Wikibollocks entry for today comes from Grist magazine, a "source of nonprofit, independent green journalism", who just ran a piece on peer-to-peer sharing which includes sentences like this.
We’re choosing peer-to-peer because we want to do business differently. We actually kind of want to pretend like we’re not doing business at all.
Some questions for Grist.
- Why do you think that you are on the same side as Uber (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, and a host of venture capitalists), Sidecar (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Google and other venture capitalists), and Lyft (based in San Francisco, in early-stage VC funding) and AirBnB (based in San Francisco, funded by Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, Crunch Fund, Ashton Kutcher and other venture capitalists)?
- Does it not occur to you that when billionaires promote "pretending like we're not doing business at all" then maybe there's something a bit dodgy going on?
- When Jeff Bezos (personal wealth $18.4B) and Marc Andreessen (personal wealth, $600 million) are one one side and taxi drivers are on the other, what makes you think that Bezos and Andreessen are the progressive side?
Look, Grist, I understand that words like "peer-to-peer" and "sharing" sound nice and egalitarian, but in pieces like this you're actively working against the things you claim to stand for.
Ouch! That article hits so many themes of net-business propaganda that it reads like a PR piece, not journalism. It ends saying outright it’s good for you and opponents are bad – “delighting new consumers and frustrating established business owners.”.
I presume you’ve seen this take-down of that ideology:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged/
“Laws don’t exist merely to frustrate the business ambitions of coastal hipsters: They also exist to protect the more vulnerable members of society.”
Seth. Good to hear from you again. Yes, I had seen the Paul Carr piece, which brings some needed sanity to the issue. I was really disappointed to see Tim Wu’s New York Times piece: I expect better from him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opinion/the-best-way-to-regulate-urban-living-apps.html