The Sharing Economy, Improving Humanity, and Thankfully Misguided Prognostications

Remember all those fretful luddites who swore that smartphones would ensure no two people ever looked each other in the eye again? Simpletons! Fear mongers! Well… really, that outcome didn’t always seem so improbable. We were digital infants, sliming up whatever shiny new toy we could jam in our mouths. We were curious, wide-eyed, excited. The world was all about us as individuals.

Now we have developed perhaps to the equivalent of digital toddlers- learning to socialize, connect, and share with each other. Thanks to the innovation and leadership from companies such as Airbnb and RelayRides, technology is leading the revival of human connectivity and the cultivation of new models of trust. These new companies are a huge step forward in modelling technology to better match and optimize behavior, wherein trust and reputation are critical in transacting all manner of business.

It is curious to watch, really. Whereas before the agenda of social technology was to originally to connect us all in the digital world, the new model is to sync and align our on and offline lives. We are just learning how to integrate the ubiquity of computing into healthy ways of living, individually and on a societal level.

Encouragingly the collaborative consumption model has only begun to be developed, and only in a handful of applications. It is expanding and evolving, and people are learning to trust in the systems underlying these platforms, and more importantly, to trust in each other. A far cry from the coming night of digital isolation, rather this movement has brought in the dawn of an increased social and meaningfully human connectivity.

As consumers are acculturated to the new paradigm of collaborative consumption, we look forward to watching the model propagate across more activities and behaviors. Hopefully this will come to be a watershed moment for us in moving steadily toward all the utopian potentials of the technological future.

Read about the bigger movement in my latest post!