When evaluating platforms claiming to be a part of the “sharing economy”, it is important to look at why they were set up, how they are organized, and who they are intended to benefit. Those that implement a logic of collaboration, sharing and distributed power at each of these levels, stand to offer a compelling vehicle for change and force us to take seriously the transformational power of the ‘true’ sharing economy.

Julia Dreher and Francesca Pick give a number of examples in an article critiquing the ‘verticalist’ sharing economy:

“Some critics have argued that the sharing economy can only ever be parasitic to capitalism because those who do not already have private property to share are by default excluded from it.[4] Such arguments are premised on a narrow understanding of “sharing” limited to the direct exchange of goods or services of equal value. Platforms like Couchsurfing call into question such criticisms and allow us to think about sharing in a broader sense.

Couchsurfing is the perfect example of a rhizomatic structure that allows users to move beyond a traditional, transactional mode of sharing. On Couchsurfing you can “surf” a couch even if you don’t have one to offer. If you can’t host, you might still offer your time to show someone around who is visiting your town. Collaboration is based on a much broader sense of exchange, tied more to notions of redistribution. Those who can offer something, offer it. Those who are in need can accept that offer but that doesn’t mean that they are obliged to give back something of the same value to the same person. Collaboration is distributed across the network and follows a rather circular logic. If you don’t have the same goods to offer back, you might offer something else to someone else. Eventually what goes around comes around and everyone is satisfied. This circular logic is essential to rhizomatic structures. Deleuze and Guatarri describe the network as a system of shortcuts and detours, which is what we can observe with Couchsurfing: rather than a “straight and direct” exchange of goods of the same value, we can see horizontal interactions between different participants of the network.

Numerous other examples of heterarchical organizations abound. CoWheels Car Club is a car sharing platform in the UK that runs as a not-for-profit social enterprise, where all surplus generated is reinvested back into the organisation to help fulfill its social mission of reducing car ownership and its negative effects on the environment. An example that takes collaboration one step further is Loconomics, a local peer-to-peer service marketplace from San Francisco, which is cooperatively owned by the freelancers who provide the services on the platform. A similar model is implemented by Guerrilla Translation, a P2P translation collective and cooperative from Spain that offers the same services as a translation agency.

Fairmondo, a German startup, offers a slightly different approach to participating in “the sharing economy”. Fairmondo is an Amazon-like online marketplace, owned and governed by its users, who are also its shareholders. An even more extreme example of such a distributed marketplace is the decentralized transportation system known as La Zooz. La Zooz eliminates ownership of the platform altogether by using an algorithm that runs by itself on the servers of each individual participant of the network. By running on the “Blockchain” (the technology underlying Bitcoin), La Zooz is able to operate as a decentralized, autonomous organization.”