It’s been almost a decade since the world was introduced, or rather sold, the dream of the shared economy. The pitch was simple and beautiful. Technology would help us create new economic models. Models that were efficient, fair, and inclusive. A win-win revolution.

Prices would fall. Access would expand. Premium services that were once out of reach would suddenly become available to everyone. We were told ownership was outdated. Sharing was the future.

We mistook access for fairness.

A decade into this revolution, the promise feels hollow. And not just for buyers. It has failed the suppliers just as badly.

The popular definition of the shared economy was that people who had more than what they needed would rent out the excess. An empty room. An unused car. Idle time. This would lower the cost of ownership while creating new income streams. Technology would simply act as the invisible glue, coordinating trust, pricing, and logistics at near zero cost.

Sharing excess is humane. Creating excess to survive is not.

Uber became the poster child of this movement. People driving alone could now share their rides. Cars that were already on the road could be better utilized. It sounded efficient. It sounded almost ecological.

I started my first company during this wave, and my understanding of the shared economy was very different from the one being marketed. What I saw was not sharing. What I saw was economies of scale, subsidized heavily by venture capital, and distributed just enough to look decentralized.

What looks decentralized in the interface is often centralized in power.

I still remember an investor pushing back on this view. He insisted it was about people sharing their resources. I didn’t argue. But even then, the cracks were visible. People were not sharing spare cars. They were buying new ones to become Uber drivers. This was not excess capacity being unlocked. This was new capacity being created, often through debt.

What we called sharing was often just debt with better UX.

For a while, it worked. It worked because the unit economics didn’t matter. Venture capital was footing the bill. Consumers got cheap rides. Drivers got incentives. Platforms grew fast. Losses were reframed as growth. Everyone was happy, as long as the money kept flowing.

When unit economics don’t matter, stories do.

It was a great time to be a consumer. It was also, briefly, a great time to be a supplier.

But subsidies are not business models. They are postponements.

Subsidies feel like innovation until the bill arrives.

A decade later, the bill has arrived.

Once the venture capitalists started asking for their money back, the rules changed. Platforms could no longer burn cash indefinitely. And instead of charging a transparent fee for coordination, many companies chose a darker path. They started extracting value directly from the people doing the actual work.

VC money didn’t fund efficiency. It funded denial.

The technology companies didn’t become SaaS providers. They became toll booths.

Drivers now shoulder the costs. Fuel. Maintenance. Depreciation. Insurance. Time. Risk. The platform takes a cut, adjusts the algorithm, changes incentives, and bears almost none of the downside.

A platform that owns nothing can still take everything.

The irony is painful. The shared economy was supposed to reduce ownership. Instead, it pushed risk downward. From corporations to individuals. From balance sheets to households.

The shared economy didn’t remove ownership. It redistributed risk.

The model of SaaS was quietly reinvented. Not as software-as-a-service, but as software-as-a-loan-shark. Always present. Always watching. Always taking its share first.

Software-as-a-service quietly became software-as-a-toll.

And unlike a traditional employer, there is no accountability. No safety net. No conversation. Just an app update and a revised percentage.

There is no “flexibility” when the algorithm owns your time.

We didn’t end up with a shared economy. We ended up with a mediated economy. One where trust is centralized, power is asymmetrical, and the language of sharing is used to mask extraction.

Technology didn’t eliminate middlemen. It perfected them.

The dream wasn’t naive. But the incentives were always misaligned.

Algorithms don’t exploit people. Incentives do.

And that is the real broken promise.

We didn’t build a shared economy. We built a better extraction engine.