franco-Spanish frontier redrawn (1659), (i) ; French immigrants in Catalonia, (i) ; French invasion (1695–7), (i) ; Catalan hostility to, (i) , (ii) ; supports Stuart pretender to English throne, (i) ; war with Spain (1793–5), (i) ; French invasion and Spanish resistance (1808), (i) , (ii) ; occupies Catalonia in Napoleonic Wars, (i) Francis II, King of France, (i) Franco, General Francisco, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Franks, (i) , (ii) Free Church of Scotland, (i) , (ii) French Revolution (1789), (i) , (ii) fueros (Aragonese and Valencian): Aragon’s revolt over defence of, (i) ; abolished by Philip V, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; ‘exempt provinces’, (i) , (ii) ; desire for recovery, (i) ; see also Constitutions, Catalan Gaelic see language Galicia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Galileo Galilei, (i) Ganivet, Ángel: Idearium español , (i) Garbett, Samuel, (i) Gaudí, Antoni, (i) Gaythelos (Greek prince), (i) Generalitat: role and function, (i) ; revived (1931), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; re-established (1977), (i) , (ii) ; Pujol’s presidency, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Constitutional Tribunal discusses, (i) ; educational and cultural programmes, (i) ; anger at Supreme Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, (i) ; policy on independence, (i) , (ii) ; overspending, (i) ; economic management, (i) ; see also Diputació; Govern Genoa, Treaty of (1705), (i) Geoffrey of Monmouth: History of the Kings of England , (i) , (ii) George I, King of Great Britain, (i) , (ii) George II, King of Great Britain, (i) George III, King of Great Britain, (i) George IV, King of Great Britain, (i) Gibbs, James, (i) Gibraltar: captured by Allies (1704), (i) Gil, Pere, (i) Gil Robles, José María, (i) Gilmour, Sir John, (i) Girona: established as province, (i) ; under French occupation, (i) ; sieges of (1684), (i) ; (1808), (i) Gladstone, William Ewart, (i) , (ii) n.4 Glasgow: riots over proposed union (1706), (i) ; Malt Tax riots (1725), (i) ; population increase, (i) ; and Atlantic trade, (i) ; Literary Society, (i) ; compared with Barcelona, (i) ; mercantile elite, (i) ; university, (i) , (ii) n. 130; unrest and riots (1819), (i) ; (1848), (i) ; industrial growth and dominance, (i) , (ii) ; Kelvingrove Park exhibitions (1880 and 1901), (i) ; contribution to Great War, (i) ; rent strike, (i) ; see also Clydeside Glasgow General Assembly (1638), (i) Glencairn, William Cunningham, 9th Earl of, (i) Glencoe, Massacre of (1692), (i) Glendower, Owen, (i) , (ii) Glenfinnan, (i) globalization, (i) Glorious Revolution (1688–9), (i) , (ii) Gloucester, William, Duke of: death (1700), (i) ‘God Save the King’: as British national anthem, (i) , (ii) Goded, General Manuel, (i) Godoy, Manuel, (i) Good Friday Agreement (Ireland, 1998), (i) Goschen, George, 1st Viscount, (i) Goths, (i) Govern, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Goya, Francisco, (i) Granada: as Moorish kingdom, (i) ; captured by Ferdinand and Isabella, (i) Grant, Alexander, (i) Great Britain: and Scottish independence movement, (i) ; formed by James VI/I’s joint monarchy, (i) ; mythical origins, (i) ; and dynastic union (1603), (i) ; as term, (i) , (ii) ; and nationality, (i) ; formally created (1707), (i) , (ii) ; reordered after Union, (i) ; victories in Seven Years War, (i) ; as fiscal-military state, (i) ; impact of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, (i) , (ii) ; Spain sees as enemy, (i) ; wars with Spain (1796–1802, 1804–8), (i) ; growing power, (i) ; patriotism, (i) ; as united nation-state, (i) ; union by association and imitation, (i) ; 19th-century stability and prosperity, (i) ; proposed federalism, (i) ; regional aspirations, (i) ; patriotism in Great War, (i) ; sense of unity in Second World War, (i) ; welfare state established, (i) , (ii) ; post-war GDP, (i) ; votes to leave EU, (i) ; see also England Great Depression (1929–1930s), (i) Great Reform Bill (and Act, 1832), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Great War (1914–18): and collapse of Austro-Hungarian Empire, (i) ; suspends British home rule movements, (i) , (ii) ; and social-political change, (i) ; Spain’s neutrality in, (i) , (ii) ; effect on British sense of community, (i) Guadalupe, Sentence of, (i) Guardia Civil: created (1844), (i) Güell family, (i) Guipúzcoa, (i) Habsburg dynasty: and Spanish royal succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Haig, Douglas, 1st Earl, (i) Hamilton, James, 3rd Marquis ( later 1st Duke) of, (i) Hamilton, James Douglas, 4th Duke of (and Duke of Brandon), (i) , (ii) Hamilton, James, 7th Duke of, (i) Hamilton by-election (1967), (i) Hampden, John, (i) Hanover, House of: and succession to British throne, (i) , (ii) harvest: failures in Scotland (1695–9), (i) ; in Spain (1790s), (i) Hastings, Warren, (i) Heath, Ted, (i) Hebrides, (i) Henry II, King of England, (i) Henry VII, King of England, (i) , (ii) Henry VIII, King of England, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Henry II, King of France, (i) heraldry: Catalan, (i) Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1747), (i) , (ii) Hesse-Darmstadt, George, Prince of, (i) Highlands (Scottish): character, (i) ; lawlessness and banditry in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Glencairn’s rising (1653), (i) ; Monck subdues, (i) ; as recruiting ground for Jacobites, (i) ; Anglicization, (i) , (ii) ; land tenure, (i) ; Wade’s road-building programme, (i) ; and Jacobite rebellion (1745), (i) ; farming difficulties, (i) ; provides troops for British Army, (i) ; migration to America, (i) ; and national identity, (i) ; in romanticized history, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; clearances, (i) , (ii) Hispania: as myth, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; as term, (i) historiography, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also myths Holland, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron, (i) Holyroodhouse, Palace of, (i) home rule: Catalan, (i) , (ii) ; Spain and, (i) ; Irish, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; devolution accepted by major British political parties, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; critics of, (i) , (ii) ; see also independence Horne, Sir Robert, (i) Huguenots: persecuted in France, (i) Hume, David, (i) Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis, (i) Hutcheson, Francis, (i) ‘Hymn of the Grenadiers’ (Spanish national anthem), (i) Iberian Peninsula: union of regions, (i) , (ii) ; localism, (i) ; see