This promise of making a temporary home in Tokyo, New York or Rio, regardless of your background, class or bank balance, has buoyed Airbnb’s growth since its beginning but its forward-looking face is fraying a little at the seams. In December 2015, a study from Harvard Business School, which surveyed 6,000 hosts across five US cities, found that Airbnb hosts were 16 per cent less likely to accept prospective guests with names that sounded African-American, such as Darnell, Rasheed or Tamika than those called Allison, Brent or Kristen, who they presumed were white. This practice spanned every demographic, even as each instance of racial profiling sparked losses of $65 to $100. Suddenly, the ‘Bélo‘, the Airbnb logo conceived as the global symbol of belonging, has already started to look more like the sign of a world whose cosmopolitanism extends to letting strangers crash on its couch but not quite far enough to actually open its mind.

– I wrote about AirbnB bias and the downside of the sharing economy for Daily Life last week.