There’s nothing resembling a “sharing economy” in an Uber interaction. You pay a corporation to send a driver to you, and it pays that driver a variable weekly wage. Sharing can really only refer to one of three occurrences. It can mean giving something away as a gift, like: “Here, take some of my food.” It can describe allowing someone to temporarily use something you own, as in: “He shared his toy with his friend.” Or, it can refer to people having common access to something they collectively own or manage: “The farmers all had an ownership share in the reservoir and shared access to it.”

None of these involve monetary exchange. We do not use the term “sharing” to refer to an interaction like this: “I’ll give you some food if you pay me.” We call that buying. We don’t use it in this situation either: “I’ll let you temporarily use my toy if you pay me.” We call that renting. And in the third example, while the farmers may have come together initially to purchase a common resource, they don’t pay for subsequent access to it.

In light of this, we should call out Uber for what it is: a company in control of a platform that originally facilitated peer-to-peer renting, not sharing, and that eventually transformed into the de facto boss of an army of self-employed employees. And even as “self-employed employee” might sound like a contradiction, that’s the dark genius of the Uber enterprise. It took the traditional corporation, with its senior managers responsible for controlling workers and machines, and cut it in two — creating a management structure that need not deal with the political demands of workers.

So, how exactly did we get to the point where business executives at conferences can talk about Uber as a “sharing economy” platform with straight faces? How is it that they don’t feel a deep sense of inauthenticity? To understand this, we must return to the roots of the actual sharing economy. It is the only way we can wrest it back from those who have hijacked it.

Our everyday economic life is characterized by three things. First, you get a job at a company — or you start a company — and you produce something. Second, that company goes to market to exchange its product for money. Third, you use that money to get goods or services from others who are also producing. Zoom out, and a market economy is a large-scale network of interdependent production. We cannot survive without accessing the products of other people’s labor.

Monetary exchange takes the form of, “If you give me money, I will give you a service.” There’s always potential for rejection in market offers, which creates uncertainty, and some people fare better than others. Those who undertake the heaviest burden of production don’t necessarily get rewarded commensurately. Individual competition appears to be — at least at first glance — the defining mark of monetary exchange.

There are, however, three major but inconvenient truths that seem to get glossed over when we talk about the market economy. The first is that market systems feed off an extensive, underlying gift economy in which people transfer ideas, goods, services, and emotional support to each other without requesting money. Unpaid childcare is one example. If your mother watches your two children while you’re at a job, that’s the gift economy in action. In fact, without friends and family it’s unlikely that you could even maintain the desire to go to work. Even in professional settings we share common resources with business colleagues. Companies rely upon this internal collaboration to produce the very products they then competitively exchange in markets.

The second inconvenient truth about the market economy is that its products are not really desirable unless we can use them within non-market systems. What’s the point of all this stuff getting produced if we can’t share it, compare it, gloat about it, or enjoy it with others? Friends, family, and various community systems make having material goods meaningful.