In the nuclear winter that followed the dot com bubble of 2000 there was a new class of artisans without any patrons. Underemployed and between jobs they began to build products and services for each other. From this downtime weblogs and podcasts emerged. Rather than for financial exchange or gain people interacted and shared knowledge openly and freely.
The sharing economy has been around for thousands of years on a localised level. With the arrival of the web activities moved beyond immediate friends and families to distributed global networks. People were no longer constrained by physical proximity to each other in localised networks.
Extended networks were now global in nature once communities had internet access. I had witnessed how the rollout of GSM globally in the 90's had affected societies as they joined the grid. This death of distance enabled by technology let peer to peer interactions flourish.