While giving someone a ride, running errands or having a guest to stay in your spare room might be something you offer a friend for free, these are becoming the basis of a range of services increasingly provided to strangers in exchange for money. In The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, Arun Sundararajan explores this new ‘sharing economy’ based on peer-to-peer commercial exchange. Although the book provides a wealth of interesting detail in accounting for the historical emergence of ‘crowd-based capitalism’, Christopher May argues that it obscures the real impact of the changes it posits on workers as well as the potential intensification of economic insecurity and inequality that may be brought about by the ‘sharing economy’.
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