The Emerging Platform Economy is the new way to do business. Legacy business models are asymptotically doomed. But:
What shape will the elimination of the information brokering layer assume?
The p2p ubiquity – p2p credit, Hayek Money, p2p economy with a management function intermediated by technology- is already here: will it free the social fabric? The might of the owners of big servers (see J. Lanier’s You are not a gadget) may either pursue the direction of triggering a different welfare state or to shift shape the of the distribution of social wealth from a Gaussian (as it has been in the ‘Golden Age 1945-1973’ – see Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes) to a Pareto like, heavy tailed distribution. To be expanded and reformulated.

Relevant bibliography is here:

• Lanier, Jaron: You are not a Gadget
• Schmidt, Eric and Cohen, Jared: The New Digital Age
• Stiglitz, Joseph: Creating a learning Society
• Krueger, Alan: An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver – Partners in the United States
• The Atlantic on Uber

Categories: Society, Technology