Jeremy Rifkin on the Fall of Capitalism and the Internet of Things
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Economic theorist and author Jeremy Rifkin explains his concept of The Internet of Things. Rifkin's latest book is The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (http://goo.gl/4estV2). Don't miss new Big Think videos! Subscribe by clicking here: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Transcript -- We are just beginning to glimpse the bare outlines of an emerging new economic system, the collaborative commons. This is the first new economic paradigm to emerge on the world scene since the advent of capitalism and socialism in the early 19th century. So it's a remarkable historical event. It has long-term implications for society. But what's really interesting is the trigger that's giving birth to this new economic system. The trigger is something called zero marginal cost. Now, marginal costs are the costs of producing an additional unit of a good and service after your fixed costs are covered. Business people are all aware of marginal costs, most of the public isn't. But this idea of zero marginal cost is going to dramatically intimately affect every single person in the world in the coming years in every aspect of their life. There's a paradox deeply embedded in the very heart of the capitalist market system previously really undisclosed. This paradox has been responsible for the tremendous success of capitalism over the last two centuries. But here's the irony, the very success of this paradox is now leading to an end game and a new paradigm emerging out of capitalism is collaborative commons. Let me explain. In a traditional market, sellers are always constantly probing for new technologies that can increase their productivity, reduce their marginal costs so they can put out cheaper products and win over consumers and market share and beat out their competitors and bring some profit back to investors. So business people are always looking for ways to increase productivity and reduce their marginal cost, they simply never expected in their wildest dreams that there would be a technology revolution so powerful in it's productivity that it might reduce those margins of cost to near zero making goods and services essentially free, priceless and beyond the market exchange economy. That's now beginning to happen in the real world. The first inklings of this zero margin cost phenomenon was with the inception of the World Wide Web from 1990 until 2014. We saw this zero marginal cost phenomenon invade the newspaper industry, the magazine industry and book publishing. With the coming of the World Wide Web and the Internet all of a sudden millions of people, then hundreds of millions of people, and now 40 percent of the human race with very cheap cell phones and computers they're sending audio, video and texting each other at near zero marginal cost. So what's happened is millions of consumers became prosumers with the advent of the Internet. And so they're producing and sharing their own videos, their own news blogs, their own entertainment, their own knowledge with each other in these lateral networks at near zero marginal costs and essentially for free bypassing the capitalist market, in many instances altogether. This zero marginal cost phenomena, as it invaded the information industries, wreaked havoc on big, big industries. Newspapers went out of business; they couldn't compete with near zero marginal costs. Magazines went out of business. And my own industry publishing has been just wracked by free e-books and free knowledge and information. But, you know, the strange thing about it is at first a lot of industry watchers said this is a good thing because if we give out more and more information goods free and people are producing and sharing it free, these freemiums will stimulate people's appetite to want premiums and then upgrade this free goods and information by getting more customized information. I'll give you an example. Musicians give away their music free when they started to see this happen hoping that they would get a big loyal fan repertoire and then their fans would be enticed to go to their concerts and pay premium in order to be there in person. And then, of course, we saw this with newspapers. The New York Times will give you ten free articles a month, freemiums, hoping that you'll then upload upgrade to premiums and by their subscription service. It didn't happen on any large scale. This was very naïve by industry watchers. Sure, some people have moved from freemiums to premiums but when more and more information goods are out there nearly free shared with each other, music, film, arts, information and knowledge, attention span is not there to then want to go to the premiums when you have so much available already in the freemiums. Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton
Comments
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It's practically a society based on Wikipedia system. Share and get information without any cost of production, thus people will move forward through a collaborative knowledge
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everything should be free then people will be happy. no stress, no starving. fuck money. we need to get rid of that stinky retarded archaic system some a few creeps made up thousands of years ago. people criticize religions but look at the way we live, we are slaves of this archaic miserable system called CAPITALISM. well, if you someone who belive money system is the only way, u are a stupid brainwashed unhumane fuck. look how the world suffers by money control.
People fight for all kinds of rights but never fight for real freedom from money. I swear i am a revolutionist. join today for your new life beginning. -
He doesn' believe it himself.
If he did, he would give digital copies of his book for free.
LIAR -
so we become drones like the borg.You know what they can fuck off
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So basically we're going to be dominated by AIs of things right?
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I swear this could have been better explained and more concise.
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Basically this is Marx's 'tendency for the rate of profit to fall'. Read 'on the fragment of machines.'
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when do I get free pizza on the Internet?
