Jennifer O’Connell: Only privileged white men could have dreamed up Airbnb

A few years ago, when I was working in Silicon Valley, I attended a talk by someone from Airbnb about the company's communications strategy. The strategy seemed to boil down to a phrase I heard again this week about Airbnb in an entirely different context: shooting the money cannon.

When Airbnb wanted a music track to accompany one of their promotional videos, it shot the money cannon and brought in a professional composer and an orchestra. When it wanted to make a video showing how “Airbnb makes the world smaller”, 30 model makers and designers were given five weeks to create an 85 sq m miniature set. (It’s always good to hear about lucrative opportunities for creatives. It’s even nicer when those opportunities don’t involve making expensive ad campaigns.)

Now it emerges that the money cannon philosophy extends to the parts of its business model that Airbnb doesn't advertise with heartwarming videos. Bloomberg Businessweek has reported that the company employs a team of 100 crisis management agents, many of whom come from military or trauma backgrounds.

Their role is to swoop in after a disaster in one of its properties and clean up. Cleaning up is not a metaphor. The agents “have had to hire body-fluid crews to clean blood off carpets, arrange for contractors to cover bullet holes in walls, and deal with hosts who discover dismembered human remains”. Businessweek revealed that the company made a $7 million payout to a woman who was brutally raped at an Airbnb property in Manhattan in 2015, after her attacker got hold of the key. In 2019, five people died in a shootout at a property booked by a guest who had been reported to Airbnb for leaving a bullet at another listing days earlier.

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Where are 30-somethings supposed to live?

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Even before these revelations, Airbnb was battling controversy after controversy – including accusations of fuelling over-tourism, skewing the rental market and pushing city-dwellers out of their neighbourhoods. Just because it’s convenient for politicians to blame Airbnb for its own failures to provide adequate housing doesn’t mean there’s no truth in it. Now the company is in the midst of a crisis that reflects the paradox at the heart of the tech sector.

This is the paradox of techno-capitalism: you can't create a system that rewards greed, and expect the beneficiaries to be their best selves.

Silicon Valley was built on two fundamentally incompatible ideologies – one naively idealistic, the other utterly cynical. The first is the notion that people are basically good. This sweetly Rousseauian view of human nature is touted by everything from Google’s “Don’t be evil” to social media companies, to the newer generation of sharing economy companies – often not so much because they believe it, but because it gets them off the hook for having to police user behaviour. It makes for an uneasy bedfellow with the valley’s second guiding principle: there’s no problem that can’t be solved by the money cannon.

Airbnb is based on the idea that strangers can trust each other, exchange money, write honest reviews, even sleep in one another’s spare rooms. “On any given night, 2 million people stay in homes on Airbnb in 100,000 cities . . . What makes all of that possible? Trust,” brags its website. The vast majority of the time, that trust is repaid – Airbnb says fewer than 0.1 per cent of stays result in a reported safety issue. But that 0.1 per cent of two million nightly stays may be enough to give people pause.

Looking back on 14 years of Airbnb – from the vantage point of this post-#MeToo, post-Black Lives Matter, post-Trump world – it’s clear this is an idea only three privileged white men could have dreamed up.

No woman who has walked home with her keys in her hand for protection would have contrived a business model based on sleeping on strangers’ couches. Surprise, surprise: Airbnb pays $50 million annually cleaning up after people who are not basically good.

Empty slogans

Airbnb is the biggest player in the short-term rental market, with more than 5.6 million listings in over 220 countries. Even before this latest controversy, the $90 billion company was pledging to do better and to be “an enduringly successful business [that] goes hand-in-hand with making a positive contribution to society”.

This is what’s known as stakeholder capitalism – the notion that businesses shouldn’t focus just on shareholders but the enrichment of local communities. It’s a nice idea. But what happens when the pandemic shreds the already-tenuous links between those businesses and the communities in which they operate? What incentive is there for a mostly-remote organisation to contribute anything to the community where the empty glass box it calls head office is based?

Airbnb is one of a generation of companies that arrived in the “move fast and break things” age. Two decades on, it’s not enough for these companies – some of the world’s most profitable – to merely deign to clean up the messes they created. Giving back shouldn’t be something they do by choice.

Theoretically that’s what taxes are for, but many of the world’s biggest tech companies, and quite a few of their billionaire founders, appear to see local taxes as more or less optional.

This is the paradox of techno-capitalism: you can’t create a system that rewards greed, and expect the beneficiaries to be their best selves. Landlords feel terrible about families living in hotels, but the homeless family isn’t going to pay them anything like the nightly rate they make on Airbnb.

City planners would love to do something creative with this or that piece of cultural heritage, but selling it to a hotel developer is easier. Software engineers are embarrassed about earning up to three times what a senior staff nurse does but that’s just the way things are. People are basically good, and trust makes it all possible, and don’t be evil are nice slogans, but the tech industry needs to do better than slogans.