Dave5

How Airbnb is being supplanted by the twentieth-century relic known as the hotel is a good lesson in capitalism. In particular, it’s a reminder to ignore perennial promises that new market innovations will reform capitalism so that it works equally for corporations and everyone else.

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But crowd-based capitalism, as it turns out, is just more capitalism. We also know now that the success of the “sharing economy” was propped up by the free flow of cheap venture capital. The plan was simply to use artificially low prices and generous incentives to establish a large customer base, and then elbow out the competition while never having to make a profit. This era, roughly 2012 to 2020, was dubbed “the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy” by the New York Times because ordering takeout, a ride to the airport, or a weekend in someone else’s dope loft in Seattle was cheap — until shareholders and Wall Street investors finally asked someone to pay the bill.

https://jacobin.com/2024/01/airbnb-big-tech-hotels-travel-sharing-economy-capitalism/