Economy

I wrote down notes for this article on the back side of the Chess Logbook. This scoreboard serves for formalized notation of the chess game, each move is recorded using standardized marks. I sit in the busy hall of Incheba in Bratislava, where 1,400 young chess players met at the European Youth Chess Championship. Chess has many advantages, firstly, you are not allowed to scream, and secondly it improves memory, concentration, problem solving, forecasting and minimizing risky action. While my son is silently fighting on the chessboard, I have time to summarize my recent observations….

Every morning, when I walk to work, I stumble over electric scooters and bikes thrown along the way. Sharing of vehicles is a good idea, but rather than engulfing the city with new junk, it would be enough to utilize what people really own, but (at the moment) don't use. After all, this is what a shared economy is really about, that is, renting a property of great added value, typically a car or an apartment. In the future we certainly will share more and own less, which shall reduce negative impacts on environment. Unless, of course, they are not plenty of new electric vehicles that need to be charged somewhere and electricity must be produced somewhere…

In principle, two types of sharing platforms are on place, either the operator owns a fleet (such as the unfortunate pedelecs) and leases it, or people lend equipment each other, with these exchanges running across a platform operated by someone. If we disregard all digitization and hence the platforms, it is a principle established in the first-communal society, which we have slowly disposed of during modernization…

I hope that over time our digital-communal society will get rid of all the defects that are against its primary meaning, whether environmental protection or sharing surplus, for example, free-riding on shared platforms by renting something that does not belong to me or something I acquire only for this one purpose. I believe that the principles of sharing could then develop into areas where they are not yet established but make a lot of sense - such as sharing companies and their equipment, sharing machines and technology, sharing computing power or sharing employees. I look forward to a shared B2B economy helping to solve some of the current market problems arising from the tense between market globalization on the one hand and resource localization on the other...