also federalism; Hispania; Spain Ilay, Archibald Campbell, Earl of ( later 3rd Duke of Argyll), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ‘improvement’: English origins, (i) , (ii) ; in Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) independence movements: Catalan, (i) , (ii) ; independent republic (1641) (i) ; (1713), (i) ; criticized by Balmes, (i) ; (1934) (i) ; (since 2010), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; overseas imperial territories, (i) , (ii) ; Cuba, (i) , (ii) ; see also home rule; secession and separatism India: Scots in, (i) Indies see empires, Spanish industrialization: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; European, (i) , (ii) ; see also ‘improvement’; textiles Innes, Thomas, (i) Inquisition, Spanish, (i) Institute of San Isidro, (i) intermarriage: Scots-English, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Spanish Monarchy, (i) Ireland: treaty with Britain (1921) and creation of Irish Free State (1922), (i) , (ii) ; conquered by English, (i) , (ii) ; Henry VIII proclaimed King of (1541) and English rule, (i) , (ii) ; relations with western Scotland and Scottish settlers in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Ulster plantation, (i) ; rebellion (1641), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; support for James II and reconquered by William III, (i) ; keeps parliament, (i) ; manpower resources, (i) ; 1798 rebellion, (i) , (ii) ; incorporating union (1801) and inclusion in British parliament, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Church disestablished (1869), (i) ; nationalism and Home Rule movement, (i) , (ii) ; Easter Rising (1916), (i) , (ii) ; Irish immigrants in Scotland, (i) ; see also Northern Ireland; Ulster Isabel II, Queen of Spain, (i) Isabella I of Castile, Queen of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Italy: fascism in, (i) ; see also Mazzini Jacobites and Jacobitism: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; rebellions (1715), (i) , (ii) ; (1745), (i) , (ii) ; Jacobitism and Scottish history, (i) ; see also Charles Edward Stuart; James Francis Edward Stuart Jamància (pastry-cooks’ revolt, 1842), (i) James II, King of Great Britain ( earlier Duke of York): proposed as viceroy in Scotland, (i) ; Edinburgh court (1679–82), (i) ; accession (1685) and religious policy, (i) ; flight to France and exile, (i) ; death (1701), (i) James III, King of Scotland, (i) James IV, King of Scotland, (i) , (ii) James V, King of Scotland, (i) James VI, King of Scotland (James I of England): succeeds to English throne (1603), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; as ruler of composite monarchy, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; crowned king of Scotland, (i) ; adopts style ‘Great Britain’, (i) ; compatriots follow to English court, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; advocates perfect union, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) ; and nationality question, (i) ; on intermarriage of nobility, (i) ; attempts to pacify Borders, (i) ; death (1625), (i) James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince (‘the Old Pretender’; ‘James III/VIII’): and succession, (i) ; rising (1715), (i) , (ii) ; exile and plotting, (i) ; see also Jacobites Jaume I, Count-King (‘the Conqueror’), (i) Jefferson, Thomas, (i) Jeffreys, George, 1st Baron, (i) Jenkins’s Ear, War of (1739–48), (i) Jesuits, (i) , (ii) Jocs Florals , (i) , (ii) John of Fordun, (i) John II, King of Aragon, (i) John II, King of Catalonia, (i) John IV, King of Portugal ( formerly Duke of Braganza), (i) Johnson, Samuel, (i) Johnston, Tom, (i) Johnstone family, (i) Johnstone, George, (i) Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, (i) Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Juan Carlos, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Juan José de Austria, Don, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Junqueras, Oriol, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Junta de Comercio (Barcelona), (i) Junta Superior (Catalonia, 1808), (i) , (ii) Junts per Catalunya (JpC), (i) , (ii) Justices of the Peace: in Scotland, (i) Kames, Henry Home, Lord, (i) Killiecrankie, battle of (1689), (i) Kirk: General Assembly, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; unease at James VI/I’s religious policies, (i) ; gifts of property revoked, (i) ; Charles I’s liturgical reforms resisted, (i) ; fails to extend church government to England, (i) ; vulnerability after 1707 settlement, (i) ; welcomes Hanoverian succession, (i) ; opposes Gaelic language, (i) ; Moderates acquire control, (i) ; and national sentiment, (i) ; diminishing influence, (i) ; see also Church of Scotland; Disruptionists; Presbyterianism Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, (i) Knox, John, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also Covenant Labour Party (British), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Labour Party (Scottish), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) labour (workers): in Scotland and Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; and industrial unrest, (i) ; organized, (i) , (ii) ; indifference to Catalan autonomy, (i) ; see also anarchism; trade unions lairds, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) language: Castilian, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; nineteenth-century revival, (i) , (ii) ; prohibitions under Franco, (i) ; official status in 1978 Constitution, (i) ; Generalitat’s promotion of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; English, (i) ; Gaelic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, (i) Lauderdale, John Maitland, 1st Duke of, (i) , (ii) law: English–Scottish differences, (i) ; English Common, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) León: united with Castile, (i) ; foundation myth, (i) Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, (i) Leovigild, Visigothic king, (i) Lérida see Lleida Lerroux, Alejandro, (i) , (ii) Leslie, General Alexander, 1st Earl of Leven, (i) Liberal Democrats (Britain): coalition with Conservatives (2010), (i) ; decline in Scotland, (i) Liberal Party (British), (i) , (ii) Liberal Party (Spanish), (i) ; factional divisions, (i) Liberal Unionists (Scottish), (i) , (ii) liberalism: ideology, (i) , (ii) ; in Cortes of Cadiz, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; liberal triennium (1820–3) (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; in Scotland, (i) Lithuania: union with Poland, (i) Lleida (Lérida), (i) , (ii) Lliga