You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave. — Eagles, Hotel California.

How Airbnb Kills Our Ideas of Privacy is an excerpt from The Four-Dimensional Human, by Laurence Scott. I could run out of adjectives to describe it (deep, insightful, erudite, masterful...) and not begin to convey how right-on and disturbing it is. 

Some excerpts:

Airbnb is one of the increasing number of cyber-services that demands its users have fixed, 4D bodies—a chain-store identity. It is an apt illustration of how we are asked to materialize online as contained, knowable people, to enter into a community of fully realized digital subjects. We are required to accumulate an online history of consistent, amiable personhood, so that we can be recognized wherever we crop up in digital space. This paradigm rings a death knell for the bodiless shape-shifter of the early web, despite one of Airbnb’s slogans echoing the spirit of the first popular web browsers: “The only question is: where to go next?” A common reason that people travel is to try to outrun their old lives, to experience fresh starts, to be blissfully anonymous, a mysterious stranger blowing through town. But in order to journey with Airbnb, we are required always to bring ourselves with us. Our pasts become a travel document; we’re not allowed to shed our digital skins...
There’s some degree of pathos in Airbnb’s turning of the home inside out for financial gain and pitting it against the other items in the windows, which perhaps more reflects the western housing crisis than it does a utopian adoption of Bedouin hospitality...

Until recently I lived in the top flat two floors above a small-scale pizza takeaway, which made for impolitic moments when my Papa John’s delivery pulled up outside...

The flat stood empty for months, and then a doorknob appeared and footsteps returned to the stairwell. On two occasions I bumped into two different people who gave me the same name and who turned out to be squatters. After the lesser-spotted cockney owner evicted them, months of vacancy would be interrupted by the comings and goings of unseen and furtive new inhabitants. On one of those unholy nights when you know that the sleep demon is standing at the foot of your bed, I holstered a rolling pin in one of my mattress’s side-handles, entertaining wild thoughts about the latest mystery guest below.
During my second summer there, envelopes addressed to a professor began to appear. One morning I heard the yaps of a dog in the hallway. A writer had bought the flat of shadows, and she greeted me in a boiler suit, announcing that she was going to finish painting the floor and then go on Open Book. I tentatively returned the rolling pin to its drawer. Unsurprisingly the flat was only meant as a pied-à-terre, and during her absent times, the writer said, she would be accepting guests from Airbnb (“Do you know it?”). And so it was that my life continued to be perched above a thoroughfare, with none of the reassuring routines of constant neighbors.

At startling times the main door would open and strange, woollen voices would come through the walls, except that now they were often joined with the huffs and strains of suitcase haulage. Indeed, while the revolving door continued to spin, a significant change had occurred. The place had been transformed from a secretive refuge for the temporarily dispossessed and the desperate—a black-hole asylum whose boiler never ran and where letters could be lost and demands evaded—into a spruce and transparent little crash-pad for the global traveller.
I looked up the flat’s listing on Airbnb, and soon found the first name and picture of my professor, smiling politely in her good pearls. I could read both the reviews of her visitor-customers and her thoughts on them: the acts of kindness and mutual goodwill, as well as vivid details about one disastrous stay involving (separately) improper linen usage and a toilet bowl full of steeped urine. A man I had seen leaning against the tree outside the pizza shop was now in the gallery of client-friends, and by clicking on him I could see where he lives, goes to university, and peruse samples of his prose.

A key writer in the late-Victorian vogue for the fourth dimension was Edwin A. Abbott, whose 1884 novel Flatland is both a social satire and an allegory of inter-dimensional travel. In the story a three-dimensional being visits the two-dimensional plane-world of the book’s title, which is inhabited by sentient lines and triangles and priestly circles. The 3D visitor, a sphere, describes to a Flatlander his higher perception of two-dimensional space: “From that position of advantage I discerned all that you speak of as solid (by which you mean ‘enclosed on four sides’), your houses, your churches, your very chests and safes, yes even your insides and stomachs, all lying open and exposed to my view.” Airbnb relies precisely on this kind of exposure, a 4D scrutinizing of our three-dimensional world. The flat below me had become like Flatland. Its ceiling had been blown away and I could, if I liked, peer inside it, see its tables and chairs and carpet without ever passing through the front door. And in the case of bad reviews, it is often the private messiness of the body that is revealed, its unsporting excretions and stains, the clots of hairs in the plughole that soil the reputations of slovenly guests.

The growing popularity of Airbnb testifies to our sense of everywhereness, which enables a feeling of continual connection to the safe and the familiar. Wherever we go, part of us is always at home. A thousand miles from our loved ones, we can pull a stranger’s blanket up to our chin and manage not to feel eerie, soothed no doubt by the night lights of our phones and laptops. In this sense, our tentacular digital bodies help us to defeat an age-old dread of being cut off from the familiar and cast into an unknown environment.

These primordial fears have been famously depicted in the psychodramas of children’s stories...

The Beast (of Beauty and the Beast) is a creature of his fairy-tale world not only in appearance but also in his professed ability to short-circuit the anonymity of strangers. If you can be traced then you aren’t anonymous. In a 2013 interview, (AirBnB CEO) Chesky describes the milieu in which Airbnb operates, while presenting the same contradiction as the Beast: "You can call it the sharing economy. Or the trust economy. I think there’s something really special about that. A year from now everybody [on Airbnb] will be required to verify, meaning share their email and their online and offline identity.” Airbnb’s million dollars of insurance coverage for each of its hosts, and the demand for user transparency, seem to indicate the opposite of trust, which by its nature is the sum of our reckonings with the unknown.

