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How Airbnb Is Silently Changing Himalayan Villages

Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards occasionally growl outside the cottage. There is no habitation nearby, except a small village of hundred people where houses stand so close to each other that people can watch over each other for good. In their houses, people, cattle and mountain dogs coexist. There is no shop or restaurant nearby. There is nothing for many miles down, except pine forests and a narrow, unpaved road. Even the narrow, unpaved road didn’t exist a few years ago. Then there is a river. Everybody knows everybody else. It is hard to make an advance at a river girl without all mountain girls hearing about it. Crime is almost unheard of.  I live at the end of the habitable world.

A year ago, when I began to travel into eastern Himalayas, I put my cottage on Airbnb. It didn’t take long for it to become one of the most successful Airbnbs in my state, raising my landlord’s income beyond his wildest hopes. A decade ago, this would have been hard to imagine. My town is not very different from the United States at the end of the 18th Century. The family is still the fundamental business unit. People work alone in their family farms or one-man shops, some with a nephew or two as help. The rule of the clan is in its full glory. Everybody is on Facebook and Instagram, and nowadays, on Airbnb. But in many ways, time has remained still. It’s an unlikely location for a successful vacation rental, but Airbnb made this possible.

When they drive up the hill, even our happiest guests fear there can’t be anything good at the end of this. It’s the rare sort of person who doesn’t get cold feet when he drives up the narrow, winding road. This doesn’t bother me, because they’ve already made the payment. They’ll almost certainly write glowing reviews, because good memories are about good endings. A mountaintop cottage out of nowhere wouldn’t have had much success not long ago. It’s not for everybody. Quirky spaces have always had a market, but it was hard to bring them to people. People didn’t pay attention if your property wasn’t centrally located. Travel agents have a limited shelf space. Anything offbeat can be a bit hit-and-miss. But it isn’t hard for an offbeat product to outcompete mainstream products on Airbnb. If guests love the experience, you’ll get plenty of long, heart-felt, perfect reviews. It won’t take long for your property to appear on the top, when potential guests look up your neighborhood.

Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer once said that theory is information for free. Airbnb works a bit that way. A great theoretical framework explains the world the same way Airbnb makes a mountaintop cabin useful. With a great theoretical framework, you work with the pieces of information you’ve always had, but you see what you hadn’t seen before. When you list your mountaintop cabin on Airbnb, the property doesn’t change physically, but it suddenly becomes useful.

Many hosts who were tried and found wanting want to believe this is easy, semi-passive income. But this is not true. I remember the winter I came back to my mountaintop cottage. My landlord had come back from a festival that took a month of his life. He started leveling the land around the cottage built on a rock, to build a lawn. There wasn’t much land around it. It snowed heavily, and his nephew deserted him. The wind blew hard, and my pup came inside the quilt. Through the glass panes of my window, I saw him working outside the cottage till the snow dusted everything including him, and it turned dark and nothing was visible. When it became dark, the man with the mattock became distinct, as in a black-and-white movie. The snowfall became more intense. I could hear the snow falling on the roof. My pup shivered inside the quilt, and the villagers who walked down the path to the last house on the hill laughed. I opened V.S. Naipaul’s ‘A Bend In The River’ and read the opening line, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In a world without Airbnb, men like him, too, may have allowed themselves to become nothing.

It’s very expensive to farm in Himalayan villages like mine. The farms are quite small, and can’t leverage economies of scale. The law forbids selling land to outsiders, but the tyranny of the state pale in comparison to the tyranny of social norms. Most hill people see the process of selling land as a humiliating ordeal they would never consider. Everybody chips in to cultivate the land. Women spend many hours a day cutting grass for their own cows. This is not yet a division of labor society. It is this world Airbnb has penetrated, turning it upside down. In the beginning, nobody paid attention. People didn’t take well to the orderliness of an American company. Now everybody wants to get on it.

Millions of people stay in Airbnb homes every night. It’s not trust which makes this possible. My pup is fearless when he sleeps with the door wide open, in a cottage in the woods. There are leopards around. Dogs here don’t live very long. He doesn’t trust leopards, but he knows they are afraid of humans. My pup sleeps on my bed, and so is well-protected from the vicissitudes of life. But I’m not the living proof that dogs can trust leopards. Dogs wouldn’t need humans to guard them if they could trust leopards. Similarly, Airbnb puts hosts and guests in a position where behaving badly would ruin their reputations. In one of my bad moods, I held my pup quite firmly. At midnight, he ran out of the cottage and barked for hours. I couldn’t bring him back to my bed. I did something he thought I wouldn’t consider. He felt I betrayed his trust in me. I’m, here, talking about a more meaningful form of trust. Intellectuals miss this obvious distinction, because they’re not the wonderful people they think they are. The distinction between trust and assurance is all too obvious. But if doing wrong doesn’t fill you with moral horror, you won’t get it. You can’t trust anybody who doesn’t feel that way, and there are not many such people. Unconditional trustworthiness is one of the rarest things in the world. Institutions can’t produce this kind of trust, because people aren’t conditionable beyond a point. In any case, how do you produce something you don’t even understand?mountain dog peacefully resting on the grass and posing for a spectacular picture

To do well on Airbnb, you’ve to come across as a good fellow. It’s alright to cheat so long as you aren’t caught. But this doesn’t mean you’ll game the system if you’re a bad person with perfect impulse control. It’s easier said than done. Impulse control is hard, especially for opportunists. The pleasure of behaving badly comes soon enough, but the penalty of a bad review comes a few days later. If you’re a bad person, you just can’t help it. I’ve seen this in other domains of life, and I see this in hosts. They can’t help overcharging their guests. And they cut corners on the “free” breakfast they offer. They always think other people are trying to get the better of them, and so it’s hard for them to stop trying to get the better of other people.

