You wake up and take a Lyft to the airport. You arrive at an AirBNB apartment, and you order food on UberEats, delivered by bicycle. You’ve just taken part in three different activities that are part of a broader trend of collaborative consumption. Thanks, technocapitalism!
Collaborative consumption is part of the broader crowd economy that allows the collective use of a variety of assets without requiring that all individual members own his or her own personal assets, like a car, house, or delivery bicycle. The cost of those assets is never completely fixed on one individual, but instead collectively purchased through constant renting and exchanging of services.
Naturally, people who own legacy assets like taxis, hotels, and delivery vans don’t care for this sort of behavior, so they lobby to politicians to ban or limit collaborative consumption, and force consumers to resort on the older, less adaptive model that offered fewer choices, greater costs, and less accountability.