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Wikibollocks entry for today comes from Grist magazine, a “source of nonprofit, independent green journalism”, who just ran a piece on peer-to-peer sharing which includes sentences like this.
We’re choosing peer-to-peer because we want to do business differently. We actually kind of want to pretend like we’re not doing business at all.
Some questions for Grist.
Why do you think that you are on the same side as Uber (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, and a host of venture capitalists), Sidecar (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Google and other venture capitalists), and Lyft (based in San Francisco, in early-stage VC funding) and AirBnB (based in San Francisco, funded by Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, Crunch Fund, Ashton Kutcher and other venture capitalists)?
Does it not occur to you that when billionaires promote “pretending like we’re not doing business at all” then maybe there’s something a bit dodgy going on?
When Jeff Bezos (personal wealth $18.4B) and Marc Andreessen (personal wealth, $600 million) are one one side and taxi drivers are on the other, what makes you think that Bezos and Andreessen are the progressive side?
Look, Grist, I understand that words like “peer-to-peer” and “sharing” sound nice and egalitarian, but in pieces like this you’re actively working against the things you claim to stand for.