Online platforms are making it possible again for people to share resources such as cars, homes and time. As well as bringing people together, they’re a way to save money in a tepid economy.
Meanwhile, sharing has become a big business: Airbnb is now more valuable than Hyatt, and Zipcar, which leases cars by the hour, has been bought by the massive international car-rental company Avis Budget. The sharing economy is also changing the way we work. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Mechanical Turk “employ” hundreds of thousands of people to share their labor in the form of piecework — data entry, picking up packages, running errands — without expectation of protections or benefits.
Read the full article at Al Jazeera
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