94 95 In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a wide variety of initiatives emerged to address these intertwined crises: couchsurfing networks offered free hospitality; urban farming groups and food swaps attempted to rebuild local food systems; tool libraries and makerspaces provided collective access to equipment; timebanks created alternative circuits of exchange based on skills rather than money. These projects were animated by a mix of moral commitments and practical necessity. They sought to rebuild social connection, revive the commons, and respond to environmental challenges while using new digital tools to coordinate activity beyond the neighborhood scale. The early 2010s were marked by optimism. Books like Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’s What’s mine is yours celebrated sharing as the next economic paradigm, one that could restore social trust and ecological responsibility. Activists and entrepreneurs promoted ideas of collaborative consumption, peer-to-peer trust, and sustainable living. It seemed possible to bypass bureaucratic States and distant corporations, allowing ordinary people to take back control of their economic and social lives. Food swaps fostered conviviality. Coworking spaces promised creative synergy. Carsharing initiatives reduced wasteful ownership. New technologies seemed to make it possible to realize older communal ideals in modern societies. Yet this optimism has since given way to cynicism. The spiritual and social renewal that many expected has not materialized. In hindsight, the Sharing Economy attempted to address many of the ills that have led to our current moment of political polarization, ecological crisis, and institutional distrust. It sought to rejuvenate society, reinvigorate the commons, and construct a collective 'we' in the cracks of a hollowed-out system. But good instincts alone were not enough to stem broader political and economic currents. A more reactionary social order is now asserting itself, visible in anti-immigrant movements, military rearmament, and authoritarian political currents. To understand how the Sharing Economy might adapt, it is important to examine why certain strategies were chosen and why they fell short. From the beginning, the Sharing Economy largely rejected formal politics. Unlike social movements that make claims on the State, sharing initiatives assumed the State would not act and that individuals must take matters into their own hands. Many initiatives also avoided political questions internally. �uestions about distribution and power were left vague. Voluntarism was central. Participants could choose to barter food, share tools, or exchange skills, but they were not required to do so. This voluntarism was appealing at a time when formal politics seemed paralyzed and alienating. But voluntarism alone could not fulfil the promises of connection, authenticity, sustainability, and reciprocity. The limitations of non-profit sharing initiatives became starkly apparent over time. Many were animated by moral commitments to community, reciprocity, and authentic exchange, but they were structurally fragile. As our research on makerspaces² demonstrates, formally egalitarian environments often fail to resolve the underlying organizational and class tensions that shape participation. At Industry, a large non-profit makerspace in the United States, the absence of formal hierarchies did not eliminate social inequalities. Instead, it created new arenas for informal status competition, privileging those with abundant cultural capital and leisure time. Rather than channelling energies into shared material goals, high-status participants engaged in what we termed material disavowal and cultural validation, valorising esoteric and impractical production as markers of distinction. These practices reproduced class boundaries and left many members feeling alienated and peripheral. Beyond internal social dynamics, non-profits faced hard material limits. Most relied on a precarious mix of philanthropic donations, volunteer labor, and small membership fees. Their survival depended on the willingness of participants to donate their time and resources on a continuous basis. Voluntarism was essential, but it was not sufficient to sustain complex infrastructures. Once enthusiasm waned or core volunteers burned out, many organizations folded. In our earlier study, all three of the non-profit sharing organizations we followed either collapsed or became conventionalized within five years. Their dependence on goodwill made them vulnerable to shifts in individual circumstances and broader economic trends. The absence of stable revenue streams or public backing meant that even popular and wellloved projects could vanish quickly, once key individuals departed. By contrast, for-profit platforms were better positioned to endure. Their durability came not from superior community-building capacities, but from their ability to attract venture capital, scale rapidly, and substitute wage labor for voluntarism. Platforms like Airbnb and Uber did not depend on unpaid volunteer time to provide essential functions; they relied on paid labor and on technologies that automated key coordination tasks. In the early years, many platforms sustained below-cost pricing and subsidized both consumers and workers in order to rapidly capture markets. These subsidies were not a reflection of transaction-cost efficiencies, but of the vast sums of capital they could mobilize to undercut competitors and entrench themselves. This financial backing allowed them to sustain operations even in the absence of profitability. Uber, for example, reported only a single profitable quarter after years of massive losses, relying on investor confidence and monopoly ambitions to survive. ²The research was part of Boston College's Connected Consumption and Connected Economy research group, whose principal investigator was Juliet B. Schor @ www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/ morrissey/departments/sociology/ connected.html
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