You can’t solve evolutionarily novel problems without really thinking them through. The internet is evolutionarily novel. In the ancestral environment, there was no formal third-party enforcement of norms. There was usually no penalty for treating outsiders dishonestly and unfairly. The Airbnb review system is an extremely powerful third-party norm enforcement system. Most hosts don’t understand how formal third-party enforcement of norms work. When the hosts try to deceive guests through evolutionarily familiar ways, the penalty comes in evolutionarily novel ways. A negative review can haunt you for very long, but it’s hard for many hosts to get their heads around this.

Then there is pricing. Airbnb has tools that help you price your home right, allow the price to fluctuate according to supply and demand, and offer last minute discounts. But hosts believe there is a fair, fixed price for everything. In our fairly stable, hunter-gatherer past, there was no market pricing because they didn’t trade with strangers. There was only authority ranking, communal sharing and equality matching, as anthropologist Alan Fiske points out. The price can’t vary according to supply and demand if you’re equality matching. In a fairly stable environment, you can’t be a better bargainer if you settle for less when something is less valuable to you than usual. Hunter gatherers who felt too much humiliation and envy when they got less than usual were better bargainers, and had more reproductive success. When Airbnb’s “smart pricing” brings the prices down, hosts think they got the short end of the stick. They have too much pride to lower the prices even when the demand is ridiculously low. They don’t see why they can’t get more out of an app by bargaining with it, because apps are evolutionarily novel.

I manage the Airbnb listings of several hosts, and they wonder why the properties of highly rated hosts are more expensive than theirs. They can’t help thinking this is authority ranking, in which dominant people grab what they want from low-status ones. They expect more communal sharing. Human diversity is vast, and when everybody is free to list their homes, stars are inevitable. As Clay Shirky said long ago, when you reverse the star system, you destroy the village in order to save it.

The best Airbnb hosts don’t feel very tempted to overcharge or deceive their guests. They don’t feel too much envy or humiliation when they offer their guests a great, mutually beneficial deal. They would have found this hard to pull off, if they were continually fighting the temptation to misbehave. When you look at things this way, the distinction between genuine trustworthiness and benign, self-interested behavior seems to be a matter of degree. It doesn’t seem all that different. So is being a good host about being a good person, as Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia says? The bar, here is, way too low. You don’t need to be unconditionally trustworthy to fare well in short-term interactions. It is enough to have high social intelligence and be moderately trusting and trustworthy. Airbnb can’t produce genuine trust. No institution can.

Where, then, do you need genuine trust? In Himalayan villages like mine, there is deep social uncertainty because of Airbnb and other online marketplaces. The opportunity cost of doing business with one’s nephews and cousins is now high. There is the real problem of nephews who run away on the flimsiest of pretexts. The stakes are higher, and there is much to gain by trading with outsiders. You can’t even run Airbnbs well without breaking free from closed relationships with your family and tribe, and forming spontaneous relationships with strangers.  It’s hard for me to do justice to my Airbnb listings without being free to run them in a fairly entrepreneurial fashion. An outsider can’t lease land, if he isn’t sure the landlord would honor the contract in letter and spirit. Vast, hidden opportunities aren’t exploited because it takes unconditional trustworthiness. There are valuable transactions that don’t take place because they aren’t negotiated in the first place. We lose sleep over what we see, but what is unseen is often more important.

Airbnb provides enough assurance to get millions of people on the beds of strangers every night. There is something to be said for trust here. But people are strong norm-followers. There is little to fear. I travel for months at a time, and usually stay in the houses of strangers which aren’t on Airbnb. I write this from the house of a stranger who knows absolutely nothing about me. It probably never occurred to her this is strange. And I’m in a remote village where outsiders weren’t allowed not long ago.                                                                                        

PS: Thank you all, for sharing my essay. Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution | John Naughton, in The Guardian | New York Post  | Jake Seliger, The Story’s Story | Daulat Jha | Hacker  News |  The Browser | Bookofjoe | The Morning New | Real Clear Investigations | View From The Wing | Jason Potts | John Rentoul | Rory Sutherland |Agnes Callard | Arthur Charpentier | Gwern

  1. Pingback:Trust, Airbnb, and Himalayan villages - Marginal REVOLUTION

  2. Dallas Sommers says:

    I followed your thinking about the low bar for trust in the context of Airbnb relationships. Thanks for that.

