Subscription 790/year or 190/quarter

Escande and Cassini: Bienvenue dans le capitalisme 3.0

It is long before the sharing economy gives sounding coins in the common fund.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Philippe Escande and Sandrine Cassini: Bienvenue dans le capitalisme 3.0. Editions Albin Michel, 2015

1 layoutVenice Beach, California, at first glance, consists of a fairly normal boardwalk with some cool restaurants and tent-like stores that mostly sell caps and t-shirts. A more laidback atmosphere to look for a long time, especially when the marijuana's eye is not infrequently floating around body-building youth, wearing nothing more than shades and sunglasses. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, Venice Beach nevertheless provided us with Jimi Hendrix, jogging dilla, skateboard and roller skates, salad bars, health food stores, Ray-Ban sunglasses and Eastpack backpacks. Often it took five to ten years before the trend reached the east coast of the United States, and another five before it reached Europe. If you want to be successful, you could sit down at a Venice Beach beach cafe and observe lifestyle and fashion, fly back to Europe and just wait for the trend to come sneakily from over there. Common to the Venice trends was that they created demand for goods and services that contributed to economic growth and jobs. The only societal threat was the thundering gaze of west-edged women over rasta hair and increasingly visible body parts under hollow jeans.


GAFA invasion.
But the west coast of the United States should have more to offer than new lifestyle trends: The combination of sun, hippies and venture capital has given birth to a creativity that, according to the book Welcome to Capitalism 3.0 – "Welcome to Capitalism 3.0" – gave rise to the so-called GAFA invasion: that Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have occupied our lives. Now also Uber, Tesla and Starbucks. The West Edge women, with their long eyes, have turned into violent taxi drivers who are chasing Uber customers and blocking city traffic in Europe's capitals. Today, an Uber car is more expensive than one yellow cab in New York because it is both easy and trendy to get picked up by a friendly driver and avoid paying on the spot. But when demand rises, prices do the same – leaving the old, crumpled taxis profitable again. This parallel is not taking place in Europe – at least not in continental Europe, where Uber's activities have been banned in Germany, France and Belgium.

Screen Shot at 2016 01-08-20.09.16Totally normal. Can we resist the intense forces of the sharing economy? ask authors Philippe Escande and Sandrine Cassini. Should we not, for example, give Muslim immigrant youth the opportunity to make money with the help of a car and a smartphone, instead of going unemployed and disillusioned, getting into trouble, being deployed and vice versa freedom fighters in Syria? Or should we make every effort to preserve the 200-year-old protected taxi driver profession, whose main function today may be to give unskilled immigrants an opportunity to make money legally – albeit to a far more limited extent? In Escande and Cassini's book, the conflict between Uber and the taxi industry is just a foretaste of what awaits us. And by "us" the authors mean everything and everyone. For the areas of society will sooner or later be invaded, yes, invaded – which suggests occupied and almost terrorized – by the digital revolution. With such alarming vocabulary, the French journalists entice the reader to look at the phenomenon of sharing economy in both a broad and historical perspective.

Should we not allow Muslim immigrant youth the opportunity to make money using a car and a smartphone, instead of going unemployed and disillusioned, getting into trouble, getting stuck in, and vice versa freedom fighters in Syria?

Natural development. It is funny to hear Socrates' statement that "the writing will freeze thought" – and about how the monks condemned printmaking. But more interesting is the production of the sharing economy as decisive for social development as the invention of the steam engine, or the changes that followed in the wake of electricity, with the oil just after. Steam, electricity, oil – and now, the digital revolution. The authors draw threads back to the making of the telegraph, the telephone and the computer, and show how one technology builds on the other as new products and services are developed that transform our society and our economy. In this way, one cannot claim that the world is facing an unexpected revolution: The sharing economy is a consequence of an all-natural historical development.

