What’s Mine is Yours stresses the new importance of peer-to-peer relations. They claim, “The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services.” In other words, our new networking and technological abilities will drive away the need for a pre-existing institution to facilitate our consumption. However, a lot of their sentiments seem to have been presented without objection. We are not heading towards a utopia of individual self-interest trumping corporate greed; we are simply moving into the business of connecting buyer and seller. Even if you get rid of the institution that previously offered the service, and thereby disrupt the traditional distribution model, there will still remain a new “collaborative” institution that will take its place. You no longer need a travel agent to book your hotel room for you, because now you reach out directly to people offering up a spare room on Couchsurfing.org. But the authors don’t address the fact that Couchsurfing.org still generates revenue (yes, it is a non-profit) in exchange for offering a service. Airbnb.com is probably a better example of this “new economy:” it charges 9-15% of the nightly cost. Clearly this is a self-sustaining business with a profit model—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
Funny enough, Facebook’s status as the de facto example of a new model of peer-to-peer discourse has ultimately sparked unending speculation as the to the specific amount in billions and billions of cash revenue it earns by selling every single piece of information it can gather on its members. No one would deny that the number of companies that buy and sell personal data is growing, and the scope of the data collected is widening. Does anyone believe that Facebook is more altruistic than the next $50 billion dollar conglomerate simply because its business model encourages peer-to-peer interaction?
The Huffington Post has been widely regarded as politically-progressive, independent news blog. It is mentioned in the book that “collaborative consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, mush as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as the New York Times.” However, this too, is not the idealist news source it has claimed to be. What started off as a liberal blog with a small staff has grown. Although some of their news is aggregated from other sources, they now invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets – the same “big dogs” they were lauded for eschewing. Not only that, but it was announced a week ago that AOL was purchasing the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million. According to the New York Times, “$300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” More proof of how much money can be made off this online community of readers with tens of millions of people.
The truth is, to offer a product widely and with a certain degree of quality control requires many hours of labor, even if it is just running Couchsurfing.org and the business model does not involve the sale of a physical good. Couchsurfing.org generated more than $1 million through fees and donations in 2009 and spent nearly all of it administering the site. How much does Wikipedia now expend to continue operations? As any space grows—physical or virtual—the cost to maintain it increases. As individuals come to rely on the space for their livelihoods, the incentive to drive revenue increases.
Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, ebay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others).
Maybe there are some good things that can be done through our new collaborative networks that aren’t profit-driven. In What’s Mine is Yours, the “Let’s Do It” clean-up campaign is mentioned. Through social networking sites, fifty thousand Estonians gathered to clean up their country, “an operation that otherwise would have taken the Estonian government three years and cost an estimated 22.5 million euros” to do. However, this was not merely a collaboration of people online; it required broad support from many traditional social institutions.
The Internet absolutely has the potential to give a public voice to an individual and to link together people who would have no other means of finding each other. Certainly, there are discourses that take place amongst small community are marked by a great deal of altruism and which function without requiring a strong central organization. The author’s postulations on the abilities new technologies can provide us are not all wrong. However, they are guilty of an overly optimistic tone researchers often take toward new technologies. It’s imperative to remember that the digital age is not a perfect one. Human behavior is slow to change and we cannot truly give up our self-serving nature. At the same time, we should also question whether a “greedy” business interest is always a negative prospect. Presumably the Egyptian protesters who organized via social media could have done so through other traditional social networks—revolts have succeeded prior to twitter—but the true inherent worth of the networks that were utilized, is not the method that they use to connect peer to peer, but their broad adoption across the population and their always-on status. It’s probably impossible to fully remove the element of greed, and it’s naïve to think that a particular technology can do it alone. But keeping the lights turned on at Facebook keeps a lot of other people happily poking away.
Resources:
Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.
Peters, Jeremy, and Vern Kopytoff. "Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post." New York Times. 7 Feb. 2011. Web.
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