Unfortunately, something different and altogether darker is happening: the Sharing Economy is extending a harsh and deregulated free market into previously protected areas of our lives. The leading companies are now corporate juggernauts themselves, and are taking a more and more intrusive role in the exchanges they support to make their money and to maintain their brand. As the Sharing Economy grows, it is reshaping cities without regard to those things that make then liveable. Rather than bringing a new openness and personal trust to our interactions, it is bringing a new form of surveillance where service workers must live in fear of being snitched on, and while the company CEOs talk benevolently of their community of users, the reality has a harder edge of centralised control. Sharing Economy marketplaces are generating new and ever-more-entitled forms of consumption. The language of ‘a little extra money’ turns out to be the same as that used about women’s jobs forty years ago, when they were not seen as ‘real’ jobs that demanded a living wage, and so did not need to be treated the same, or paid as much, as men’s jobs. Instead of freeing individuals to take control over their own lives, many Sharing Economy companies are making big money for their investors and executives, and making good jobs for their software engineers and marketers, by removing the protections and assurances won by decades of struggle, by creating riskier and more precarious forms of low-paid work for those who actually work in the Sharing Economy. (p.3)

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