Tom Slee, a British-born software designer, lives in Waterloo, Ontario, a place better known as the home of Blackberry. As a result, he tells me over the phone shortly after the release of his book, “we’re quite familiar with companies that seem to be the future, but turn out not to be, after all”.
What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy is a painstaking examination of the latest set of companies claiming a chunk of our future. AirBnB, Uber and apps that send you anything from dinner to a cleaner all claim that they’re portals, upon which vendors and customers can “share” (or “buy and sell”, as we’ve called it for thousands of years) their products. At first glance, it’s a utopian vision, which bypasses all the nastiness of Big Business. Yet Slee’s book redraws the landscape in harsher terms, as a group of companies backed by enormously wealthy “old-school venture capitalists” which count themselves out of the rules and regulations that other companies are bound by.
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