Regionalista ( later Catalana), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Llivia, (i) Llorens i Barba, Xavier, (i) Lloyd George, David, (i) London Corresponding Society, (i) Lord Advocate (Scotland), (i) , (ii) Lords of the Articles (Scotland), (i) , (ii) Lords, House of: Scottish peers in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; as ultimate court of appeal, (i) ; Irish peers in, (i) Lothian, William Kerr, 3rd Earl of, (i) Louis I (the Pious), Carolingian Emperor, (i) Louis XIII, King of France, (i) , (ii) Louis XIV, King of France, (i) , (ii) ; and Spanish succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Louis XVI, King of France, (i) Lublin, Union of (1569), (i) McCormick, John, (i) McCrone, David: Understanding Scotland , (i) MacDiarmid, Hugh, (i) MacDonald, Ramsay, (i) Macià, Colonel Francesc, (i) , (ii) Macmillan, Harold, (i) Macpherson, James, (i) Madrid: Archduke Charles captures, (i) , (ii) ; population increase, (i) ; uprising against French invaders ( dos de mayo , 1808), (i) ; urban elite, (i) ; lacks manufacturing, (i) ; political and administrative power, (i) , (ii) ; as national capital, (i) , (ii) ; University, (i) ; see also Castile; Spain Magna Carta (1215), (i) Mair, John: Historia Maioris Britanniae , (i) Major, John, (i) , (ii) Malcolm III, King of Scotland, (i) Malcontents , (i) Mallorca: Jaume I captures from Moors, (i) ; and Indies, (i) ; language, (i) , (ii) ; and Nueva Planta, (i) Malt Tax, (i) ; riots (Glasgow, 1725), (i) Man, Isle of, (i) Mancomunitat, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Manresa, (i) , (ii) Mar, John Erskine, 22nd or 6th Earl of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Maragall, Pasqual, (i) , (ii) Margaret (‘Maid of Norway’): death, (i) , (ii) Margaret, Queen of Alexander III of Scotland, (i) Margaret, St, Queen of Malcolm III of Scotland, (i) Margaret Tudor, Queen of James IV of Scotland, (i) Margarit i Pau, Joan, Cardinal, (i) María Cristina de Borbón, Queen of Ferdinand VII, (i) María Cristina de Austria, Queen of Alfonso XII, (i) Martin the Humane, Count of Barcelona, (i) Martínez Marina, Francisco, (i) ; Theory of the Cortes , (i) Mary of Guise, Queen of James V of Scotland, (i) , (ii) Mary I (Tudor), Queen of England, (i) Mary II (Stuart), Queen of Great Britain, (i) Mary Queen of Scots, (i) , (ii) Mas, Artur, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) mas (farmstead), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also fadristerns Mataró, (i) Maura, Antonio, (i) , (ii) May, Theresa, (i) Mazzini, Giuseppe, (i) ‘Memorandum of Grievances’ ( Memorial de Greuges ), (i) Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, (i) Menorca, (i) Millar, John, (i) miquelets , (i) , (ii) Miralles, Enric, (i) Miró, Joan: Segador (mural), (i) modernista movement, (i) Mon, Alejandro, (i) monarchy: as unifying force, (i) ; ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’, (i) , (ii) ; restored in Spain (1874), (i) ; ceremonial activities in Europe, (i) ; as centre of stability in Spain, (i) ; styling in Britain, (i) monarquia española (Spanish Monarchy), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also empires, Spanish Monck, General George (1st Duke of Albemarle), (i) , (ii) Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of: rebellion (1685), (i) Montjuïc, battle of (1641), (i) ; World Fair site (1929), (i) Montrose, James Graham, 5th Earl and 1st Marquis of, (i) , (ii) Montserrat: Santa Maria abbey, (i) , (ii) Moors (Muslims): invade and settle southern Spain, (i) ; conflict with Christians, (i) ; Barcelona recaptured from, (i) Morocco: Spain’s wars in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Mossos d’Esquadra, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Muir, Edwin, (i) Muirhead, Roland, (i) Muntañola, Pere, (i) Murat, General Joachim, (i) Mussolini, Benito, (i) myths: and national identity, (i) , (ii) ; and foundation of Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and foundation of Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; see also historiography; Romantic movement Nairn, Tom, (i) Naples: Alfonso V conquers, (i) ; and composite monarchy, (i) Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor of the French, (i) , (ii) Napoleonic Wars: impact on Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) Narváez, General Ramón Maria, 1st Duke of Valencia, (i) Naseby, battle of (1645), (i) nation: concept and meaning, (i) , (ii) ‘nation-state’: as political formation, (i) ; (i) ; (i) ; Pi i Margall on, (i) ; Prat de la Riba on, (i) national anthems, (i) , (ii) National Assembly of Catalonia (ANC), (i) National Party of Scotland, (i) nationalism: rise of, (i) , (ii) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; linguistic, (i) ; English, (i) , (ii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) ; British, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; in post–Great War Europe, (i) ; resurgence, (i) , (ii) ; changes with circumstances, (i) ; see also patria , patriotism; unionist nationalism nationality, (i) ; difficulties over definition, (i) nationalization, (i) NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), (i) Navarre, kingdom of: status in Spain, (i) ; Castilian conquest and incorporation (1515), (i) ; under Bourbon administration, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also ‘exempt provinces’ Navigation Acts (English), (i) , (ii) Negrín, Juan, (i) Netherlands see Dutch Republic, Flanders New Lanark, (i) New Model Army (English), (i) Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of, (i) newspapers, (i) , (ii) Newton, Sir Isaac: Principia Mathematica , (i) Nifo, Francisco Mariano, (i) Nine Years War (1688–97), (i) , (ii) nobility: Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; intermarriage in Britain and Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also Lords, House of Normans: expansion in Britain, (i) North America Act (Britain, 1867), (i) North Sea oil, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Northern Ireland: Good Friday Agreement (1998), (i) ; see also Ulster Norway: contends for dominion over Scotland, (i) Nottingham, Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of, (i) Nueva Planta: as incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; and system of government and administration, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Numancia, (i) , (ii) Núria Statute, (i) ‘October Revolution’ (1934), (i) O’Donnell, General Leopoldo, (i) Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of: administration and reforms, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and