Last week we talked about the sharing economy as a transition stage to “after capitalism.”
Intermediaries are an interesting consideration in the Horizon 2 (H2) transition. The sentiment today is that intermediaries are bad and thus should be disintermediated. Get rid of the middleman! Thus P2P (peer-to-peer) platform approaches are in favor.
But let’s recognize that they are useful and not-so-useful intermediaries. A simple example is travel agents. In many cases, they got a percentage for not adding much value. But how many of us long for the days when we had one who saved us countless hours comparing airlines and searching for hotels – that’s a precious intermediary. When we disintermediate, the illusion is we are taking out costs, but really we are just shifting them. Instead of one travel agent, a company of 40 people has in effect 40 part-time travel agents. So we may see some “re-intermediation” along with disintermediation.
I put P2P Platforms in transition in because I think it will have one foot in the old and one in the new. UBER and AirBnB, the poster children of P2P platforms, are enabled by intermediaries who make a nice living from it and lean toward the old Horizon 1 neoliberal world. As we discussed last week, the gift platforms (freecycle, neighborgoods) lean toward Horizon 3 transformation.
In my scanning, P2P platforms are sometimes praised for bringing back the old barter economy. I sorta get it, but I there is a tendency to romanticize barter. I suspect it is simple an emotional reaction against the evils of money. But trying to figure out how many haircuts is worth how many miles of an Uber ride or shoveled driveways seems counter-productive….unless, we jump to a transformation scenario in which it is not necessary to assign value. Some local currency experiments have done okay with this, but the idea isn’t scaling. In the H2 transition, pricing/value is still essential. Indeed, one of the “scary” paths that might emerge from this transition is what we might call hyper-pricing, in which economic value is ascribed to practically everything. You one-hundredth of a cent for visiting a web page, a couple cents for clicking on an ad, etc. Not conducive to barter.
So, as we look at P2P platforms, let’s be sure to situate them on our three horizons, and not fall into the trap of lavishing praise on new things just because they are new, or more simply, watch out for the poseurs! – Andy Hines
