Wipe right: toilet app Looie forces movement of 'sharing economy' towards privatisation | Jeff Sparrow

Looie, a new app servicing user-pays toilets, is making a splash. As bottled water did to drinking fountains, are free amenities destined to fight a rearguard action?

Meet Looie: it's like Uber, but for bodily functions. Looie is a new app that promises you access (for a fee, naturally) to private bathrooms, all of which have been certified for hygiene and cleanliness.

"[Y]ou're getting a consistent, amazing experience all the time," explained Looie founder Yezin Al-Qaysi earlier this year. "You won't have to flush with your foot anymore."

Related: Subway station toilets: a surprisingly accurate indicator of urban civilisation

If you can monetise the liquid going into a human body, you should be able to make a buck when it comes out.

[W]ell into the 1880s, new fountains were considered significant enough to warrant news stories in major newspapers. And large crowds would gather to watch them be turned on. In 1881, The New York Times wrote that a thousand people were present at the opening of the water fountain in Union Square.

Airports undergoing renovation keep losing their water fountains,' she says, 'while coolers stocked with Fiji proliferate. Well-maintained fountains are becoming about as scarce as working pay phones.

America has accepted the spread of the pay toilet, now a $2 million a year industry. That acceptance is importance because it firmly establishes a basic tenet of a true free market economy: that a fee can be placed on anything for which there is a demand " And it is not hard to forsee the day when what are presently considered "free" services will be recognised by creative capitalists for what they are - profit opportunities.

[It] always depended on a very measured and modest set of expectations from those worker-consumers, happy to accept a limited range of lifestyle choices and social identities: men were expected to accept their role as breadwinner and paterfamilias with very little variation in how these roles could be interpreted; educational options were narrowly restricted at all levels of society; immigrants were expected to assimilate; it was possibly the worst time in history to be gay; there were very few choices for the woman who didn't want to be a housewife, etc. And this lack of freedom went along with a very modest range of choices in the marketplace: 'You can have any colour you like, as long as it's black,' Henry Ford famously told his customers.'

The welfare state during the postwar boom provided security - but a security that could feel stultifying.

Related: Composting loos should be the answer to the world's toilet crisis