Monica Potts, writing for the Washington Monthly:
When we rent a Zipcar for a few hours, Zipcar asks us to clean up after ourselves and fill the gas tank out of a sense of obligation to our Zipcar community. When we hire an Uber or a Lyft or rent a room on Airbnb, the person on the other end has a Facebook-style profile picture, and we chat like old friends on a big social network that purports to have taken the place of an economy. In reality, though, these are the same types of services that have always been around—private drivers and taxis, hotels, rental car companies—but their services are sliced up into tiny bits and provided by underpaid contingent workers, which is what we are ourselves. No one notices the money changing hands, and it may seem like we’re just sharing a service with friends. But in fact we’re enriching the owners of whatever app or platform we’re using, becoming just a data point on the path to their payday while we age without assets. It’s their world, and we’re just renting it.
Well, that’s a sobering perspective.