"Of the eight sites listed above, only NeighborGoods is still around—after it ran through its seed funding, it was salvaged by an investor with a personal interest in the idea. About 42,000 people have signed up, though fewer than 10,000 are active. While sites like Airbnb and Uber became giant companies, the platform on which we would share our power drills with neighbors never took off.
Instead of platforms that would inspire human interaction and create less waste, what emerged were companies that awkwardly fit into—and at times completely twisted—this vision of neighborhood sharing. The "sharing economy" grew to include an odd menagerie of companies with little in common. Groupon "shared" the collective action of tipping a deal. Kickstarter "shared" a similar funding goal among many contributors. Sites like Airbnb "shared" homes, but charged by the night, like a hotel. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Handy "shared" the labor of independent contractors paid by the hour or mile. Netflix somehow even managed to fall under the sharing economy umbrella at one point...
It’s not that these tools and sites aren’t good services or that they don’t make things easier. It’s rather that they have little to do with the original promise of the sharing economy. Really, it’s more of an "access economy," a term Williams used from the beginning. "We hated that terminology," he says of the sharing economy. "Hated it with the heat of a thousand suns.""
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