Peer2Politics

Capitalism is waning, Rifkin argues in The Zero Marginal Cost Society, and it will be replaced by a Digital Commons world in which nearly everything we need, including energy and physical goods, are so close to free as to be negligible. I read this book thoroughly after hearing an NPR interview with Rifkin, and in particular his claim that exponential speedups in technology are driving the cost of energy and goods towards zero.  This book is filled with naivete regarding technology and regarding the physical world. It feels to me as if someone who grew up inside the headspace of a computer- in the world of bits and bytes- came forth into the physical world, then assumed that everything they learned inside a single computer applies to our actual universe.  Let me be systematic below. Let’s write a quick primer for any digital progeny out there. Read this while still trapped in a computer universe:

Jeremy Rifkin long has perfected the art of adding two and two and getting five. In the 1980s, he claimed that entropy made it impossible for a free economy to exist, and therefore Rifkin concluded the state needed to plan and run things. How the state would triumph over the second law of thermodynamics is anyone’s guess. He later declared that a new “hydrogen economy” was just around the corner — government just needed to engage in central planning and order hydrogen to be our new fuel of choice.

Race to Innovate · Tagged: productivity Techno-utopianism seems to be a particularly American phenomena.

A note from the publisher says Jeremy Rifkin himself asked them to ship me a copy of his latest book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society. It’s obvious why: in writing about the economics of open-source software, he thinks I provided one of the paradigmatic cases of what he wants to write about – the displacement of markets in scarce goods by zero-marginal-cost production. Rifkin’s book is an extended argument that this is is a rising trend which will soon obsolesce not just capitalism as we have known it, but many forms of private property as well.