war with France (1635), (i) ; and Catalans, (i) , (ii) ; opposition and downfall, (i) ; see also Union of Arms Oliver, Frederick Scott, (i) , (ii) Omnium Cultural (organization), (i) Organic Laws (1978 Constitution), (i) , (ii) n. 41 Orkney, (i) Ortega y Gasset, José, (i) Orwell, George, (i) Ossian, (i) Oswald, Richard, (i) Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of, (i) , (ii) Paisley: riots (1819), (i) Paris International Exhibition (1937), (i) Parliament British: composition, (i) ; and peripheral countries’ representation, (i) ; sovereignty, (i) ; see also Great Reform Bill (1832); Lords, House of Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) English: and union with Scotland, (i) ; Short (1640), (i) ; Long (1640–60), (i) ; Rump (1648), (i) ; as counterpart to Scottish parliament, (i) ; Convention (1689), (i) ; historical legacy, (i) Irish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Scottish: devolved, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; defers to monarch, (i) ; ratifies National Covenant, (i) ; and Triennial Act, (i) , (ii) ; and rebellion (1640s), (i) ; Covenanter, (i) ; dissolved, (i) ; post-Restoration status, (i) ; relations with English parliament, (i) ; activities, (i) ; passes Succession Act favouring James II, (i) ; revival under William III, (i) ; history of, (i) Spanish see Cortes; Corts parliamentary democracy: European disillusionment with, (i) Partido Popular (PP), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) Paterson, William, (i) Patiño, José, (i) , (ii) patria , patriotism: Catalan image of, (i) ; and Scottish and Catalan rebellions, (i) ; dual patriotism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; in Cortes of Cadiz, (i) ; and struggle for liberty, (i) ; and a federal Spain, (i) ; and state, (i) ; Primo de Rivera and Spanish, (i) Patronage Act (British, 1712), (i) peasantry, Catalan: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) peers (Scottish): in House of Lords, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; apply for English titles, (i) Pelayo, Don (legendary figure), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Penedès region, (i) Peninsular War, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Perpinyà (Perpignan), (i) Perth, Five Articles of (1618–21), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Peterborough, Admiral Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of, (i) Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, 1819), (i) Petronilla, wife of Ramon Berenguer, (i) Philip II, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) Philip III, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Philip IV, King of Spain: accession (1621), (i) ; early encounters with Catalans, (i) ; and Olivares’s administration, (i) , see also Olivares; and Catalan rebellion (1640–52), (i) , (ii) ; rule without minister-favourite, (i) Philip V, King of Spain ( earlier Duke of Anjou): contends for succession, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; and Catalan Corts (1702), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Nueva Planta, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; aims to recover lost Italian territories, (i) ; war with Charles VI ends, (i) Philip VI, King of Spain, (i) , (ii) Philippines, (i) , (ii) Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, (i) Pi i Margall, Francesc, (i) , (ii) ; Las nacionalidades , (i) Picasso, Pablo: Guernica (painting), (i) Picts, (i) Pitt, William the Younger, (i) PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, Basque Nationalist Party), (i) Poland: union with Lithuania, (i) political culture: English, (i) , (ii) ; Catalan, (i) ; Spanish, (i) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) population: Castile, (i) ; Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Crown of Aragon, (i) ; Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; England and Wales, (i) , (ii) Popular Front, (i) Porteous Riots (Edinburgh, 1736), (i) Portugal, kingdom of: (i) ; dynastic marriages, (i) ; and Ferdinand and Isabella’s title, (i) ; union with Spain (1580), (i) ; citizens declared foreigners in Castile, (i) ; customs barriers with Castile, (i) ; recovers independence (1640), (i) , (ii) ; in War of Spanish Succession, (i) ; French invade (1807), (i) ; and proposed federation with Spain, (i) , (ii) POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), (i) Prat de la Riba, Enric, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Compendium of Catalanist Doctrines (with Muntañola), (i) ; La nacionalitat catalana , (i) prayer book: in Scotland, (i) Presbyterianism: (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; restored (1690), (i) , (ii) ; and Scottish national identity, (i) ; internal dissent, (i) ; relations with state, (i) ; see also Church of Scotland; Covenant; Kirk; Knox, John Preston, battle of (1648), (i) Prim, General Joan, (i) prime ministers (British): Scottish origins of, (i) , (ii) n. 4 Primo de Rivera, General Miguel, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Privy Council, British (post-Union), (i) , (ii) Privy Council, English, (i) , (ii) Privy Council, Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) pronunciamientos , (i) , (ii) proportional representation: in Scotland, (i) , (ii) protectionism, (i) Protestantism: adopted in England and Scotland, (i) ; and Scottish working-class culture, (i) ‘province’: differing interpretations, (i) PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; Socialist Party), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Puerto Rico, (i) , (ii) Puig, Tomàs, (i) Puigdemont, Carles, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Pujol, Jordi, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Pyrenees, Peace of the (1659), (i) Quadruple Alliance (Britain–France–Austria–Netherlands), (i) Quebec, (i) rabassaires , (i) , (ii) ; see also viticulture Radical Republican Party, (i) radicalism, (i) Rajoy, Mariano, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) Ramon Berenguer IV, Count, (i) rauxa , (i) rebellions: Aragon (1590–1), (i) , (ii) barretines (1687), (i) Carlist, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Catalonia: (1640), (i) , (ii) ; (1705), (i) ; (1719), (i) ; (1822), (i) Ireland: (1641), (i) , (ii) ; (1798), (i) , (ii) Jacobite: (1715), (i) , (ii) ; (1745), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Madrid (1808), (i) Monmouth’s (1685), (i) Riego’s (1820), (i) , (ii) Scotland: (1638), (i) ; (1640s), (i) see also wars, civil Recaredo, Visigothic king, (i) , (ii) referendums