Digital Economies and Diversity

Question 1

How does sharing relate to neoliberalism?

Answer 1

Sharing produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance

Cockayne (2016)

Question 2

What is the sharing/’on-demand’ economy?

Answer 2

Describes digital platform that connects consumers to a service or commodity

Cockayne (2016)

Question 3

What is the paradox of sharing in on-demand economy?

Answer 3

performance of sharing are framed both part of capitalist economy and as an alternative

Cockayne (2016)

Question 4

How do paradoxes and articulations of performances of sharing vary by platform?

Answer 4

• Difference between AirBnB and Uber platforms: Uber model employs users as contractors that sell their labour power
• AirBnB users profit from listing properties, which still requires work but not a formal employment

Cockayne (2016)

Question 5

How is labour viewed in the shared economy?

Answer 5

• Labour devalued and viewed as infinitely available commodity for on-demand purchase with barely any value
• Abolishes distinction between digital economies and labour-power
• Labour as ‘gift’ of one’s shared contribution
• Political economy approach reveals how this undermines workers’ possibilities of collective action and progressive change to their circumstances

Cockayne (2016)

Question 6

What does the digital dimension of the shared economy do?

Richardson, 2015)

Answer 6

Opens up possibility of new practices of economy –> manifested in complex relationship between the virtual and the material

Richardson (2015)

Question 7

What are the three ways of performing the sharing economy?

Answer 7

1. Performing sharing through community
2. Performing sharing through access
3. Performing sharing through collaboration

Richardson (2014)

Question 8

How do you perform sharing through community?

Answer 8

• Dependent upon participation
• Mobile technologies created a logic of continuous connectivity
• Constant connection means online and offline are difficult to distinguish
• AirBnB desire for guest is that hosts are authentic –> unique experience of familiarity creates possibilities to belong anywhere

Richardson (2014)

Question 9

What is the role of trust in performing sharing through community?

Answer 9

• Enabled through economies of trust through platform
• “Strangeness” of strangers stamped out by technology that makes sharing less threatening but more surprising

Richardson (2014)

Question 10

How do you perform sharing through access?

Answer 10

• Access to Wi-Fi is essential for much of the activity of sharing economy
• Sharing through access might be forced with the marketplace replacing public resources

Richardson (2014)

Question 11

How do you perform sharing through collaboration?

Answer 11

• Promises more quality and/or quantity of labour
• Quality built into digital design through open development
• Quantity achieved through pool of potential workers is multiplied
• Poses unanswered questions around conditions of, access to and profits from such labour

Richardson (2014)

Question 12

What does recognising the plurality of economies through these performances feed into?

Answer 12

• Feeds into broader aim of using ‘the sharing economy’ as a prompt rather than target for geographical research
• Instead of delimiting sharing economy, digital technologies can extend, reconfigure and upset a diversity of existing economic practices

Richardson (2016)

Question 13

What are attributes of digital platforms?

Answer 13

• Peer-To-Peer
  
  • Client and service provided are equal and can switch places
  • Horizontal –> role of business not fixed
  • E.g. AirBnB: be both traveller and host
• Access-Based
  
  • ‘Post-ownership’
  • Buying access/experience for a short period
  • E.g. RentezVous; Ebay (P2P but ownership-based)

Question 14

What difference does the digital economy make to practicies of sharing?

Answer 14

• Volume, velocity, variety of ‘sharing’ opportunities
  
  • Big data
  • ‘Bigness’ better –> supply-chain capitalism = big

Question 15

What is the utopian fantasy of technology?

Answer 15

Promise technology will enhance human capacities and abilities to harness nature

De Certeau (1984)

Question 16

What is the dystopian fantasy of technology?

Answer 16

Technology will remove human agency, destroy nature and undo progress

De Certeau (1984)

Question 17

How has hacking played a role in digital economies?

Answer 17

Mainstreaming of hacking through ‘hackathons’ demonstrates hacking as positive practice – ‘outlaw innovation’

Richards (2015)

Question 18

What is network sociality?

Answer 18

Not only about flows of information as commodities but also social life

Question 19

What is the role of space and place of digital sharing?

Answer 19

Undermining normative spatial typologies and boundaries for economic activity

Question 20

What is the role of the home in digital sharing?

Answer 20

• Becomes a commercial space through platforms like AirBnB
• Opening up a new space within the City
• Sense of belonging to a city
• Part of longer term growth of informal network hospitality
• Trust reconfigured built through technology – opening up domestic space to strangers requires trust

Question 21

What is the role of the workplace in the sharing economy?

Answer 21

• Becomes mobile, networked and open
• Ability to locate business functions in the cloud and to connect with clients/colleagues instantaneously
• Co-working spaces for (tech) start ups
• The ‘on-demand’ worker:
  
  • Ability to connect workers through digital platforms for one-off jobs

Question 22

What is the role of mobilities in digital sharing

Answer 22

• Geospatial data
  
  • Uber and other logistics providers utilise this data to provide mobility services
  • Delivering everything?

Question 23

What does Schor et al. (2014) remark about the sharing economy?

Answer 23

Tells us much about a culture dominated by economic imperatives but yearning for more cooperative ways of doing things

Question 24

What are the issues with AirBnB’s ‘hospitality’?

Answer 24

• Disrupting regulation of formal hotel industry
• Implications for rental prices and buy to let
• Differentiated by space; regulation from city to city
  
  • Disembedded from particular geographical context

Question 25

What does re-imaging capitalism as a network do?

Answer 25

• Re-imaging capitalism as a network that has to constantly be achieved, it becomes possible to identify places within space economies where network is weak
• In these weak spaces potential exists for new forms of economic diversity

Leyshon and Lee (2003)

Question 26

What does a pessimistic reading of economic alternatives provide?

Answer 26

Pessimistic readings of economic alternatives that seek to operate through a ‘spatial fix’: where attempts to escape contradictions of capitalise will prove temporary and fleeting

Leyshon et al. (2009)

Question 27

What is platform capitalism?

Answer 27

New form of digital economic circulation where knowledge, labour, use rights and ideas move between geographically distributed but connected online communities

Langley and Leyshon (2017)

Question 28

What does platform capitalism solve?

Answer 28

• Coordination problems in market exchange by extending the amount of data that can be transferred between network locations
• Internet revolutionised two-sized markets to create multi-sided markets

Langley and Leyshon (2017)