Sharing

This chapter examines popular and academic concerns that the sharing economy offers workers a raw deal—lower salaries, fewer benefits, and little job security—and that workers have essentially been forced to take sharing-economy jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, all of which have been masked by the communitarian rhetoric of sharing-economy proponents. The chapter does not dispute critics’ characterization of sharing economy practices as unsavory, but rather takes issue with the notion that contingent employment is necessarily a bad thing for workers. The chapter argues that concerns about the increasing precarity of labor are rooted in a rejection of the market and of money as inimical to valued social bonds. The antisocial thesis inspires a critical interpretation of money and the market as potentially liberatory.