People trust each other, the sharing economy proves

Iwas chatting earlier this year with Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb. He told me about trying to raise $150,000 in 2008 for his idea of a peer-to-peer home and room rental company. Everyone called him crazy. They scoffed at the notion that people would trust one another enough to allow strangers into their homes. They derided the idea that those strangers would be nice enough, or honest enough, to respect properties.

“Airbnb, without fundamental human goodness, would not work,” Chesky said. A decade later, Airbnb is in more than 190 countries. It has had more than 300 million guest arrivals. From all the data the company has accumulated, no major country anomalies, in terms of patterns of behaviour, have emerged. People from Japan, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, the United States, Mexico and France are equally respectful and honest. There are no national outliers, Chesky said, on the goodness or trustworthiness scale. There are no enemies.

That is interesting. I wonder if we are looking in the wrong places to assess the state of the world. The twilight of an era, as in Vienna a little over a century ago, is always murky. With nationalism and xenophobia resurgent, examples of humanity’s basest instincts abound. They grab the headlines. At the same time, community and sharing, often across national borders, through digital platforms like Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Facebook, expand.

The nation state is trumpeted. The nation state is redundant. Perhaps the trumpeting is linked to the redundancy. The natural state of politics becomes theatre. Its most compelling actors, however buffoonish, prosper. They strut the stage mouthing fantasies. They babble and veer.

The digital undercurrent is steady. It leads people to make daily leaps of trust, like getting into a stranger’s car. It prizes efficient use of resources. It opens the world.

“These platforms are an integral part of the geopolitical landscape, because in some ways and for a different set of reasons their power is approaching the power historically held by nation states,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of The Sharing Economy, said. “We look to Facebook for identity.” He continued: “More and more people actually have a sense of understanding of others’ cultures and the feeling someone I don’t know can be trusted.”

Perhaps Airbnb is the new Nato. I started thinking about this in Hungary earlier this year. Viktor Orban, the prime minister, promotes an illiberal model based on xenophobic nationalism. He is prospering. Yet just about every Hungarian I met was renting out apartments or rooms to strangers through Airbnb or other platforms. Connected to each other, individuals organise the self-defence that is cross-border community. It is closed systems that kill.

I have been in Italy for the past couple of weeks. Italy has a new government whose rightist interior minister, Matteo Salvini, favours the slogan Primi gli Italiani, or “Italians First.” Originality is not the forte of today’s proto-fascists. The coalition government is paralysed. It is the object of scorn, mockery and disdain — but more of the kind reserved for bad opéra bouffe than for a genuine threat.

The networking undercurrent may be stronger than the surface of things. How else to explain that the world has not gone over a cliff these past 19 months?

We have learned that the internet can be just as good at building silos and reinforcing the algorithmic separation of people as at bringing them together. We have learned that, contrary to idealistic pronouncements, Facebook or Google may be more driven by the temptation of maximising advertising revenue through leading you to content you have responded well to in the past than by any mind-broadening mission. We know how echo chamber effects get amplified, and how those echo chambers may be opaque. The utopian view of the Internet has collapsed.

Still, Chesky said, the Airbnb model has prospered by “pushing people to be more understanding and accepting of each other.” It draws on an idea alluded to by George Packer in The New Yorker and attributed by Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, to the late chef Anthony Bourdain and to Obama: “If people would just sit down and eat together, and understand something about each other, maybe they could figure things out.”—NYT Syndicate

The greatest danger in turbulent times is not the turbulence, but to act with yesterday’s logic