In 2003, a young French IT worker called Frédéric Mazzella was trying to get from Paris to his parents’ home in the south-west of France for Christmas. He had left it late to book and all the SNCF trains were full. He did not own a car. There was no bus that did the 260-mile route. Surely, Mazzella thought, there must be other people who were driving the same way with spare seats? But how could he find them? There was the traditional method: Mazzella could have stood by the side of the road with a cardboard sign, but that seemed very low-tech. Besides, snow was forecast. Didn’t the internet offer this service? Mazzella looked online and found nothing. His sister eventually drove 93 miles out of her way to take him home for the holidays, but all the way there, Mazzella kept looking at the cars around him that were travelling the same way with three empty seats. In each of those seats he saw a gap in the market.

At a time when full-time jobs in traditional industries are being lost, multiple micro-businesses are a seductive idea

Mazzella, however, had what you might call a timing problem. In 2003, there may have been the internet, but there was little social media. There wasn’t any Facebook. There were no smartphones. People told him that his idea could never work; who would want to drive 260 miles with a stranger they met on the internet, however cheap it was? Mazzella held on to his idea, though. And by the time social media, Facebook and smartphones came along, this idea, now called BlaBlaCar, was waiting. Mazzella – and the two partners he had persuaded to create his “ride-sharing platform” with him – had a couple of external factors beyond the technological change to help them. The first was the financial crash, which gave a generation looking for work for the first time not only the sense of the fragility of capitalism, but also the understanding that it was not built with their interests in mind. New revenue streams had to be found. The second factor was the 2010 ash cloud, which gave BlaBlaCar the traction of publicity as a smart solution for people stranded far from home. In the five years since then, Mazzella’s idea has become a multimillion-euro success story.

BlaBlaCar has little infrastructure and fewer than 300 employees in territories around the globe. Its internet platform finds seats for more than 2m journeys a month. The chief executive of the French rail operator SNCF recently cited BlaBlaCar as his company’s most significant competitor. You can see why he might be concerned. While SNCF has thousands of miles of track and untold rolling stock to maintain and renew and many thousands of employees to reward and take care of, BlaBlaCar’s infrastructure and much of its organisation is provided free of charge by BlaBlaCar’s 10 million active members. In the most popular countries, these members also now seem happy to pay BlaBlaCar a 10% commission for the use of the platform.

BlaBlaCar is a perfect example of the possibilities of the emerging “gig economy”, which finds spaces for employment in the inefficiencies of capitalism and exploits them through the sheer scale of the “sharing platform” on the internet. It makes use of spare car seats in the way that Airbnb makes money from spare bedrooms or Moocs (massively open online courses) share lectures. Its members do not make profits on the seats they advertise, but they cover the costs of travel.

The trick is keeping all your different roles in the air. Illustration: Dom McKenzie

Nicolas Brusson was one of Mazella’s original partners in BlaBlaCar. When he talked to me about the company last week, he suggested that BlaBlaCar was not really in the low-cost transport business, rather it was in the trust business. “The cost argument for ride-sharing was always there,” he says. “The question was: how do you create trust?” The technology and the understanding of peer review and ratings allowed that to happen. “The magic really takes place within the community,” Brusson says. Maintaining the reputation of the service, the safety of the user experience, are the things that keep Brusson awake at night. However, by providing profiles of themselves and carefully rating their experiences, “the members do most of our job for us”. Even better, the more people who sign up, the more ratings that are given and the more reliable the experience becomes.

“So far, the challenge we have had is not competition,” Brusson says. “BlaBlaCar is too low cost a model for that. The challenge is to educate more people in the service. We asked ourselves: is it French phenomenon? We proved that it was not. We then asked: is it a European phenomenon? No. We are about to launch in Brazil, India and elsewhere. It is a platform that works wherever people have cars.”

