This is a good observation, thanks hugely for writing about it.
But it doesn’t just apply to the so-called sharing industry.
It applies to all of capitalism, and even all activity of profit, the sharing industry was just another manifestation of the activity of profit tightening its noose around the neck of humanity, and it wasn’t the last, every time we think it can’t get any worse, it does, and we see the next stage of the ending of our species.
The latest stage is vaccines against deadly illness for profit. Does that industry wish covid to end? Of course not, and it won’t, as long as we make a business of it.
When the choice comes to human life or profit, profit always wins.
When we personally are faced with working for the profit machine whilst killing ourselves, vs abject poverty, we choose to work.
In my opinion, you almost nailed the whole problem, where you pointed out most people don’t know the real costs of anything in the sharing economy.
The same thing applies across all of the activities in our current business model, our chocolate, our coffee, our clothes, our energy, even our water, everything we consume and use, is brought to us at horrible cost to huge numbers of people in other places, out of sight, out of mind, and our profit driven mainstream media does its best to hide the uglier sights of it, so we can more easily close our minds to it.
All the while, we remove packets of stored energy from Earth, replacing those with toxic pollution, so there is even a cost penalty to our planet.
Every packet transported does so by an account balance; a transaction, where the net movement of energy, and wealth, is away from the majority of people, and our planet.
Of course it has to change, its spell has to be broken, otherwise we are done.
Key to ending it, is ending scarcity.
That started with free money, and might lead to the solution, together with another recent phenomenon, Bitcoin.
But it isn’t the way most investors think, when they buy, or make Bitcoin for profit, they may actually be unwittingly funding the end of all advantage of holding capital.
So we should cheer them on.
Anyone interested in more details can learn more by searching out a story about a “Kardashev Hinge”.