American pirates. French media houses, like Norwegian, are victims of Facebook and Google's huge advertising revenue, which previously went to the paper newspapers. From the reader's perspective, one could wish the authors of Welcome … Tried to relate fairly objectively to the new economic phenomenon. Frequent use of words such as "invasion", "barbarians", "vampires" and "pirates" to describe the US companies makes it clear that there is a profound bitterness in the media industry towards the changes the GAFA companies have caused. The same disastrous consequences warn the authors convincingly will reach other, still untouched sectors such as health, defense, education and finance. We all want to be unemployed because of the GAFA pirates.

Tax? Who said tax? Critical voices say that the productivity growth of the sharing economy does not lead to increased employment, and that economic growth does not increase welfare: The authorities can no longer make money from workers. With digital technology and a computer in your pocket, the state's revenue base is bypassed. Equally detrimental to society is the GAFA tax optimization – enabled by technology and talented, high-paying lawyers, something that the world community has for too long looked at with open eyes without reacting. Why should we allow Ryanair to take one Double Irish – that is, to take advantage of Ireland's low tax rates that do not cover income from so-called offshore companies?
The same can be said for the shipping industry in Europe, which is exempt from ordinary corporate taxation and instead pays a symbolic fee for every ton of ship they own. This is because it creates positive economic effects and employment. Or the petroleum industry, which – with a seemingly high tax rate – is offered huge depreciation opportunities which means that other taxpayers cover the oil companies' full-page ads, golden handshakes and exploration expenses. The growth of the sharing economy is thus only a result of the desire to do exactly what big industries already do and benefit from: not having to contribute to the community.

Perhaps it is precisely society's inability to make the consequences of the digital revolution a common good, which is the main point of the book.

Another challenge is the pace of development. The sharing economy destroys traditional business concepts and societal bastions in a hurry the administrative capacity of the authorities can only dream of. Who is responsible for identifying new solutions that ensure that services such as Airbnb and BlaBlaCar can contribute to the community's coffers and respect workers' rights when payments are made directly between provider and consumer? Here, the OECD, the EU and national authorities, besides business interests, have been in a collective hibernation.

Click-democracy. In addition to addressing these issues, the book gives the reader a broader perspective on the digital revolution, and points out the dangers of the BigBrother community. Again, we see how short the authorities have come, this time in making sure to highlight the delicate distinction between protecting privacy and the ability to monitor our movements and digital footprints. Here, the book could easily have gone deeper into the matter to balance the broad description of the bargaining economy's bargains and opportunities. The decision of the European Court of Justice, which forced Google to offer deletion of information, is a scant but important beginning. The Commission's decision to fine Apple, Fiat Chrysler and Starbucks for non-tax payment fell into the same category, but came just after the book's release. No nation-states would have had neither the courage nor the power to do the same without the help of Brussels, something the Italian authorities' recent punishment of Apple for tax evasion is proof of.
The role of social media in mobilizing the masses is also a relatively new but important phenomenon. Again, the digital revolution has served us with a double-edged sword that screams for clear frames and regulation. For while Beppe Grillo's five-star movement revolutionized the Italian political landscape through its exclusive use of the Internet and social media for the benefit of a whole generation, web users must simultaneously make absurd choices such as spending money on building hospitals or bombing Libya. This is how the authors believe the so-called "click democracy" can drive a country's political agenda crazy. Such mass mobilization helps to undermine very basic social institutions of representative democracy, and, according to the authors, go so far as to tear apart the nation states.

From pragmatic to philosophical. The strength of the book is the questions it poses, and the description of society's inability to cope with the changes needed. The weakness is the absence of any suggestion of concrete solutions to the challenges that seem to be in line. Welcome ... omits to answer the question in the introduction about how society can reinvent the welfare state at the beginning of the digital revolution – "the third level of capitalism". This is a pity, because the preparation of the consequences of the "barbaric" GAFA invasion creates high expectations. Instead of good answers we get served a wide range of philosophical soundbites from all the way back to the Greek mythology wizard and inventor Prometheus.
Perhaps it is precisely society's inability to make the consequences of the digital revolution a common good, which is the main point of the book. Without even knowing it.


Frisvold a writer, former leader of the Europe movement, living in Brussels.
pfrisvold@gmail.com

Paal Frisvold
Paal Frisvold
Writer for MODERN TIMES on Europe issues.

You may also like