The "sharing economy" isn't about sharing at all. Despite the warm, communal language used to describe platforms like Airbnb, Uber, and Robinhood, what we're really talking about is the aggressive marketization of everything we own and do. Through these platforms, every possession becomes a potential revenue stream, every moment of free time a chance to "hustle," and every social interaction a business opportunity.
Let's use Robinhood - the commission-free investment app now worth over $8 billion with nearly 16 million active users - as a case study to examine how the sharing economy is reshaping society, and not for the better.
The Economics of "Sharing"
The sharing economy emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, during a period of brutal austerity that accelerated the erosion of the welfare state. With wages stagnant and full-time work often insufficient to support a family, people needed alternative income sources. Enter platforms that promised to help users either monetize their existing assets (renting out spare rooms on Airbnb) or access goods and services more cheaply (catching rides via Uber).
The concept hinges on what business types call "sweating idle assets" - maximizing the usage capacity of goods by connecting owners who have excess capacity with non-owners who want access. Your car sits idle 95% of the time? Put it to work on Uber. Have some savings languishing in a low-interest account? Put it to work on Robinhood.
This might sound sensible enough, but it represents a profound shift in how we relate to possessions and to each other. Everything becomes a potential asset to be optimized and monetized. Your home isn't just a place to live - it's a revenue stream. Your car isn't just transportation - it's a business opportunity. Your savings aren't just security - they're capital to be put to work.
This financialization of everything reflects deeper changes in how capitalism operates. As David Harvey observes, we've moved away from traditional production toward financial activities as the primary driver of economic activity. Wealth increasingly concentrates at the top through returns on capital rather than labor - as Thomas Piketty demonstrated with his famous formula R>G, where return on investment consistently outpaces economic growth.
The sharing economy both reflects and accelerates these trends. Platforms like Robinhood don't just facilitate trades - they transform users' relationship with money itself, encouraging them to view every dollar as an investment opportunity and themselves as traders rather than savers.
The Psychology of Always Being "On"
The mobile phone is central to how the sharing economy reshapes our psychology. Robinhood users manage their entire portfolio through their app, bombarded with real-time price updates, news alerts, and trading notifications. The interface is carefully crafted to be "sticky" - with satisfying animations, game-like rewards, and constant prompts to check positions and make trades.
This gamification works startlingly well. Robinhood users trade nine times as many shares as E-Trade customers and 40 times as many as Charles Schwab customers, per dollar in their accounts. The app drives "attention induced trading" - irrational behavior prompted by the constant stream of information and opportunities.
But the psychological impact goes beyond just trading frequency. To participate in platforms like Robinhood is to subject yourself to an endless cascade of digital information, market signals, and social feedback. Even when markets close, users obsessively hunt for information and trading ideas on Reddit and other forums. The invisible hand of the market becomes an invisible manager, dictating thoughts and actions through a torrent of symbols and prompts.
This is what Franco Berardi calls "semiocapitalism" - where our thoughts, feelings, creativity and emotional energy become tools for producing value. If industrial capitalism confined our bodies to assembly lines, digital capitalism colonizes our minds with endless streams of data and demands for attention.
The result is profound anxiety. The threat of losing your savings, your driver rating, or your rental income becomes an accepted cost of the "autonomy" these platforms provide. When a 20-year-old Robinhood user committed suicide in 2020 after seeing a $730,000 negative balance in his account (which turned out to be temporary), it highlighted the real human cost of gamifying financial risk.
As Byung-Chul Han argues, we've moved from external exploitation to self-exploitation. The sharing economy promises freedom from traditional employment, but replaces it with the "free constraint of maximizing achievement." We work harder, consume more information, and focus obsessively on metrics of success - exploiting ourselves more effectively than any boss could.
The False Promise of Liberation
This brings us to the central contradiction of the sharing economy. These platforms present themselves as liberating alternatives to traditional capitalism, using the language of democratization, empowerment and community. Robinhood claims to "democratize finance for all." Even the brand name invokes folklore about taking from the rich to give to the poor.
But this promised emancipation isn't about collective resistance to capital - it's about the chance to become a capitalist yourself. Put your money to work! Rent your assets! Be your own boss! The sharing economy offers the tools of bankers and landlords to the masses, promising the autonomy and freedom supposedly enjoyed by the capitalist class.
This is, of course, a false promise. The "freedom" offered comes with more precarity, isolation, and anxiety than traditional employment. We may feel more autonomous, but we're more thoroughly subjected to market forces than ever before. As Jonathan Crary notes, "the attack on values of collective and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependency on others, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the 'free' workings of markets."
There's something perverse about this dynamic. The sharing economy tacitly acknowledges that capitalism isn't working for most people, but presents deeper integration with capital as the solution. Don't organize or resist - just become a better capitalist! This is what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism" - the inability to imagine any alternative to capitalism, even when critiquing it.
The sharing economy has proven remarkably effective at absorbing and neutralizing impulses toward genuine sharing and cooperation. Any authentic communal energy that might have existed in early "sharing" platforms has been thoroughly colonized by market logic. What's left is a system that makes us feel better about our conditions while foreclosing possibilities for actually improving them.
The Verdict
Despite its name, Robinhood takes from the poor and gives to the rich - just like the rest of the sharing economy. These platforms haven't democratized anything. They've simply found new ways to financialize our possessions, colonize our attention, and channel collective dissatisfaction with capitalism into deeper integration with market logic.
The casualization of work, the profound isolation, the obsessive focus on monetizing every asset and interaction - none of this has made us more free. Instead, the sharing economy has given us new forms of precarity and anxiety while dampening possibilities for genuine collective action.
The solution isn't more creative ways to "share" within capitalism's constraints. It's to rebuild authentic forms of sharing and cooperation that exist outside market logic entirely. Until then, the sharing economy will continue to harm not just individual participants, but the very fabric of society itself.
