It’s a familiar pattern. First there’s an economic crisis. Then comes an enormous restructuring of capital — and with it a restructuring of labor — throwing past certainties into doubt. Old industries, companies, and occupations disappear and new ones emerge, enabled by new technologies. As people struggle to find a way to describe the seismic upheavals in the economic and social landscape, a linguistic mist arises, muddling the features of this new landscape, blurring attempts to analyze and map it.

This time around, among the first commentators on the scene were techno-utopians, offering terms like “sharing economy” and “peer-to-peer networking” to conjure up a vision of a positive new development that, they claim, prefigures what a cooperative, post-capitalist society might look like. This is a society in which the Internet allows services to be freely shared between those who need them and those who can supply them, eliminating the capitalist intermediary. With 3-D printing, they even speculate, we can cut out factories too, allowing goods to be produced when they are needed.

The notion that people are happy to offer their services altruistically to strangers is picked up in another set of discourses in which the “wisdom of crowds” is tapped to “crowdsource” or “cloudsource” solutions to intractable problems.