Airbnb in Context

Airbnb is the culmination of that process: the industrialization of trust itself. The conversion of personal favors and characteristics into impersonal products that anyone can buy. Dense pools of people — cities and, later, the web — enabled the replacement of “natural” human relations with a series of interactions driven by cold logic and necessi... See more

Airbnb's latest product upgrade shows what this means in practice. In what it calls "the biggest change in a decade," the home-sharing company launched a new way to book space. Instead of starting your journey by selecting a location, Airbnb now lets you pick a "category." The category represents the type of experience you're looking for — based on... See more

Airbnb systematized and commoditized trust, turning it from a unique personal quality into an impersonal feature that could be “attached” to anyone.