Canada (1980, 1995), (i) Catalan (2017), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Scotland: (1979), (i) ; (1997), (i) ; (2014), (i) , (ii) , (iii) Spain (1978), (i) Wales (1979), (i) Reformation (Protestant): effect on Anglo-Scottish relations, (i) , (ii) ; exacerbates religious differences, (i) regidores , (i) , (ii) regionalism: in Spain, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) , (x) , (xi) ; in Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also Home Rule; Lliga regionalista religion: resurgence, (i) ; see also Church of England; Church of Rome; Church of Scotland Renaixença , (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) resistance, right of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Revocation, Act of (1625), (i) revolutions of 1848, (i) , (ii) Richard III, King of England, (i) Richelieu, Cardinal Armand du Plessis, Duc de, (i) , (ii) Riego, Colonel Rafael de, (i) , (ii) rights (civil): and independence movements, (i) Ripon, Treaty of (1640), (i) Rius i Taulet, Francesc, (i) Rivera, Albert, (i) Robertson, William, (i) ; The History of America , (i) Robres, Agustín López de Mendoza y Pons, Count of, (i) Roebuck, John, (i) Romanones, Alvaro de Figueroa, Count of, (i) Romantic movement: influence, (i) , (ii) ; and historiography, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and revival of Catalan language, (i) Rome: Fascist march on (1922), (i) Ross, Willie, (i) Rosselló ( comtat ), (i) ‘rough wooing’ (Henry VIII’s), (i) Royal Academy of History, Madrid, (i) Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969), (i) Royal Company of Barcelona, (i) Rubió i Ors, Joaquim, (i) Ryswick, Treaty of (1697), (i) Sabadell, (i) Sagasta, Práxades, (i) Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Salmond, Alex, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) San Sebastián, Pact of (1930), (i) Sànchez, Jordi, (i) Sanjurjo, General José, (i) Sanpere i Miquel, Salvador, (i) Santa Coloma, Dalmau de Queralt, Count of, (i) , (ii) Sardana (dance form), (i) Scone, Scotland: as site of royal enthronement, (i) , (ii) ; stone of, (i) , (ii) Scota (mythical Scottish queen), (i) Scotia: as term, (i) Scotland: recent independence movement, (i) ; as nation without state, (i) ; devolved parliament (Assembly), (i) , (ii) ; dynastic union with England (1603), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Edward I invades and subdues, (i) ; geographical character, (i) ; colonised and settled, (i) ; influence of sea on, (i) ; Scots dominate, (i) ; early claims to sovereignty, (i) , (ii) ; land ownership and transfers, (i) ; close relations with Ireland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; local powers and chieftains, (i) ; territorial consolidation and expansion, (i) , (ii) ; slow state-building, (i) ; Wars of Independence, (i) , (ii) ; ‘auld alliance’ with France (1295), (i) ; population changes, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; foundation myth, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Protestantism, (i) , (ii) ; union settlement debated, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; administrative system after union, (i) ; intermarriage with English, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; and nationality question, (i) ; customs barriers with England, (i) ; transatlantic trade and colonization (i) , (ii) ; incorporating union with England, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; innovation and reform under Charles I, (i) ; revenue raising under Charles I, (i) ; Estates, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; rebellion against England (1640s), (i) ; defeated by Cromwell (1650), (i) ; army threat to England, (i) ; army strength, (i) ; seeks confederal union with England, (i) ; role and fortunes in English Civil War, (i) , (ii) ; rift with England over execution of Charles I, (i) ; improvement in, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) ; post–Civil War settlement and government reforms, (i) ; Episcopacy reimposed (1661), (i) ; rejects office of viceroy, (i) ; clan conflict, (i) ; church government (Presbyterian) in, (i) , (ii) ; and succession question (to Charles II), (i) ; divisions in, (i) ; cross-border trade, (i) , (ii) ; economic hardship and population loss, (i) , (ii) ; migration to America, (i) , (ii) ; William III’s indifference to, (i) ; and succession to William III and Anne, (i) ; opposes Catholic monarch, (i) ; as prospective province of Dutch Republic, (i) ; government and constitution under Union, (i) ; fear of anglicization after Treaty of Union, (i) ; constituencies reduced, (i) ; post-Union administrative and political part-autonomy, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; coinage, (i) ; sacrifices sovereignty, (i) ; shares economy with England, (i) ; delayed economic development, (i) ; Secretary of State for Scotland office revived under Oxford, (i) ; unable to participate in overseas trade, (i) ; administrative reforms under Walpole, (i) ; riots against English government, (i) ; resents English governance, (i) ; feudal jurisdictions abolished (1748), (i) ; social and economic changes (18th century), (i) , (ii) ; commercial networks disrupted by wars, (i) ; surplus food production and exports, (i) ; access to British market and overseas trade, (i) ; industrialization, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; textile and weaving industry, (i) , (ii) ; gains access to overseas trade, (i) , (ii) ; military service abroad, (i) ; shipbuilding, (i) ; manpower resources, (i) ; taxation levels, (i) ; administrators in India and colonies, (i) ; rise of English hostility to (1760s), (i) ; national identity and culture, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Enlightenment, (i) ; dual patriotism in, (i) ; and romanticized history, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; dissent and riots in, (i) ; Lords Lieutenant introduced, (i) ; national militia question, (i) ; representation in British parliament, (i) ; national debt, (i) ; ‘radical war’ (1820), (i) ; contribution to British Empire, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; agricultural revolution, (i) ; employment and labour, (i) ; landed aristocracy, (i) ; cotton spinners’ strike (1837), (i) ; parliamentary reform, (i) ; laissez-faire government in mid-19th century, (i) ; peripheral role in British economic development, (i) ; semi-independence, (i) ; feudalism survives, (i) ; historiography, (i) ; nineteenth-century renaissance, (i) ; grievances, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; provides