Airbnb, building cathedrals today.
Back in 2011, Brian Chesky shared that Airbnb creates millions of micro-entrepreneurs. These local and analogue crafts men and women contribute to creating a better world beyond the sole horizon of mass production. In that sense, Airbnb is a contemporary form of gothic cathedrals.
Artisanship as an emancipatory claim
Two product designers founded Airbnb. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia often remind non-designers that design is about how things work, rather than how things look. Another interesting claim they proposed is that, beyond being a peer-to-peer hospitality platform, Airbnb creates millions of micro-entrepreneurs delivering local crafts and unique experiences. Airbnb co-founders argue that these genuine crafts are much needed to counteract our current global mass-production system.
This vision is not without reminding us of the arts & craft movement, a prominent cornerstone in the emergence of contemporary design culture. The arts & craft movement was founded in the late XIX century by William Morris and spread throughout Europe, the US or Japan at the turn of the century. This arts & craft movement drew on the observations and writings that John Ruskin elaborated in the middle of the XIX century.
John Ruskin emerged as an emblematic figure for the rehabilitation of artisans’ work against the Victorian era’s unbridled industrialization. His critic was not a bare romantic one. At the heart of the mid-nineteenth century, the core of Ruskin’s argument was not to deny technical or scientific innovations, nor the betterment of material conditions. His point was to question the ethical cost of improving the population’s material needs through mass production and managerial labour division.
The works of craftsmen/women do not represent underdeveloped pre-industrial times. These minor works hold a value of their own that does not emerge from comparing them with the dull and calculated output of the industries of their time. This genuine value lays in the joy at work they embody.
When Airbnb founders argue that the platform produces millions of micro-entrepreneurs, it is not surprising that they insist on the value of their manual, local, material production. They invoke the ethos of craftsmanship as a re-enchanting force for hospitality service production in our industrial globalization era. But how authentic might be the rejuvenation of local artisanship enmeshed into the colossal enterprise of global online platforms?
Learning on Progress from gothic cathedrals
In the Progress hungry times of Victorian industrialization years, Ruskin took an inspiring stand. He argued that to look forward, one must look backwards first. During his study travel across Europe, his attention rested on gothic cathedrals construction.
“Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front…examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters…but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone, a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being.” — Ruskin, On Nature of Gothic, The Stones of Venice, XI, 1853.
Ruskin sees in gothic ornament a proof of the craftsman’s joy engaged in free and creative work. As cathedrals’ construction spanned decades and even centuries, these monumental enterprises were not designed by ‘one’ architect nor implemented by mere underclass manoeuvrings.
In an enlightening reading[1], Clarke and Holt revisit the gothic ethos depicted in Ruskin’s writing for the benefit of better understanding what entrepreneurship stands for.
The entrepreneurship ethos of cathedral workers
For Clarke and Holt, this gothic spirit remains a source of inspiration for contemporary entrepreneurship. Indeed, the Schumpeterian figure of the solitary value-creating heroic entrepreneur does not adequately represent entrepreneurial practices’ multiplicity. Clarke and Holt argue that entrepreneurs are better understood as co-creators of opportunities, connected with various stakeholders, including those beyond the enterprise itself.
Furthermore, the companionship they joined was also a kinship structure rather than a competitive market. These kinships between independent artisans and other authorities appear less instrumental than ethical, meaning less calculated toward an end-in-view than dedicated to fuel awareness of wealth. This perspective on companionship shall illuminate both the posture of enterprising hosting peers and that of the platform founders.
The colossal operation of erecting a cathedral resembles the contemporary work of platforms coordinating the tasks of individuals. A shared supervisory function, or that of financiers and authorities legitimizing the operation as a whole, is required for such a project to materialize. But the scheduling is not that of the manager concentrating the knowledge giving orders to an anonymous mass of workers evaluated on their ability to follow the plan.
The micro-entrepreneurship claimed by the founders of Airbnb resonates with Ruskin’s perspective of a creative and collective work life. Moreover, it is inspiring to read that an enterprise as monumental as the erection of a cathedral did not have to be the site of inhuman alienation of the working masses working diligently under the enlightened leadership of a talented foreman. Entrepreneurship is not the task of one, but that of all. A talent was and remains today, a collective and distributed endeavour.
The lasting effect of imperfections
Airbnb produces micro-entrepreneurs by equipping ordinary people and enabling them to enterprise as amateur hosts. But as the re-reading of Ruskin’s thoughts tells us, entrepreneurship might not boil down to empowering tools nor a neat competitive market place.
As Clarke and Holt detail, entrepreneurship is not about building enterprises — or business outputs — but first is the activity of enterprising — the undertaking of opportunities. Their re-reading of Ruskin’s works on the gothic ethos illustrates entrepreneurship as an ethical stance, in the service of a good life more than solely business profits.
If Airbnb is true to its aspiration of emancipating through micro-entrepreneurship, the collaborative form of cathedrals mode of production and the un-classed companionship of artisans might provide enriching insights for an enduring design of Airbnb colossal enterprise. Conversely to companionship, the grand mess of contemporary ‘community building’ is of a previous era, that of Apple using selected app developers to illustrate their proprietary system’s power for instance.
If design is not about how it looks but about how it works, cathedrals do remind us that the long lasting worth of collectively built structures lays more in the proof of each contributor’s joy at work than in the efficiency of the algorithm loading and distributing tasks. Said otherwise, the value in how things work is about how they are made to work. The imperfection of cathedrals keeps alive the passion that was fueling the collective life centuries later.
- Clarke, J. S., & Holt, R. (2020). Ethics in Gothic Form: John Ruskin and Ethics of Entrepreneurship. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2020, №1, p. 20465). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.20465abstract ↩︎