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the third industrial revolution has the potential to make each individual largely self sufficient, within the global network as paradoxical as that sounds.
definetely huge. the labor v capital fight that has been ongoing for a thousand years will be disrupted. everyone will be an owner of capital, as well as a producer of labor. -
A key point he raised was dependant on the Internet of things being allowed to maintain its neutrality.
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A key point he raised was dependant on the Internet of things being allowed to maintain its neutrality.
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This so called colaborative economy is too limited to be taken seriously. Money is power and is concentrated by few who have the power of buying the whole internet of everything and controlling this new area. Google is only one of the big corporations who can fuck up internet whenever they feel is the right moment. Internet lives because it makes money for advertizing business and that means consumerism is at large in the real world. Automobile industries still produce hundreds of thousands units of cars every year. Will this market ever become colaborative? Will food and beverage corporations like Nestle be overtaken by colaborative economy? The essential things we need are made in large scale by few and powerful corporations. Can colaborative economy beat large scale production? Will big corporations give way to small local business? I don't believe so. This colaborative economy may apply to a few sectors of actual economy but not to the whole. Big industries depend on bulk energy, i can't imagine automotive industries running os solar or wind power.
The problem is POWER. Its concentrated in the hands of few and they are the ones who decide and do, and we, the commons can only resign and accept the way they point out for us. Democracy is just another marketing feature controlled by POWER, and it gives us the wrong but confortable nuance that somehow we participate, but only to keep things as they are. POWER dominates democracy, government, banks, media, church (religions) and military. With these tools they dominate us.
As long as i can see a new economy will rise when the concentrating trend begins to fall and power becomes balanced. But i'm not sure we'll be given the time to survive, we are already living "hell on earth" as Immanuel Wallerstein says. -
In other words, we're moving toward an era of electronic serfdom in which free labor is the rule rather than the exception?
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In short,we are living in the midst of a fundamental quantum shift which is going to change EVERYTHING.
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As someone in IT, this possibility is also the scariest that can probably happen to human being, especially with NSA and so-called 'secret society' watching us. Let's think about that for a moment, what a hacker or maybe simply dude with no-life who want to watch other suffers can do to us :
1. Assassinate : You have that automatic hormone injector or heartbeat pacemaker connected to your personal doctor? A hacker can make it overdose or make your heartbeat too fast/slow to kill you. You don't need to hire a sniper to kill certain president who disagree with you :). Other ways to do that using 'self-driving car' : controlling the steer, disabling the brakes, activating the airbags in the wrong time, etc.
2. Monitoring and surveillance : Let's thanks to these modern things we have, our privacy will become a scarcity in the near future. The one in power can know almost every aspect of your life, from simple thing like what kind of coffee do you like to tracking you wherever you go.
3. Stealing, thieving, robbing : You guys want to keep thief out of your home by connecting the lock to your device? Well, let's think about this for a moment, estimately 90% of HTTPS connection (secure connection you use to access sensitive data on the internet, including credit cards, e-banking, e-commerce, etc.) are actually not secure enough. Can you trust the safety of your house to someone else, even when it has the so-called "best practice security"? Some experts say that those standards of IT security nowadays, even the internationally recognized one such as ISO 27000 isn't enough. The more we are connected, the harder we can think of various ways that some creepy/cruel dudes out there can exploit into taking advantage of this 'sophisticated technology'.
These are what's in my mind right now and the one that has been predicted to be the problem in the near future. We haven't known what the other problems are. Just be careful when using this double-edged sword that is the internet of things. -
I can see this happening very rapidly in the tech world, especially in MOOCs and Open Source paradigm of Software Development. However, like the current economic systems, the future will still be in a mixed economic state, where capitalism will be mixed with collaborative commons to drive innovation and socialist policies for critical services for achieving a maximally efficient economic system. Capitalism will become irrelevant once the scarcity assumption of economics becomes irrelevant, and that would take a lot of time and technological innovation to be a reality.
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If people spend their money with consideration for the overall amount they've acquired, how is one to estimate the value of their time, oblivious of their remaining balance?
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As long as there is scarcity there will always be price, competition and Capitalism. Don't let Mr. Rifling fool you. You can't 3D print a house made out of gold or download a trip to Mars. People will always come up with new products that others are willing to trade for. We can create mud huts at zero marginal cost. The problem is no one wants to live in them. The point being that in the future people might look at our houses today and consider them mud huts. Future residents might want to live in designer homes floating in the clouds. Life is always getting better but it's never going to be free. Cheers.
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Really? We could have cut the work week by 75% after the 1st two industrial revolutions. It will never happen, the governments will suck up all the reserves and keep us slaving away until the elite decide they don't need us anymore.
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