[.ca] Age Of Access (ISBN 1585420824)

From Amazon.co.uk:
He's been called the postmodern Chicken Licken, but it so happens that the sky really is falling down. Jeremy Rifkin pulls the plug on the trend away from property ownership and free public life in The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience. As usual, he's a bit ahead of the curve--most of us aren't yet fully immersed in the sea of leased products and packaged experiences that he sees awaiting us. Still, his eerie visions of a world of gatekeepers paying each other for access to nearly every aspect of human life brings a chilling new meaning to the phrase "pay to play" and should spark some debate over our new cultural revolution. Using examples from business and government experiments with just-in-time access to goods and services and resource sharing, Rifkin defines a new society of renters too busy breaking the shackles of material possessions to mourn the passing of public property. Are we encouraging alienation or participation? Can we trust corporations with stewardship of our social lives? True to form, the author asks more questions than he answers--a sign of an open mind. If property is theft, leased access is extortion, and The Age of Access warns us of the complex changes coming in our relationships with our homes, our communities, and our world. --Rob Lightner, Amazon.com

Spectacular analysis of today's hyper culture and commerce.:
Your life is part of a larger drama. As you grow up you are presented with numerous options as to the character you will play. What attributes should your character have, what personality traits, what reputation, what should your character strive to be? Will you take on different personas at work, in social situations, in simulated environments? The choice is up to you, but your choices are presented by advertisers who seek to steer you in a particular direction and supply you with the props to act out your character of choice. Once you acquire the physical props needed to reinforce your character (which have limited revenue potential for the companies supplying them), you need to compliment your props with experiences. Maybe you want to play a distinguished individual; one who lives in an exclusive golf community with others of similar status and means. Your character of choice has the newest cars, the latest gadgets, and adheres to the norms of others playing similar roles. You own little if anything and consume most everything as a service - you lease your car, despite "owning your home" you have to pay for all kinds of memberships and fees to keep up the act. You script your social circles and cultural experiences. The majority of your relationships are based on monetary exchange and are pre planned. You are able to purchase cultural experiences based on what market research has determined you want to experience. You are presented with that which others have determined you want to see and will pay the most to experience. Your experiences don't reflect reality, as it exists in nature, but the "reality" which you want to, and think, should exist. If you have enough financial resources you can rent the exact character you want to play, buy all the necessary props, and engage in all the appropriate cultural experiences. Everyone will treat you just the way you want to be treated. You'll be able to script your whole life. Will your relationships be built on trust, empathy, compassion and other genuine human emotions? Does any of this matter? Is there any difference between a life where everything is a paid for experience and one where it is not? Is this much ado about nothing? That's up to you to decide. Jeremy vividly describes how such scenarios may affect you. Another fundamental issue in "The Age of Access" is the private ownership and control of public assets and natural resources. Should a private entity be allowed to claim exclusive ownership of the radio spectra over which all sorts of communications are broadcast? Should a biotech company be able to patent (and therefore have exclusive use) of a particular gene that has always existed in nature but has only recently been discovered and put to a particular use? Should companies be able to have patents on the very building blocks that make up life on Earth? Should they be able to patent things that make up your body? When it comes to property rights, where is the line between private property and the right of humanity to share in and access the natural wealth of the planet? Monsanto, through the development of "Terminator seeds", has already shown how such patents and associated biological tampering may be used for the financial gain of a few to the detriment of the food supply of the world. \oTerminator seeds were developed by Monsanto as a way to claim intellectual property rights and revenue from farmers. The seeds are bio-engineered to be sterile so that instead of simply harvesting seeds at the end of one crop season to be used for the next, the farmer would have no choice but to ante up to Monsanto for seeds for next years crop.\c The parallel is made between cultural diversity and biodiversity. As the world's natural resources are depleted, can we continue our current lifestyles, our massive energy consumption? Many other works contend the answer is no. Rifkin compares biodiversity to cultural diversity. Can capital markets continue to operate if the very social fabric and trust on which they are built is transformed into continuum of paid for experiences? "The Age of Access" is brilliant. It raises issues that will become more and more important as we move forward into the age of "hyper-capitalism". Will it matter if your life becomes a series of subscriptions and paid for experiences? Should any private entity be able to claim control over things like genes or radio spectra or should they remain in the public domain for all to use? Is it in anyone's interest for corporations like McDonalds's, Dunkin Doughnuts, Starbucks, and others to steamroll local cultures and business outside of the US in the pursuit of profit? Rifkin presents scenarios that address these and many other questions. You may or may not agree with issues and perspectives in the book but its one book you can't afford to pass up.