British prime ministers, (i) , (ii) n. 4; education, (i) ; demands separate Department of State, (i) ; home rule movement, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; close ties with England, (i) ; in Great War, (i) ; effect of Irish developments in, (i) ; Labour party ascendancy in, (i) ; political parties established in British system, (i) ; Unionism, (i) , (ii) ; devolution proposals, (i) ; in Great Depression, (i) ; ‘Renaissance’ (1930s), (i) ; contribution to Second World War, (i) ; state intervention in, (i) ; heavy industries decline, (i) , (ii) ; post–Second World War nationalism, (i) ; referendum on devolution (1979), (i) ; Poll Tax (Community Charge) proposed, (i) ; recession (1980s), (i) ; campaign for legislative assembly, (i) ; parliament opened (July 1999), (i) ; proportional representation in 1999 poll, (i) ; referendum (September 1997), (i) ; economic resources and revival, (i) , (ii) ; renaissance of history as academic subject, (i) ; referendum campaign and vote on independence (2014), (i) , (ii) ; plans second referendum on independence, (i) ; and end of empire, (i) ; sense of Britishness, (i) ; and inadequate dialogue with London government, (i) ; see also Treaty of Union Scotland Act (1998), (i) Scots (people): arrival in Scotland, (i) ; unpopularity in England after union, (i) ; settle in Ulster, (i) Scott, Sir Walter: on Darien scheme, (i) , (ii) ; on development of Scotland, (i) ; popularity in Europe, (i) ; romanticizes Scottish past, (i) ; on Scottish emotionalism, (i) ; The Antiquary , (i) ; Waverley , (i) Scottish Assembly: proposed, (i) Scottish Council: established in London, (i) ; disbanded, (i) Scottish Education Act (1872), (i) Scottish Executive, (i) , (ii) ; title changed to Scottish Government, (i) Scottish Home Rule Association, (i) , (ii) Scottish Militia Act (1796), (i) Scottish National Party (SNP): founded, (i) ; weakness, (i) ; Hamilton by-election victory (1967), (i) ; growing strength, (i) , (ii) ; aims for independence, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; claims North Sea oil, (i) ; European policy, (i) , (ii) ; and new economy, (i) ; in government, (i) ; success in 2011 election, (i) , (ii) ; gains seats in 2015 general election, (i) ; membership increases after referendum, (i) ; members move to Barcelona to support independence, (i) ; popular appeal, (i) ; efficient rule, (i) Scottish Office: transferred to Edinburgh, (i) Scottish Reform Act (1832), (i) Scottish Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, (i) secession and separatism, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Catalonia and Portugal (1640), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalonia (2010–17), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Scotland (2014), (i) ; see also Cuba; independence movements Second World War (1939–45): and nationalism, (i) ; outbreak, (i) ; effect on British unity, (i) Security, Act of (1703), (i) seny , (i) , (ii) separatism see secession Serrano Suñer, Ramón, (i) Sert, Josep María, (i) Settlement, Act of (1701), (i) Seven Years War (1756–63), (i) , (ii) Sharp, James, Archbishop of St Andrews, (i) Shetland, (i) shipbuilding, (i) , (ii) Sidney, Algernon, (i) Silvela, Francisco, (i) Sinn Fein (Irish party), (i) slave trade, (i) Smith, Adam, (i) , (ii) ; Wealth of Nations , (i) Smith, John, (i) Socialist Party (Catalonia) see PSOE socialists: in Barcelona, (i) , (ii) Societies of Friends of the Country (Amigos del País), (i) Societies of the Friends of the People (Scotland), (i) Society of Barcelona Weavers, (i) Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture (Scotland), (i) Solemn League and Covenant (1643), (i) , (ii) Solidaritat Catalana, (i) Sophia, Electress of Hanover, (i) sovereignty: national, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Edward I claims over Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Bodin on indivisibility, (i) , (ii) ; embodied in English/British parliament, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Catalan claims, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Basque claims, (i) Soviet Union: collapse (1989), (i) Spain: and Catalan independence movement, (i) ; dynastic union (Ferdinand and Isabella), (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; mythological origins, (i) ; union with Portugal (1580), (i) ; in Low Countries, (i) ; internal customs, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; war with France (1635–40), (i) ; post-Olivares government, (i) ; frontier with France defined, (i) ; and the Austrian connection, (i) ; Bourbon administrative intentions, (i) ; sends invasion fleet against Britain (1719), (i) ; population, (i) ; as fiscal-military state, (i) ; migration to Americas, (i) ; taxation, (i) , (ii) ; national identity, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; resistance to Enlightenment ideas, (i) ; Britain perceived as enemy and rival, (i) ; impact of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars on, (i) ; allies with France against Britain (1796–1802), (i) ; uprisings against French in Napoleonic wars, (i) , (ii) ; Cortes of Cadiz and constitutional monarchy, (i) , (ii) ; liberal reform, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; new regional divisions (1833), (i) ; economic development (19th century), (i) ; political instability in 19th century, (i) , (ii) ; tensions with Catalonia over government, (i) ; developed and undeveloped regions, (i) ; civil code, (i) ; Moderates and Progressives, (i) ; centralization, (i) ; Revolutionary Sexennium (1868–74), (i) ; First Republic (1873), (i) , (ii) ; monarchy restored (1874), (i) ; considers home rule for regions and overseas territories, (i) ; varied historic regions and communities, (i) ; proposed federalism, (i) , (ii) ; defeat in war with USA (1898), (i) ; anarchist attacks in, (i) ; war in Morocco, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; loss of Empire and decline, (i) , (ii) ; regionalism, (i) , (ii) ; neutrality in Great War, (i) , (ii) ; provoked by increasing Catalan nationalism, (i) ; and Primo de Rivera’s nationalism, (i) , (ii) ; Second Republic (1931), (i) , (ii) ; under Franco’s dictatorship, (i) , (ii) ; monarchy restored (1975), (i) ; decentralization under 1978 Constitution, (i) ; membership of European Community and NATO, (i) ; failure to counter Catalan independence propaganda, (i) ; illegality of unilateral secession under Constitution, (i) ; reaction to Catalan referendum and declaration on independence, (i) ; and consequences of Catalan independence decision, (i) ; see also Castile Spanish