San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WHY WE STILL NEED NEIGHBORS
Remember neighbors? How our sense of community has changed
A decade into the so-called sharing economy, we seem to be sharing less and less.
Last month, Uber released a feature called quiet mode, which lets passengers request that drivers stay quiet during rides. On one hand, it solves for the mild inconvenience of small talk. On the other, it’s a human mute button.
“It feels like they are just turning us into robots,” Jay Cradeur, a driver who has completed more than 24,000 rides told the Guardian newspaper. “This feature is telling us to just shut up and drive, and as a human being, I don’t like being told how to do my job.”
Quiet mode is an apt metaphor for what has become of the sharing economy.
In her 2010 TED talk, author Rachel Botsman argued that the sharing economy could “mimic the ties that used to happen face to face but on a scale and in a way that has never been possible before.”
After a decade of maturity, the social promise of the sharing economy seems to have fallen on deaf ears. “Community” has become the favorite euphamism for “customer base” for platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit.
But social scientists are observing that real community — the kind that is woven by the threads of interdependence and common ground — seems to be fraying in our on-demand world.
“We’re more globally connected than ever, but more locally disconnected,” says Angie Thurston, a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School who studies how communities form. “Real social engagement requires vulnerability and courage, which you don’t always need when you interact through an app.”
David Spinks, the founder of CMX, a hub for professional community builders, believes the weakening of local communities might stem from a lack of reliance on the people around us.
“We develop community by needing each other,” he says. “But when so many of our interactions with strangers are commodified, we come to expect that we always need to get something in return.”
From pet sitting (DogVacay: “dog boarding with trusted locals”) to picking the kids up from soccer practice (VanGo: “rides for your teens from vetted local moms”), the on-demand economy offers a substitute to the common favor.
At face value, this looks like progress. Apps afford us an unprecedented level of access to goods and services. Instead of asking a neighbor for a cup of sugar, we can order on Instacart. Instead of asking a coworker for help with a move, we can hire a Lugg.
The risk, however, is that we compromise connection in our quest for convenience. “Early on, the sharing economy was going to be transformational,” says April Rinne, an independent adviser to platforms like Airbnb. “Now it’s just transactional.”
Case in point: Omni, a San Francisco startup, was founded in 2014 to encourage more inperson sharing among neighbors. The company began as a sort of external hard drive for your home, storing your belongings off-site and delivering them on demand.
In 2017, Omni expanded its service to fully embrace the sharing economy ethos: Instead of letting your items rest dormant in a storage locker, users were allowed to rent their stuff out to others in the neighborhood and split the profits with Omni 50/50.
After raising roughly $40 million in venture capital, last month Omni pivoted away from the peer-to-peer marketplace toward letting people rent items from local businesses. A number of Bay Area retailers, including Mission Bicycle, Outdoor Adventure Club and Stroller Spa have signed up for Omni’s new rental service.
“Though for the past two decades, technology has made it much more difficult for local businesses to compete, I believe technology can empower them to thrive,” says Omni COO Ryan Delk.
Perhaps Omni’s new model will introduce some neighbors to local shops, but the intermediation of an app might change the timbre of the relationship. Increasingly, there seem to be two economies co-existing in our neighborhoods: commerce optimized for convenience and everything else.
Cafes like Philz Coffee have built streamlined checkout lines for people who order through their app. Automated restaurants like Eatsa forgo human interaction altogether by allowing people to order and pick up food at self-service kiosks.
With an app for everything,
neighborhood shops start to look more like fulfillment centers. A ride to the airport is now too much to ask.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely believes we’re losing touch with the humans who make local economies thrive.
“Instead of going to the restaurant 10 minutes away from our house, we order from the restaurant 30 minutes away,” he says. “We get to play in a bigger economic playground, but our local economy suffers as a result.”
It's easy to see how the digital economy can dehumanize service workers. The faceless delivery driver drops off the order without a word from the person on the other side of the doorframe. But interacting through an app can dehumanize the consumer, too.
A leading theory in developmental psychology says that we develop self-awareness as children through empathy. That is to say, it’s by repeatedly watching others care for us that we learn to care for ourselves.
The subtle cues of the app economy — swiping past potential partners on Tinder, tapping to request a silent ride on Uber — are all opportunities to opt out of flexing the muscles that make communities strong. The humans behind the app are often a means to an end.
Hinge, a dating app that introduces friends of friends, recently rebranded with the slogan “designed to be deleted.”
“Hinge is the only app focused on setting singles up on dates and fighting digital addiction,” says a Hinge spokesperson. But there’s a difference between getting set up by a friend and getting set up by an app — even if you have a friend in common.
Relationships hold more meaning when there isn’t an endless supply of alternatives a tap away. This holds true for dating, but also for the number of platforms that provide services like haircuts (GetShortcut), car repairs (Wrench) and massages (Soothe) on-demand. Access to a barber is not the same as access to your barber.
Naturally, there’s a movement to use technology to fix problems technology helped create. London-based Actual uses artificial intelligence to help people have better conversations with their loved ones. Colu is a digital wallet that rewards users for making purchases in their neighborhoods. Wingman is an app that encourages friends to set each other up on dates.
But still, something gets lost in the intermediation. We live in a divided nation, sure. But, increasingly, our cities and our blocks are becoming divided, too. The divisions don’t just exist between red and blue or rich and poor. They exist between neighbors who have no need to learn each others’ names and commuters whose headphones distance themselves from their fellow bus riders.
“To reap the benefits of community, we must actively participate in its creation,” says Spinks. “And though technology can certainly facilitate interpersonal connection, it also has the power to take it away.”