In a mini review of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society in NewScientist (19 November 2016, paywall), Sally Adee summarizes Rifkin’s vision of the future:
Within 60 years, capitalism might have left the building completely. In its place will be a society in which all our basic needs are met. Rifkin calls his new economic vision “the commons”, but it goes beyond the economy – it will be the new “water” we swim in.
You will have a job, but it won’t be for money. The company you work for will be a non-profit. Your “wealth” will be measured in social capital: your reputation as a cooperative member of the species. So when you contribute to open-source code that makes a better widget, you’ll enjoy a “payment” in the form of an improved reputation. Apps that track your contribution to the commons – whether by your input at work, your frugal use of energy, or other measures of reputation – will let you cash in your karma points for luxuries, say, an antique chair that was conspicuously not built by a fabricator. Even in the commons, we’ll still be human.
Karma points, eh? And how will this differ from money? It doesn’t. Just another measurement of what I’ll call social contribution – so don’t get sidetracked by the terminology. The key is the nature of social contribution and what is valued. In the past it was contributing to the building of things, whether you’re laying the pavement of a bridge – or building the software that enabled the proper design of the bridge – or created the mathematics that enabled the proper design. In other words, working with reality, even at some remove, in order to further our survival.
From this limited mini review, it appears Rifkin wants to more directly control the definition of social contribution, transforming from the relatively unregulated riff on satisfying the wants and needs of society, individual and whole, to a more idealistic – or at least more manipulable – definition of good vs bad wants and needs. I suspect this’ll definitely be a more political definition of how to run society, as it’ll be disconnected from base reality (in other parts of the review, citations of automation and next generation 3D printers are used to suggest the cost of creating such things used for survival will become negligible), possibly resulting in potent arguments over who has contributed and who has not.
Could even lead to small wars. Especially with those 3D printers functioning as your weapons factories. Now I’m tempted to buy the book just to see if it’s as nihilistic as this little tidbit suggests it should be.
