Airbnb in Context

Hospitality is dispersing — from a few destinations to many, from hotel towers to individual rooms — and value is shifting from from asset-heavy hotel companies to the network-based Airbnb. As knowledge workers come back to the office after a year of working from home, they won’t want to give up their newfound flexibility. The rise of gig workers, ... See more

Zoning is losing its power. New ventures are able to reach a meaningful scale before regulators (and competitors) react. The boundaries between different uses are blurring, with people lodging in apartment buildings, living in hotels, working in restaurants and retail malls, and sleeping or socializing at the office.

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

Co-living networks (such as Selina and Outpost) will continue to grow.

Yet that vision of smallness is under the auspices and control of Airbnb, following the template the company has set and the conditions that it profits under. Smallness implies homogeneity and a move toward uniformity, most likely under a Western default, under the ideology of the tech industry. The trade-off that Chesky implied was that the more m

... See more