The Sharing Economy
Yochai Benkler,
Businessweek,
Jun 13, 2005
I have been quite unhappy with our elected leaders ever since a certain Supreme Court decision here in Canada recently, one that portends the privatization of our health care system in spite our history of electing governments who promised over and over that they would protect public health care. Quite unhappy? Seething. So if you detect a certain edge in today's newsletter, it's because of yet another turning of the screw of cynicism and disillusionment. So it's appropriate that on the plane last week I read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which is about globalism, barbarian style, and John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism, which is about the same subject. Saul's point - and I agree - is that the depiction of everything in fundamentally amoral - and in some ways seriously distorted - economic terms is causing not just ruination and poverty but also the subversion of freedom and democracy. That there are alternatives, such as are sketched in the present article, seems not even to be recognized. And when I see people like Judy Breck write about online learning producing human capital, I want to shut off my computer in digust. And go home and hide in a forest. Or, maybe, start pushing back harder and louder - because if we lose the human, and replace it with capital in society we have lost it all, and there's no point going on, there's no point to anything, for we are all disposable.
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