Both startups offered age-old ideas (share a vehicle, rent your home) with new twists and ended up fostering a remarkable degree of openness among people who had never previously met. In a previous decade, most of us would have stayed far away from someone’s private car or unlit home, scared by headlines about crime and by our mothers’ earnest warnings to avoid strangers. Airbnb and Uber didn’t spawn ‘the sharing economy,’ ‘the on-demand economy,’ or ‘the one-tap economy’ (those labels never quite seemed to fit) so much as usher in a new trust economy, helping regular folks to negotiate
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