Being a member of BlaBlaCar, or being an Airbnb provider, or doing a few hours as a cabbie on Uber, or selling knick-knacks on Etsy, or sharing some skill on YouTube is not a full-time job. But these activities are increasingly part of the working profile of large numbers of people. All of them exploit spare capacity in assets or under-utilised skills and use the reach of technology to find an audience or a market. At a time when full-time jobs in traditional industries are being lost, these multiple micro-businesses, or “gigs”, are a seductive idea.

A 2013 study found of 702 occupations that almost half fell into the high-risk category of 'potentially automatable'

Indeed, the novelty of these models has convinced some commentators and policy-makers that freelancing over digital platforms might be something of a panacea to depressed and stagnating economies and a portfolio of such interests might even represent the future of work. So far, they are probably less economically consequential than the hype allows, but as BlaBlaCar shows, zero-marginal-cost ideas can grow exponentially very quickly. Even so, if this patchwork of employment and shared services represents the future, what will that future look like? It certainly will not involve salaried careers from hierarchical employers. It may well include low wages and weak collective-bargaining rights. But it might also be an opportunity and perhaps a necessity.

Uber is currently at the vanguard of this change with its ambition to make a cab driver out of anyone with a GPS (and consequently put full-time drivers out of business). Uber’s adviser, David Plouffe, explained recently that it is designed to “help people who are struggling to pay the bills, earn a little extra spending money, or transitioning between jobs. Most drivers are not making a decision to do this for a lifetime or even for a long time. This is crucial: for most people, driving on Uber is not even a part-time job… it’s just driving an hour or two a day, here or there, to help pay the bills.”

Way back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes prophesied that the term “technological unemployment” would become a familiar part of the language. The phrase described “our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”. Or in other words, the way that computers and robots would put us out of a job. A 2013 study by the Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne attempted to draw up a casualty list of the occupations most under threat. Of 702 occupations, almost half fell into in the high-risk category of “potentially automatable”. This included nearly all data-based occupations, and with the imminent arrival of autonomous vehicles, most transport functions. I asked Frey if he thought that the gig technology of sharing platforms might mitigate those effects.

“People remain very attached to payroll,” he said, “but I do think some of those companies are very much on to something. The rise of the sharing platforms is giving people opportunities to make a market from their skills which did not previously exist.”

One result of this, he suggests, will be undoubtedly more pressure on the wages of the full-time employed and less protection of working conditions. Frey does not believe that because technology disrupts labour markets in one sphere it will necessarily provide the solutions in another.

“My reading of the evidence so far,” he says, “is that there will be less job creating and ever-greater labour saving. If we look at the creation of new occupations by decade, they accounted for 8.2% of new jobs in the 1980s, 4.4% in the 1990s, and 0.5% in 2000s. It is not necessarily true that we will have a jobless future. But I struggle to use my imagination to see which industries will emerge to balance the loss of jobs.”

Using the Airbnb app to book holiday accommodation. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Some of the more evangelical proponents of the emerging “gig economy” believe that this is looking at the problem through the wrong lens. Robin Chase was the co-founder of Zipcar, the vehicle-hire platform, in the millennium year. Her book Peers Inc, which reflects on that innovation, and the multiple sharing models that have followed, argues that we are already in the midst of a revolution.

She says: “My father had one job in his lifetime, I will have six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.” Does she think that is that a positive thing? “Well,” she says, “it seems strange to me that we would always recommend to companies that their revenue streams are diverse, yet for individuals, the smallest and most fragile economic unit, we say: you must only do one thing all your life. What a crazy way to live; 87% of people in full-time employment are not passionate about what they do. When I look at this new way of work, I think of it as opt-in. It gives people economic agency, it puts them in charge. And it gives them flexibility. People love those things.”

What we have learned is that the way to grow fastest is by inviting the participation of people outside your company Robin Chase, Zipcar

But doesn’t it also give them little security, less certainty, and potentially a great deal of anxiety?

“We have been taught to believe in security over fulfilment, security over passion,” Chase says. And anyway the opposition is probably a false one. “In the US, only 25% of work-age adults now have what we might call a full-time job with benefits. We have already moved away from that model and it is not coming back.”

