Month: January 2020

Most of what you ever wanted to know about Airbnb Magazine, in Jacobin: “I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To:”

“Because a lot of Airbnb’s workers are actually property owners, whether professional landlords or owners of real-estate portfolios, Airbnb labors very hard to do what comes more easily to services like Uber: putting a human face on twenty-first-century labor exploitation. On other sharing platforms, your interaction with the worker who powers it all is unavoidable. You are in your Uber driver’s car, after all, and you can chat with them; you might even enjoy their company. But alone in an Airbnb apartment, in an unfamiliar city, with only LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE posters for company, the fantasy of a real-estate subleasing firm that brings us together becomes harder to sustain. Into the aesthetic void of Airbnb steps Airbnb Magazine.”