Ezio Manzini on the Social Impact of the Sharing Economy
Part 2 of a 3 part series of reflections on OuiShare Festival.
Immediately after the theatrical sketch from the previous post, we received an exquisite opening address from Ezio Manzini. I was struck by two things in his talk (video recording here).
First, he situated the OuiShare Festival in the context of the so-called “migrant crisis” in Europe. He talked about “fake fear”, highlighting how the perception of crisis emerges from a manufactured story. It starts with a fairytale version of Europe: homogeneous, white, and Christian. Then this stable arrangement is suddenly disrupted by an influx of newcomers, mostly brown, Muslim and young. Of course, this story doesn’t match the true history of Europe, but simplicity and repetition seem to make it more credible.
I notice that here again is a socially-constructed polarity. Sure, you can pick your side and mark it out as opposite to the other. Or you can view it as a guitar string and begin to play it with imagination.
With this starting point he situated the gathering in the grounded reality of human suffering. He challenged the utopians and entrepreneurs in the room: if you’re not using your privilege to relieve the suffering of others… then what’s the point?
He challenged all of us at OuiShare Fest to contribute to a new narrative, a more dynamic, cosmopolitan, open Europe, less threatened by fake fears.
It felt like all of that took about 90 seconds, after which raced on to introduce two profound ideas: disruptive-constructive normality and relational goods.
Disruptive-constructive normality
The theme of the festival was “after the gold rush”, which Ezio framed as the normalisation that occurs after disruption.
Whether you look at Wikipedia or Uber or literally a million other examples, it’s obvious that new technologies and socio-economic arrangements are disrupting old institutional powers.
At some point, disruption settles into normality.
So the question becomes: how do we transition to normality while maintaining the progressive values that animated the disruption? How does the behaviour of normal people doing normal stuff aggregate into a force that is challenging to the dominant extractive economy? Where is the creative synthesis between conservative and progressive?
He gave a simple example: community gardens.
In many parts of the world now, it’s normal for people to share a plot of land and grow vegetables together in the middle of the city. These are normal people doing it for their family. They’re not explicitly trying to challenge neoliberalism, and yet this activity is totally outside of the logic of mainstream economics.
It’s a kind of gently potent non-combative militancy.
Crucially, the community garden comes out of a dialogue between bottom-up and top-down organising. The city council or some association or municipal authority creates the regulatory space for a garden, and it is the normal people willing to do stuff that create the desire, plant the seeds, and share the harvest. The top and bottom are in balance.
oh shit don’t look now but I think I spotted another polarity transmuted into creativity by imagination…
Relational goods
Ezio reminded us that while collaboration is very human, it requires a complex cultural construction: trust, shared language, friendliness, mutual care, empathy, shared goals, etc. To fit them into the economic puzzle, he calls these “relational goods”.
From this he constructed a simple metric to evaluate where a venture in the so-called ‘sharing economy’ is likely to alleviate or exacerbate suffering. Paraphrasing:
A true sharing economy venture satisfies an economic need while also delivering relational goods.
So the community garden feeds your family while also building care and trust and resilience within your neighbourhood. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to imagine an alternative to Uber or AirBnB that could do the same?
On to Part 3: Making Sense of the Emerging Economy with Yochai Benkler
