It has been almost a decade since the world was sold the dream of the shared economy where technology would create new economic models that were efficient and fair and inclusive with falling prices and expanded access and the promise that ownership was outdated and sharing was the future. A decade into this revolution the promise feels hollow for buyers and suppliers alike. The idea was that people who had more than they needed would rent out the excess through an empty room or an unused car or idle time and technology would act as the invisible glue coordinating trust and pricing at near zero cost.

Uber became the poster child where people driving alone could share their rides and cars on the road could be better utilized and it sounded efficient and almost ecological. I started my first company during this wave and my understanding was very different from what was being marketed because what I saw was economies of scale subsidized heavily by venture capital and distributed just enough to look decentralized. I remember an investor pushing back on this view and insisting it was about people sharing their resources and I did not argue but even then the cracks were visible because people were buying new cars to become Uber drivers instead of sharing spare ones and this was new capacity being created through debt.

For a while it worked because the unit economics did not matter and venture capital was footing the bill with consumers getting cheap rides and drivers getting incentives and the platforms growing fast with losses reframed as growth. It was a great time to be a consumer and briefly a great time to be a supplier. But subsidies are not business models and a decade later the bill arrived. Once venture capitalists started asking for their money back the platforms could no longer burn cash indefinitely and instead of charging a transparent fee they started extracting value directly from the people doing the work.

Drivers now shoulder the costs of fuel and maintenance and depreciation and insurance and risk while the platform takes a cut and adjusts the algorithm and changes incentives and bears almost none of the downside. The shared economy was supposed to reduce ownership but it pushed risk downward from corporations to individuals and from balance sheets to households. We did not end up with a shared economy but with a mediated economy where trust is centralized and power is asymmetrical and the language of sharing is used to mask extraction. Technology did not eliminate middlemen and it just perfected them.

If this made you think tweet me. I am @troysk704.