    However, the points mentioned in the next-to-last paragraph could use some additional clarification. It is not as clear (to me) exactly how “deep social uncertainty” comes as a result of Airbnb, etc. (although you suggest that a careful reading of Dr. Yamagishi might supply an answer). An example or two from your own experience or a second, amplifying essay would be welcome.

    1. Veridici says:

      Thank you very much. The people here usually do business with their nephews and other relatives. That’s not because they trust them, but because it’s easier to control them. But Airbnb and other portals are becoming popular, and now they have to hire, say, cooks who are more competent. They aren’t fluent in English, and they aren’t comfortable with the internet. So they’ve to get people like me to manage their listings and guide them. And this leads to a lot of friction, because their nephews and relatives don’t like it. In villages like this, it’s usually one large family. The owners usually want to get me to run their listings in an efficient way, but their relatives get in the way. So there’s the strong temptation to leave commitment relationships with their relatives and deal with urban Indians who manage or lease their properties. And this sort of thing happens in every family that gets into this. They don’t easily leave such commitment relationships, but it’s happening, and this trend is strengthening.

      1. Dallas Sommers says:

        Thank you…that helps clarify the point.

        Fascinating how this micro-society skipped over so many generations of technologies on it’s way to this encounter.

        1. Veridici says:

          Yes. Some technologies catch on fast in places like this. Smartphones, for example. Computers, not so much. True of cars too, which very few people have.

      2. Gerrard White says:

        Dear Sir
        I think, and not sarcastically, you place unconditional trust in the airbnb app : that is to say your essay seems uncritically to favour this developement in your village
        Look what happens, invariably, around the world, when communities start to rent and sell property
        The original inhabitants move out, richer part timers move in, importing or attracting a new range of servants
        The prettier the landscape the quicker it happens, what used to take hundreds of years now takes tens
        The app after all is one of many, they come bundled, the lure is cash, apparently easy cash, the price is your way of life, your property, and your soul
        Sincerely Gerrard White

  3. Ethan says:

    Are you saying that the village had genuine trust before AirBNB? I can’t tell if you are or not. If so, I don’t understand how the type of trust that existed before is that different from AirBNB. They “trust” AirBNB because they know the incentives of everyone involved make it low risk and it is in their economic interest to do so. They “trust” their nephew because it is in their economic interest to do so. But as soon as that is not longer true, they stop trusting them at significant personal cost. That does not sound like Unconditional trust. Perhaps that is not the point you are trying to make.

      1. rolandvincze says:

        Hello! I am new to this site and to sites about topics like this in general. Maybe because of this I’m missing something, but I see the point Ethan is making. Could you please elaborate on your viewpoint?

  4. Ricardo says:

    Stayed here 5 years ago during the World Cup.

    https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/744902?source_impression_id=p3_1571690836_yn4cC1KIk8iGziNR

    Already knew Paraty very well from previous trips to Brazil. This was definitely off the beaten path and was hard to find at first but it was bucolic and quite and perfect-with our very own stream for bathing and frolicking. Yes, probably would have never found it without AirBnB as a force for exploration outside of the dull mainstream.

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  6. James Jordan says:

    I want to follow/subscribe to your blog but I can find no way to do that on your website. Can you please let me know how I can follow or subscribe. Thanks
    James

    1. Veridici says:

      Thank You. I’ve added a subscription option on the right sidebar. Just go to any essay, and you’ll see it.

  7. Dan Dennis says:

    Interesting, thanks

    Usually blogs etc have a little blue twitter symbol which one can click on in order to retweet the story – I dont see that on this page. You might like to add it as retweets increase your visibility.

    BTW have you studied philosophy?

    1. Veridici says:

      Thank you so much, Dan. I’ll do that. It’s a new blog. I haven’t formally studied philosophy, but I read many philosophers. Why do you ask?

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  9. Anon says:

    As someone who grew up in the Himalayas and never returned, this was a great read with several insights into how airbnb has affected the social and cultural norms. You briefly mentioned in the article that there have been other disruptive effects of mobile internet. Can you provide some examples?

  10. Pingback:Two Boeing air disasters demand urgent change – but where do we start? | John Naughton - Washington latest

  11. Brett W says:

    I live as the only local unit among 5 floors, where the rest are AirBnB residents. It’s destroyed local culture. Grocery stores have disappeared and are replaced with high-end ice cream shops an convenience stores selling bottled water. I have no neighbors anymore.

    And from all the loud, late-night parties and trash left in our building hallways, I can tell you it’s not enough to get a good rating from the host who often collects money from far away while some multi-unit manager briefly welcomes the visitors and lets them in, never to be seen again. What’s missing is a rating from the neighbors. We are the ones who have to put up with the good and bad guests. And we know far better than any remote AirBnB lister can ever attest to.

  12. Perhaps a solution is to enable the extended village family members to manage their AirBnBs by teaching them to manage their own properties.

    Personally, as an early AirBnB host, my unconditional trust was broken by guests who took advantage and behaved rudely and by AirBnB.

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