But isn’t the gig economy just another way of driving down costs and concentrating wealth in the hands of the platform providers? “Lots of people are right now trying to pin workers being screwed by employers on to the sharing economy,” she says. “But if we look at the current income inequality that has been going on for 40 years, that fact of workers being screwed by employers has nothing to do with the shared economy.”

What she hopes the emerging platforms will inspire – and she sees no boundary to them in any industry or service – is a new openness and flexibility of thought. “Traditionally companies have kept value internally and enforced it with patents and trademarks and certifications,” she says. “What we have learned from these platform companies is that the way to grow fastest is by inviting the participation of people outside your company. That is what BlaBaCar and Airbnb and Uber and YouTube and Moocs thrive on. They exploit passion that exists outside the company. It is a profound shift in what delivers value.”

The writer and economist Jeremy Rifkin has been predicting that shift since his book, The End of Work, was published in 1995. “At the time,” he tells me, “standard economic theory argued that new technologies would create more jobs than they destroy. I didn’t buy that.” Rifkin believes that conventional capitalism is already over and he is advising governments and corporations, particularly political leaders in Germany and China, how to deal with the fallout. One key component of it, he believes, will be the sharing or gig economy, what he calls “the collaborative commons”. “We are in an age of new communications technology, new sources of energy and new modes of transportation,” he says. “When these three come together, then you always get a fundamental shift in how people work.”

That shift is already the reality in the “millennial” generation, he believes. “They already exist in a hybrid economic system,” he says. “Part of their day they may be in capitalist markets, selling and buying and producing things that are sold on margins to produce profits. That is not going to go away. But part of the day they are producing and sharing lots of virtual goods with each other at near zero cost, for free. Look at the music industry. It is 16 years since Napster. People can create music almost for nothing and distribute it to a billion potential listeners at zero marginal cost.”

File-sharing service Napster delivered the first of many shocks that have transformed the music industry. Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

Rifkin believes that the shocks that have been felt in the news and publishing and entertainment industries will soon become universal. He points to the millions of people in Europe and now in China producing their own electricity from solar and wind power at zero marginal cost and then selling some back to the grid. He suggests that a comparable revolution is about to happen in transport “with driverless, 3D-printed, fuel-cell powered, shared cars”.

A lot of the change, he suggests, has to do with a transformed idea of freedom. When the older generation thinks of freedom it imagines it as autonomy, self-sufficiency, personal choice. “Freedom is exclusivity.” When the younger generation thinks of freedom, he suggests, it is no longer about exclusivity, it is about inclusivity. “For them the more networks they are in, the more social capital they establish, the more free they feel,” he says. “It is about expanding the network. This is the sharing economy.”

Partly, though, I say, isn’t it also that grim economic necessity has become the mother of all that invention, all those millions of apps? The fact is that in developed countries, that generational gap about ideas of freedom is also a glaring generational inequality in assets and opportunities.

Rifkin likens the gig economy to the establishment of common land in feudal times. “This sharing economy is reestablishing the commons,” he says, “in a hi-tech landscape. Commons came about when people formed communities by taking the meagre resources they had and sharing then to create more value. The method of regulation of these systems is also comparable,” he suggests. “If people are trusted and vouched for they are accepted as part of the sharing economy group. If they behave badly they are excluded. Your social capital means everything in this new economy.”

There is a kind of utopian sense in much of this future, I suggest, but surely there is also going to be an awful lot of anxiety and pain in the hoped-for transition to it. Rifkin has set out a plan for European and Chinese governments that will mitigate some of that pain, he says. It involves “one last great surge of labour” to retrofit all buildings and homes as micro-energy suppliers and to build the infrastructure that allows a digital, greener creative common future. He believes this will take 40 years.

“But of course,” he says, “I don’t think there is a fait accompli in any of that. It is our best shot. I spend a lot of time with business leaders and governments. And I say: do you have another plan for the future of your economy, the future of employment? They never do. There is no plan B.”