Table of Contents
ALSO BY JEREMY RIFKIN
Common Sense II
Own Your Own Job
Who Should Play God? (with Ted Howard)
The Emerging Order
The North Will Rise Again (with Randy Barber)
Entropy (with Ted Howard)
Algeny
Declaration of a Heretic
Time Wars
Biosphere Politics
Beyond Beef
Voting Green (with Carol Grunewald)
The End of Work
The Biotech Century
The Age of Access
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Id like to thank my research director, Loring Katawala, for her outstanding work overseeing the project. Ms. Katawalas exceptional research skills often helped us locate difficult-to-find information, especially within the oil industry. Her attention to detail proved invaluable in dealing with the wealth of facts, figures, and statistics that make up the bulk of the book. Her enthusiasm and dedication have helped make the book a joyful experience.
Id also like to thank C. J. Campbell, Jean Laherrre, Buzz Ivanhoe, Jim MacKenzie, John Edwards, Richard Duncan, Joel Swisher, Seth Dunn, and Brett Williams for their scientific and technical critiques of various drafts of the book as well as for their helpful suggestions, many of which were incorporated into the final pages.
Thanks also go to Ted Howard, David Helvarg, and Marty Teitel, who read early drafts of the book and made helpful suggestions.
Id like to acknowledge my wife, Carol Grunewald, and my in-laws, Ted and Dorothy Grunewald, for many hours of fruitful conversation that helped shape my thinking during the project.
Id like to thank Stephanie Woodhouse for her superb job in editing the various drafts of the manuscript and for overseeing the project with my publishers abroad.
Id also like to thank Alexia Robinson for editing the book and Clara Mack for helping compile and assemble the research materials. Additional thanks go to Shreya Lamba, Kear Leng Chhour, Dara Sanandaji, Brett Wilson, Pat Gorton, Nicole Rousseau, Tim Emmet, and Jarret Cassaniti for their help.
Id like to thank Joel Fotinos, Cathy Fox, and Ken Siman at Tarcher/ Penguin for making this project happen. Id also like to thank my old friend Jeremy Tarcher for providing me with a unique publishing forum in which to share my ideas. His long-standing commitment to my work has made it possible for me to reach a wide public audience over the years, and it is greatly appreciated.
Finally, Id like to extend my special thanks to my editor, Mitch Horowitz at Tarcher/Penguin, for stewarding this project along. Mitch and I spent several months going over every detail of the book. His editorial suggestions helped guide the direction of this book, and his many contributions can be found throughout the finished work.
BETWEEN REALITIES
Throughout history, human beings have occasionally found themselves caught between two very different ways of perceiving reality. Certainly that was the case in the closing days of the 17th century. The Enlightenment scientists and philosophersIsaac Newton, John Locke, Ren Descartes, and otherschallenged many of the most revered shibboleths of church catechism, including one of its central doctrines, that the Earth is Gods creation and imbued with intrinsic value. The new thinkers preferred a more materialist explanation for existence and cast their lot with mathematics and reason. Less than a century later, political renegades in the American colonies and insurrectionists in France overthrew monarchical rule in favor of a republic form of government and proclaimed mans inalienable right to life, liberty, happiness and property. James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.
Today, we live in similar times of great tumult, of failing orthodoxies and radical new possibilities. After two centuries of industrial production and commerce, the use of mass human labor yoked to fossil-fuel-powered machines in factories, offices, and commercial businesses is slowly falling by the wayside. New, more sophisticated and intelligent technologies are steadily replacing human labor in every industry and professional field. We are making a great transition to smaller, elite workforces collaborating with increasingly smart computer and robotic technologies. Within a matter of a few decades, the cheapest workers in the world will not be as cheap as the intelligent technologies that will replace them, from the factory floor to the front office. By the middle decades of the 21st century, we will likely be able to produce goods and services for everyone on Earth with only a small fraction of the human workforce we now employ. This will force us to rethink what human beings will do when they are no longer needed to labor in the marketplace.
Physics and chemistry, which have dominated the era just passing, influencing every aspect of our existence, including the smallest particulars of our way of life, are making room for the age of biology. The mapping and manipulation of human, animal, and plant genomes open the door to a new era in which life itself becomes the ultimate manipulable commodity. The biotech era is beginning to raise fundamental questions about the nature of human nature, and the public is quickly being swept up in a great debate between those who view the new age as a biological renaissance and others who warn of the coming of a commercial eugenics civilization.
The computer and the telecommunications revolution have given birth to the Internet and the World Wide Web, marking a great change in the way human beings communicate. Access has become the all-encompassing metaphor for a generation of people who can now connect with one another via an electronically mediated central nervous system that spans the globe. The new speed of light society is changing the way we conduct business. The market economy, steeped in the exchange of goods and services between sellers and buyers, is found to be far too slow to accommodate the new speed of commercial life. In the coming era, the exchange of property in markets steadily gives way to access to services and experiences in networks. In a society where time itself is the most scarce and valuable resource, suppliers retain ownership of property and users pay for the time they spend accessing goods and services. Subscriptions, leases, time-shares, licenses, and rentals become the preferred way of doing business. The new temporal economy is characterized by falling transaction costs and diminishing profit margins, forcing commercial enterprises to introduce a radical new business model based on shared savings arrangements among network partners. The transformations from property exchanges to access relationships and from profit margins to shared savings are beginning to restructure commercial life around the world.
Our notions of what constitutes culture is also radically changing. Giant content companies like Disney, Universal Vivendi, AOL-Time Warner, and Sony are mining cultural resources all over the world, transforming them into paid-for experiences of every kind. The high-end income earnersthe top 20 percent of the worlds consumersnow spend almost as much money on experiences as on basic goods and services.