Civil War see wars, civil Spanish Succession, War of (1700–14), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Spanish-American War (1898), (i) , (ii) ‘Squadrone Volante’ (Scotland), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) Stair, Sir James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount, (i) ; Institutions of the Laws of Scotland , (i) state, the: and surrender of overseas empires, (i) ; changing meaning, (i) ; fiscal-military, (i) ; and sense of nationality, (i) ; and bureaucracy, (i) ; and pàtria , (i) ; Catalonia as a ‘complete’ state, (i) ; see also ‘nation-state’; nationalism Stevenson, Robert Louis, (i) Stewart see Stuart Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of, (i) ‘Strategy for Catalanization’ (document), (i) Stuart dynasty, (i) , (ii) Sturgeon, Nicola, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Suárez, Adolfo, (i) , (ii) Supreme Constitutional Tribunal (Spain), (i) , (ii) , (iii) syndicalists, (i) , (ii) ; see also anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism; trade unions tacks (Highland land leases), (i) Tarradellas, Josep, (i) , (ii) , (iii) Tarragona, (i) taxation: in Catalonia (1716), (i) , (ii) ; (2015) (i) ; in Scotland (18th century), (i) ; (since 1888), (i) ; in Spain, (i) , (ii) Terrassa, (i) textiles: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) ; Scottish, (i) , (ii) Thatcher, Margaret, (i) , (ii) Thirty Years War (1618–48), (i) Three Commons, the see Conferència dels Tres Comuns Times, The , (i) , (ii) tobacco: trade, (i) , (ii) Toleration Acts (England, 1689), (i) , (ii) ; (British, 1712), (i) , (ii) Tories: election victory (1710), (i) , (ii) ; see also Conservative Party Townsend, Joseph, (i) , (ii) Townshend, Charles, (i) trade: Catalan, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) ; see also Darien project Spanish Atlantic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) trade unions: Scottish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; Spanish, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; see also anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism trading companies, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also individual companies Trastámaras, (i) , (ii) Treaty of Union (Anglo-Scottish, 1707): and Scottish parliament, (i) ; negotiated and ratified, (i) ; as incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; and Scottish and English law, (i) ; and Scottish religious fears, (i) ; and Scottish representation in British parliament, (i) ; on relations between state and Presbyterian Church, (i) ; see also Anglo-Scottish Union Trevor-Roper, Hugh, (i) Triennial Act (Scotland, 1641), (i) , (ii) Tubal, son of Japhet, (i) , (ii) Tweeddale, John Hay, 4th Marquis of, (i) Tyrconnel, Rory O’Donnell, 1st Earl of, (i) Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of, (i) UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), (i) , (ii) Ulster: plantation established, (i) ; see also Northern Ireland Ulster Unionists, (i) Union, Anglo-Scottish see Treaty of Union (Anglo-Scottish, 1707) Union Commissioners (English and Scottish), (i) union (forms of): dynastic, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) , (viii) , (ix) ; aeque principaliter , (i) , (ii) ; incorporating, (i) , (ii) ; see also Nueva Planta Union of Rabassaires , (i) , (ii) ; see also viticulture Union of Arms, (i) , (ii) unionist nationalism (‘banal’ nationalism), (i) , (ii) n. 93 Unionist Party (Scotland), (i) , (ii) ; see also Conservative Party United Irishmen, (i) United Kingdom see Great Britain United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), (i) United Scotsmen, (i) United States of America: war with Spain (1898), (i) , (ii) Universal Male Suffrage Law (Spain, 1890), (i) , (ii) universities: Catalonia, (i) , (ii) ; Scotland, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) ; Spain, (i) urbanization: Catalonia, (i) ; Scotland, (i) Utrecht, Treaty of (1713), (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Vairement, Richard (Veremundus): Gesta Annalia (attrib.), (i) Valencia, kingdom of: Jaume I reconquers, (i) ; economic strength, (i) ; and internal relationships of Crown of Aragon, (i) ; in War of Spanish Succession, (i) ; imposition of Nueva Planta (i) , (ii) , (iii) Vatican Council, Second (1962–5), (i) Velasco, Don Francisco Antonio Fernández de, (i) Versailles: peace settlement and treaties (1919), (i) Vicens Vives, Jaume, (i) ; Noticia de Cataluña , (i) viceroys: title rejected by Scots, (i) , (ii) ; of Catalonia, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) , (v) , (vi) , (vii) ; of Peru, (i) Villahermosa, Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea de Borja, 9th Duke of, (i) , (ii) Visigoths, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) viticulture, (i) , (ii) , (iii) ; see also rabassaires Vizcaya, (i) ; see also Basque provinces Wade, General George, (i) Wales: English conquest, (i) ; incorporating union, (i) , (ii) ; referendum on devolved assembly, (i) Wallace, William, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) Walpole, Sir Robert, (i) , (ii) , (iii) , (iv) War of Spanish Succession see Spanish Succession, War of wars, civil: English (1642–50), (i) ; Spanish (1936–9), (i) ; see also rebellions Wars of the Congregation (Scotland, 1550s), (i) Waterloo, battle of (1815), (i) Watt, James, (i) West Indies (Caribbean): trade with Spain, (i) ; immigration and settlement, (i) West Lothian question, (i) Western Isles: purchased by Alexander III from Norway, (i) Weyler, Valeriano, (i) Whigs: Junto falls (1710), (i) ; return to power under George I, (i) ; and Jacobite rebellion (1715), (i) ; supported by 2nd Duke of Argyll, (i) Whitelaw, Archibald, (i) Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona, (i) Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, (i) William III (of Orange), King of Great Britain, (i) , (ii) Wilson, Harold, (i) Wilson, Woodrow, (i) wine production (Catalonia) see viticulture woollen industry (Scotland), (i) ; see also textiles workers see labour Young Scots Society, (i) Zapatero, José Luis Rodríguez, (i) , (ii) Zapatero, General Juan, (i) Zaragoza: rising (1591–2), (i) ; resists French invasion, (i)