Don't bother: try Experience Economy instead:
Jeremy Rifkin is part of what P.J. O'Rourke calls "the perenially indignant." Not that he's angry--merely that he's seen the future and has wept. (Actually, one could almost argue that his writing betrays what Nietzsche would call "the bad conscience"). Rifkin and others like him have much in common with The Decadents in literary Europe at the end of the 19th century: an overwheling feeling of apocalypse, general angst about life, a hidden hunger for the end of things. They appear quite scholarly (inasmuch as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater appear "scholarly"), but they're merely nihilists: from The Decadents we got "art for art's sake" (Pater) and a whole mess of bad behavior (Wilde). Their nihilism also produced such artists as Yoko Ono and, one could argue, the punk rock movement of the late 1970's. These are Rifkin's ancestors, as well as other leftish economists'. Although nominally on the Left, Rifkin is not a doctrinaire Marxist. In fact, I'm guessing he's never read Marx. Marx saw all of history (and the study of history) as proceeding from commerce and the satisfaction of needs. Rifkin, in Age of Access, says numerous times (as if wanting desperately to believe himself), that "culture precedes commerce," and that, somehow, the two should not intertwine. (A not-so-subtle jab at The Experience Economy). This is where the book collapses of its own weight: not only does Rifkin fail to define "culture," he fails to demonstrate any historical proof that culture prefigured commerce in any culture or setting. His thesis requires this proof, but, alas, none is forthcoming. Marx, early in The German Ideology, argues that "as needs are satisfied, new needs are made: the production of new needs is the first historical act." We can't, in other words, put a halt to "history" or "economics" without first putting a halt on human needs. Rifkin appears to stand athwart history and yell "Stop!" (much as William Buckley did in the first edition of National Review). Rifkin, however, fails even to give Marx a slot in the bibliography, although much of Age of Access is a counter to Marx's reversal of culture/commerce. Rifkin does, however, prop up his tired old thesis by appealing to David Ricardo and Adam Smith, two "classical economists." But the specter of Marx haunts the book. A book purporting to span the history of capitalism in the West, yet failing to mention Marx, is suspect at best and insidious at worst. Marx's presence in this book is similar to what Marx called "the specter" that haunted Europe in 1848 with the publication of the Manifesto. Age of Access is a decidedly conservative, reactionary take on postindustrial society. There is now no excuse why the experts in matters economic haven't read the classics in their field. They therefore forfeit their right to our attention (and money). I'm planning to try for a full refund from the local bookstore... The Experience Economy (by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore), as a book and a thing, while not explicitly nodding to Marx as ubermensch, collapses culture with commerce as neatly as it's ever been done. One need only look at Hollywood, or how many of us make our livings, for proof that indeed all the world's a stage. The Experience Economy posits that, although traditional mechanisms of value may be giving way to "creative" ones, the sky isn't falling. An invisible economy, one built less on things than ideas and performances, can still produce enough "labor" to sustain a given population. (In fact, it already does). In fact, while Rifkin decries what he sees as the end of work, The Experience Economy subtly redefines and redeploys the concept of "work" across a field of plenitude, not scarcity (scarcity being the "foundation" of classical economics). Value, Pine and Gilmore assert, can be derived from almost anything that tickles desire in the human heart. As long as desire is around, we'll never run out of work or money (or history). Whereas Rifkin has read Ruskin (see "Unto This Last"), Pine and Gilmore have read Schumpeter (and, probably, Nietzsche). Pine and Gilmore see at least a glimmer of hope in the future. Rifkin, in Age of Access as elsewhere, sees none. I strongly advise against Age of Access on grounds of gross intellectual negligence and overweening bad conscience.

Access this book as soon as you can:
Indeed an outstanding analysis of capitalist transitions. Very infomred study of how the mode of reproduction in capitalist society is redefining itself and who the agents of change are. A must read for all students of politcal and social sciences; a strong recommednation for everyone who wants to step back and reflect on where we are heading and how things got rolling. The only short-coming I see, is that Rifkin strangely avoids building on marxist thought, hardly any references and it seems he tried to "skip" Marxism in an effort to stay popular amongst a largely US readership. Still, a most important book, any current day social researcher and political analyst should make this book a key reference point.

One of the most important books EVER.:
You may not like what the author has to say, but like it or not, we have entered a brave new world order of hyper-capatalism and Rifkin disects it throughly. This book isn't so much about politics as it is about the ever encrouching power of the multi-national coporation. Reading this book may not be fun, but it is neccessary.

Good and Valuable Book:
I liked the book very interesting description of the times we are living in. Helps understand the economic tendencies that are actually occurring around us. I enjoy reading it!