Free is expensive, but cheap may be even costlier.

The Freeconomy (Facebook, Google, etc.) will give you stuff you need–or your ego wants–but in return will extract your information. Money isn’t necessary among “friends.” How unseemly. You don’t put a quarter in the slot; the slot just takes what it pleases. These nouveau companies want inside your head, first virtually and eventually literally.

The Cheapoconomy is dicier still. Not only do services like Uber and others track you, but they reduce workers to glorified serfs, promising flexibility for minimal payment, destabilizing more secure industries. As they gain greater power, the laborers will be squeezed more–until they’re completely obliterated. It’s great for us, except if we’re one of them. And more of us in the coming decades will likely become them. We won’t just be the consumers. We’ll be consumed. 

The thing is, the Peer Economy (a funny name since the workers are not your equals) is an improvement over the old way when it comes to transportation and delivery services. The disruption was successful because it was, in many ways but not all, good. And that’s where we are, at a strange crossroads of capitalism, libertarianism and socialism. Who can give us a lift out of that neighborhood?

From Douglas Coupland at the Financial Times:

I think right now the Uber situation is like the Teamsters and garburators in the mid-20th century. There’s no real argument to not have Uber drivers. They are superior to taxis in all possible ways. The only thing stopping them are all these cab drivers who had to pay extortionate amounts of money for a medallion, and suddenly entering their arena are these new people with superior service in every way, who also didn’t get hosed buying a medallion (honestly, medallions? How is that even still a thing?). So of course taxi owners are angry, and of course they’re going to lash out and try to generate urban legends to frighten people who, the moment they use an Uber, will never use a taxi again if they don’t have to. Uber’s not alone in this sort of engineered fear environment. Remember the Craigslist killer?

Gosh — someone didn’t buy an ad in a newspaper, and for their stupidity they paid with their life.

And in Canada two weeks ago, the press revelled in the fate of an Edmonton couple who rented out their house on Airbnb, and came back only to find it trashed to the tune of C$100,000. Airbnb now has the largest hotel footprint in the world. Uber has image problems but they’re on the correct historical track. Craigslist, Lyft et al . . . the shareconomy? The freeconomy? It’s going to happen. And the moment these firms start paying more in taxes is the moment they officially suffocate to death the old economy.•