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Norton, 2019). 23.The classic historical work on casual labor markets is Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (1971; London: Verso, 2013). For more recent works on the subject, see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, eds., New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 24.For the origin of the term “precariat,” see https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/precariat.html, accessed December 15, 2021, and Standing, The Precariat. 25.See Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, “Introduction,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1–26. 26.For Rick Santelli’s rant, see https://www.cnbc.com/video/2015/02/06/santellis-tea-party-rant-february-19-2009.html, accessed June 22, 2021; Phil Rosenthal, “Rant Goes Viral, Raising Profile of CNBC’s Rick Santelli,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 2009, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2009-02-23-0902220319-story.html, accessed June 22, 2021. 27.On the origins of the Tea Party, see Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Michael Leahy, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Warin, Philippe. 2012. “Non-Â�Demand for Social Rights: A New Challenge for Social Action in France.” Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 20(1): 41–55. Weitling, Wilhelm. 1845. Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, 2nd ed. Hamburg: Im Verlage des Verfassers. Weitzman, Martin L. 1984. The Share Economy: Conquering Stag flation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wenger, Albert. 2016. “World Â�after Capital.” Self-Â�published essay. https://Â�w ww╉.Â�gitbook╉ .Â�com ╉/ Â�book ╉/Â�worldaftercapital ╉/Â�worldaftercapital ╉/Â�details. Werner, Götz. 2006. Ein Grund für die Zukunft.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

(But in the last decade the rate of advance was much lower—5¼% for the S & P composite index and only the once familiar 3% for the DJIA.) The record of price movements should be supplemented by corresponding figures for earnings and dividends, in order to provide an overall view of what has happened to our share economy over the ten decades. We present a conspectus of this kind in our Table 3-2 (p. 71). It is a good deal to expect from the reader that he study all these figures with care, but for some we hope they will be interesting and instructive. Let us comment on them as follows: The full decade figures smooth out the year-to-year fluctuations and leave a general picture of persistent growth.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The global culture emerging from the internet offers humanity a view of itself as an interconnected whole, inviting people to see themselves as part of a web of life encompassing the entire world.86* The internet also offers the opportunity for people at a grassroots level to change the very structures that have defined commerce and communication since the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Collaborative offerings such as Wikipedia and Firefox—an open-source web browser with half a billion users—demonstrate the power of a volunteer network to compete with established corporations. In another development, the newly emerging “sharing economy,” which emphasizes the value of sharing access to products rather than owning them outright, is rapidly extending to cars, homes, clothes, tools, toys, and other items. These examples are perhaps only the first baby steps toward new structures of human cooperation that haven't yet been imagined.87* As a counterweight to the forces leading civilization toward either collapse or Techno Split, the internet offers a way to create an enhanced collective intelligence at a time when we need it the most.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Most people forget that innovation (and investing in innovation) is a business of exceptions. “It’s easy to understand why most investors rely on pattern recognition. It starts with a successful company that surprises everyone with a new model. Perhaps it is Uber and on-demand networks, Airbnb and the sharing economy, or Warby Parker and vertically integrated e-commerce. What follows is endless analysis and the mass adoption of a playbook that has already been played. . . . Sure, [those companies] may create a successful derivative, but they won’t change the world. “I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

., carbon credits trading, where the value of money is itself measured in carbon) and monies-into-virtuality (i.e., the light pulses of high-speed trading) continues to evolve and accelerate.8 New addressing schemes to locate and coordinate instances of value are multiplying, both as generic currency (bitcoin blockchains) and as platforms for brokering things-with-value (various sharing economy schemes). At stake in all this is also the design of the economy of information itself, from the smallest-scale object or gesture to the largest topological frameworks, and interrelations across scales by drawing and managing an orthodox map in the form of an address table.9 What gets to count and to whom, and who profits from merely counting?


J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return by J. K. Lasser Institute

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, asset allocation, bike sharing, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, distributed generation, distributed ledger, diversification, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, sharing economy, TaskRabbit, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, zero-coupon bond

Rul. 95-37, 1995-1 CB 150 Rev. Rul. 95-55, 1995-2 CB 313 Electing LLC status News Release IR 95-29 (3/29/95) Employment taxes * Legal Memorandum ILM 199922053 40.2 REPORTING SELF-EMPLOYED INCOME *IRS Publication 334 *https://www.irs.gov./businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/sharing-economy-tax-center Election for husband and wife sole owners IRC 761(f) Health insurance deduction for self-employed IRC §162(l) Passive losses IRC §469 Professor's expenses not deductible *Vladimir Shpilrain, TC Summary Opinion 2010-133 Adjunct is an employee William Edward Schramm, TC Memo 2011-212 40.3 ACCOUNTING METHODS FOR REPORTING BUSINESS INCOME *IRS Publication 538 Permissible methods IRC §446(c) IRC §446(d) (more than one business) Reg. §1.446-1 Limits on use of cash method IRC §448 Cash method safe harbor for small businesses(Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) IRC §448 (b) (3) and (c) (1), as amended by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97, 12/22/2017) for tax years beginning after 2017; $25 million average annual gross receipts test) IRC §448 (c) (4) (inflation adjustment to $25 million average annual gross receipts amount for years after 2018), as added by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97, 12/22/2017) Rev.