Term “sharing economy” was coopted. It has little to do with real sharing. It has as much with sharing as my landlord “shares” the apartment to me. This is not sharing. Sharing economy became another term for renting, lending, outsourcing, only that the units of “sharing” are now smaller because information technology backing sharing economy allow less overhead in coordination and transactions. Oh, and of course, almost no regulation and oversight. So less paperwork. No contracts are signed, no responsibility or liability, no labor rights, no insurance. In real sharing you also have none of those, so is maybe this the only thing which sharing economy shares with real sharing?

It is interesting to notice that a web service is not seen as sharing economy if it just facilitates real sharing between people, without having an intermediary in between which is collecting a commission every time somebody shares something. You need that intermediary charging a commission for a service to become sharing economy.

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Crowdsourcing definitely has some issues we are not talking about enough. They are workers as any other workers. They are precarious as many others today. Who is thinking about their rights, worker rights? Who is making sure that they are payed and are not working in sweatshops or even slavery conditions? We really do need a 21st century concept of worker unions, for globalized and precarious world. All crowdsourcing workers, unite!

Is open source possible because of the general lack of programmers so we do not even need an union to be able to require from our employers perks? Employers do not have much space to negotiate if they want to do their businesses. As workers we are then so lazy that we rather cooperate with others from other companies then (re)do all their work ourselves. In which other industry you can say to the boss that you do not feel to do the mundane task which was already done by somebody else and you would rather just work together with that colleague from the other company and let the boss imagine some other business model instead?