[GiftEconomy] 'Emerges'? How about 're-emerges'?

[Robin Upton]

Thanks for this, Tereza.
>> The Sharing Economy Emerges
>> Peer to peer exchange of goods and services has skyrocketed way
>> beyond craigslist.org and Couch Surfing. Now, access to goods and
>> skills is becoming more important than ownership of them. And that
>> has sparked a "Sharing Economy". Gartner Group researchers estimate
>> that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion
>> by 2013. Botsman says the consumer peer-to-peer rental market will
>> become a $26 billion sector, and believes the sharing economy, in
>> total, is a $110 billion-plus market. "Is this purely a
>> warm-and-fuzzy kind of thing?" says Ann Miura-Ko, a venture
>> capitalist at Floodgate Fund. "It's not. It's underutilized asset
>> utilization." That is to say, sharing is becoming common place.
The rise of digitally mediated sharing is indeed promising, but only a
capitalist could see this as a fundamentally new thing. I mean life is
full of sharing. To say nothing of shared genes, shared understandings
or shared streets, people in most parts of the world still share all
sorts of stuff daily, just as they used to in the past in USA.
Barnraising? Potlatch?

So whilst in one sense it's a welcome step away from what Eisenstein
calls "the discrete and separate self", sharing does not cease to count
just because it goes unaccounted in ledgers. Arguably, unmetered sharing
is more important. I haven't investigated the 'Floodgate Fund', so I may
be doing her an injustice, but Ann Miura-Ko's designation as 'venture
capitalist' suggests to me that she's expecting to get out more money
than she puts in.

Anyway, it's food for thought for my work on the Internet Gift Economy,
which has been going slow lately - distracted by working on the
roofgarden. The current model as regards metering is to leave it up to
those involved whether they want to record things. Eitherway, a big
difference is that there won't be any central authority in charge, so no
point for revenue extraction. No business model.

Robin