April 2017, Year IX, n. 4
Tom Slee
Sharing Economy. The other side of the coin
Telos: You are one of the first critics of so-called “Sharing Economy”. What triggered your interest in this topic?
Tom Slee: I have a longstanding distrust of people who claim to be building decentralized, community-oriented person-to-person networks that just happen to involve creating global enterprises that turn their founders into billionaires. We’ve seen this happen with earlier cycles of Internet innovation especially around the idea of openness: Google claims to be about openness except for the advertising and search algorithms that make it money, Facebook is all about openness on the part of its users, but not about its newsfeed algorithm, and so on. ...more
Editorial
How would you translate sharing economy? In Italian economia delle condivisione would seem the most accurate. And yet it doesn’t do justice to this economic phenomenon. Sharing is currently one of the most rhetorically abused words. Reuse, recycle, borrowing: many extremely recent entrepreneurial start-ups are based on this concept. They always start with a technological platform where citizens can offer services or share an asset. ...more
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