The trend of "co-living" is the latest buzz phrase to emerge from Silicon Valley. This, despite the fact that people were living as roommates a long, long time ago too, and co-living is just another fancy term for it.
Writing about it, one of the millennial breed, Julie Dagenais, described it as, "another real millennial innovation from the generation who are always rewriting the rules of the game. Could co-living be the new way to get by?"
Given the housing situation in Australia, sharing rooms is probably the only way to get a roof above one's head after one is forced to move out of the parental home.
But then co-living means not living with just any poverty-stricken hobo; it means consorting with the rich and famous and wondering about the meaning of life while looking at a $1000 smartphone and updating one's status on Facebook. It wouldn't suit the poorer classes but then which millennials had time for those hobos?
{loadposition sam08}There's a peculiar form of snobbery that inhabits the domain of techies, those ephemerals who have nothing better to do that to keep reinventing the wheel. And one crackpot idea after one another has emerged, and, horror of horrors, been taken seriously.
IT'S CALLED *ROOMMATES*
— Yulie [NSFL] ? (@sugarsh0t) November 13, 2017
YOU INVENTED ***ROOMMATES*** pic.twitter.com/zKo1VrFwqR
Some examples: Soylent, a food replacement beverage. Now there are plenty of these beverages that have been around but some venture capitalists were so thrilled with this idea that they poured in US$50 million and more in funding.
As a Guardian writer pointed out, the same Soylent has pulled in the moolah despite having also given many people bad cases of diarrhoea.
Also invented, this time by the company Lyft, is Shuttle. This ground-breaking service lets you walk to a stop, hop on, hop off, and then walk to your destination.
Never mind that we've had buses for as long as I've been alive, doing exactly the same thing.
Any kind of crackpot idea, couched in the right words it appears, will pull money from venture capitalists. Never mind if it has been done to death a thousand times and failed every time.
In the mid- and late-1990s, we had bizspeak floating around as the Internet began to boom. One could "strategise holistic initiatives" and "e-enable world-class platforms" in order to "transition one-to-one e-business."
Version 2.0 of that era is back, judging by the likes of Dagenais.
The con artists are back with a force it seems; we obviously haven't learnt from the tech crash of 2000. Welcome to the new tech crash that's coming in the 2020s.