Disney’s account of the fairy tale foresaw the perfect Airbnb stay in the song “Be Our Guest,” in which the Beauty, Belle, is serenaded by the anthropomorphized objects in the Beast’s palace. Jigging crocks are a Disney shorthand for joie de vivre, and these crocks are delighted to treat Belle to a spectacular feast. “No one’s gloomy or complaining while the flatware’s entertaining,” sings the candlestick. The motherly teapot can’t wait to start bubbling and the champagne bottles are popping their corks, all of them reveling in a quasi-erotic desire to be used. Those Airbnb-ers who stay in the lived-in homes of intermittently present or fully absent owners experience a muted version of this hospitality-by-proxy. In such a model, the guest communes with household objects that act as avatars, the feathered plumpness of the duvet, the pedigree of the kettle, the heft of the cutlery all speaking to the host’s virtue. In their Hospitality Standards section of the website, Airbnb tells us that “Every day, hosts around the world create magical experiences for thousands of guests.”

Freud naturally had much to say about the home and the idea of homeliness. The German word for homely is heimlich, and Freud, with the help of others such as the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, emphasized a glitch in its various definitions... Freud’s interest lay in the fact that the word unheimlich is also used to convey something that is concealed and therefore potentially malevolent. He concludes: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.” The English word for unheimlich is “uncanny,” which in its Freudian sense, among other things, refers to strangely familiar experiences or, perhaps more horrifyingly, a sense of estrangement in what should be a familiar, homely situation. The upshot for Freud is that, like the Beast’s palace, all homes are unhomely: cosy, talkative candlelight throws deep shadows, and for all the merry teatimes there are people withholding things from each other, unable to express the most meaningful parts of themselves.
Airbnb has set up shop in this uncanny valley. The guarded and enclosed aspect of homeliness diminishes with Airbnb’s mandating of the inside-out house, the home whose rooms one can browse online, but even this transparency entails a certain uncanniness. As Freud remarks, “Everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.”...

In the comments sections, the secrets of private life are broadcast, and strangers become familiar. Indeed, the whole enterprise is predicated on a classically uncanny oscillation between strangeness and familiarity. Airbnb invites its travellers to feel at home in the domestic space of a stranger, but in order for this situation to be tolerable, the uncanniness needs to be minimized. In other words, the stranger has to be converted into its opposite. Since in this paradigm being unknown is the same thing as being untrustworthy, the Airbnb website offers such assurances as “We make it easy to get to know hosts like Michelle.” For her part, Michelle seems like an honest person, standing in her modern kitchen arranging daisies. One might wish to overlook the blur of three sharp knives stuck to a magnetic strip behind her left shoulder. Chesky’s social vision certainly holds the stranger at knifepoint, since for all the chumminess there’s a threat at the heart of his ethos. “Some people,” he says, “will choose to be anonymous their whole life. That’s okay. But if you don’t opt into this online identity, you’ll have less access to the services that require it. The rest of us build a history. We build a brand online.’”

Some people will choose lifelong anonymity? What freaks! While not having much time for the naturally retiring among us, Chesky also seems to think that history and branding are the same thing. While branding often invokes “tradition”—Mr. Kipling wandering through a dappled orchard, or the peasant matriarch simmering blood-red pasta sauce—such commercial narratives are usually a smokescreen to the unlovely history of mass production. If brands are not, as Chesky implies, synonymous with history—if by history we mean what actually happened—then they’re perhaps more aligned with what Chesky sees as a “built” history. The manufactured nature of cyber-identities, while deemed vital to Airbnb’s aims, is simultaneously an obstacle because of the connotations between manufacturing and illusion. What is to stop these selfie-brands from being dismantled and rebuilt in new shapes? How would you know it was me? For those who demand that the 4D body be as robust as its 3D precursor, there is always the threat of being duped by a dummy. As of 2014, Airbnb users in America were required to have their government ID scanned in an attempt to freeze the quicksilver out of their online selves. Responding to this move, Chesky said, “We don’t think you can be trusted in a place where you’re anonymous.” For a pioneer trust-economist, he seems wary of overestimating the scope of human integrity. This policy change is designed to intertwine the founding biometrics of citizenship with our brand image, composed of online displays of sanity: wholesome Facebook musings and non-violent tweets, scores of friends and followers, combining to make a thickly woven reed boat, whose density of woof and warp somehow assures the world that someone of substance is on board.

My wife and I spent most of the summer traveling for work and pleasure, staying entirely in AirBnBs. The main reason is that they are far cheaper than staying in a hotel, or even in a cheap motel. They also tend not to be in hotel districts. Or, if they are, they are very un-hotel-like. The places we stayed in Montreal and London were dorm or dorm-like spaces with private bathrooms in perfectly central locations.

All were fine, and none were scary. And there is some adventure to traveling that way. One, for example, was at at the end of a zigzag hallway, reached by 49 zigzag stairs, rising several floors above a family's restaurant, and featuring no AC, poor ventilation and a mattress that was just a box spring. (We put our air mattress on top, which worked out fine.) Yet, even in that case, the family who rented the place to us was extremely kind and helpful, and kindly mailed us the camera charger I forgot there.

Still, had we known when we got into it that our private lives would be as exposed as AirBnB thinks they should be, we never would have started using it in the first place. And now, after reading Laurence Scott's piece, we're even more sure of that.

We take solace in knowing that the world is only 21 years into the Internet age, and we've barely begun to work out what either identity or privacy mean in this new space we all share, with zero distance between everyone on it.

We also just ordered the book, and recommend that you do too. It's the top link above.