Silicon Valley ain’t doing s#!t to make the world a better place…

Self-awareness doesn’t seem to be a common trait in Silicon Valley. A casual scrolling down Product Hunt’s main page would show what some of tech’s finest, budding minds are putting their blood, sweat and tears into: all things tiny, meta-apps for other consumer apps, and viral games about goats. Are gone the days when these innovators were supposed to ‘change the world’ for the better? The days when one’s mission was for technology ‘to give a voice to people who would never have been heard?’

Silicon Valley, ostensibly, puts this ‘innovation onus’ upon itself, hailing itself as the forefront of the world’s future. And for awhile we were doing quite well — a palm-sized pc attached to a phone, transmission of instant and collaborative communication in 140 characters, and the world’s largest resume book all came from the junction of innovation and consumer need. But at the moment, with just some notable exceptions, the Valley is somehow caught up in this trend of incremental improvement — ‘making products 1% better for the 1%’ — and I call bullshit.

One of the more recent ‘innovative’ spaces to come out of the Bay Area has been this emergence of ‘the sharing economy.’ Defined as an “economic model based on sharing underutilized assets from spaces to skills to stuff for monetary or non-monetary benefits”, this mode of transaction has been hurled into the average consumers’ pocketbooks through a myriad of apps and technological services such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit. Does this new marketplace change the world? I think so. But who does it change it for? Well, the same damn people using uber for butlers. Let me explain.

The sharing economy, much like the good ol’ capitalist economy, is still irrevocably tied to a supply and demand curve. The supply being the handyman services, spare bedrooms and car rides offered by ‘members’ of these companies. Note the word ‘members’ — those who fulfill the supply side of these sharing economy companies are very rarely, if at all, considered employees. They are merely contract workers, without any or all benefits of full-time employment.

On the demand side is, well, the usual suspects — well-educated, urban, early adopters of these tech products who reap the benefits of convenience and lower prices offered by sharing, while bearing little to none of the risk. What started out as a dramatic leap into a new, more equal mode of consumption quickly devolved into the same ol’ story of fatuous benefits for the most privileged.

So who’s to blame here? Well, we all are really. The sharing economy has opened up many doors ranging from the new-found ability to trust strangers in transactions, the discovery of new methods of consumption, and a small, but growing feeling, that the sharing economy is on to something in the way in which we humans yearn to interact with each other. However, Silicon Valley is in the driver’s seat — and there’s a hell of a lot more we can be doing to take these developments and turn them into a new, category defining platform.

Tinder showed us that it’s okay to meet up with someone you’ve never met; the ALS Ice Bucket challenged showed us that it’s fun to share good deeds with your friends; and the countless online campaigns of millions of so-called ‘slacktivists’ have showed us that people are willing to help, speak up, and care about something.

I just wonder if Silicon Valley (disclosure: which I’m now an honorary member) will create something worth caring about. Or, will we have to open our Uber for butlers app to get someone else to do it for us?