The end of culture

Jeremy Rifkin says commerce could devour life as we know it.

by Tamara Straus
4/19/00

Rifkin

"We are entering a totally different form of capitalism."

Jeremy Rifkin believes you will wake up one day soon and find virtually every activity outside your immediate family has become a paid-for experience. Almost everywhere you turn, almost anything you do will entail forking over cash: think cable subscriptions, health club memberships, monthly installments on a leased car. Your life, in effect, will have become someone else’s mini-mart, a storehouse of commercial relationships with companies that base their worth not on what they produce but on how much of your time they own.

Frightening? Well, it should be, according to Rifkin, a fellow at the Wharton School Executive Education Program in Philadelphia and the author of such dystopian polemics as The Biotech Century and The End of Work. In his latest book, The Age of Access (Tarcher/Putnam), Rifkin charts "the new culture of hypercapitalism," in which owning goods becomes secondary to paying for access to them – and a customer’s "lifetime value" becomes the ultimate market commodity.

An economist by trade, Rifkin lectures to CEOs about the social ramifications of business and runs the Foundation on Economic Trends, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. His foundation, among other things, is currently suing Monsanto for not adequately testing agricultural products.

But Rifkin is really a social science polyglot. His new book distills psychology, cultural anthropology, economics and philosophy. It is, in many ways, a popularization of the ever-elusive theory of postmodernism, Rifkin uses such favorite pomo terms as "immateriality" and "decenteredness" to describe cyber networks, electronic commerce and lifestyle marketing as a final, nightmarish stage of capitalism where the commercial sphere wallops the cultural one.

Yet Rifkin writes plainly and backs up his arguments with economic data. In The Age of Access, we learn, for example, that the average American visits a mall every 10 days for approximately an hour and 15 minutes; that the service industry employs more than 77 percent of the U.S. workforce; and that a typical U.S. citizen is bombarded by more than 3,500 advertising messages a day.

"What I was trying to do with this book is wade through all this postmodernist stuff and take what I thought was real and eliminate what I thought was bull, and get down to how this relates to economics," says Rifkin. "What people don’t understand is that we are entering a totally different form of capitalism."

Rifkin’s main point is that this new era is as different from market capitalism as market capitalism was from mercantilism.

"In a market, you have a seller and a buyer and you exchange property, which is the way we’ve defined capitalism since Adam Smith," says Rifkin. "In networks, there aren’t any sellers and buyers. There’s no exchange of property. There are servers and clients, suppliers and users and ‘just-in-time’ access to what you need, but the property never alienates. In other words, it stays in the hands of the suppliers and they lease it."

Leap forward?

Rifkin hopes not only to influence social and cultural critics. He has spent the last six months introducing business leaders to his Age of Access theories because, as he puts it, "they haven’t really thought about what they’re doing."

"One of the things that really hit me while writing," he says, "is it’s all been just about the hardware and software until now. Bill Gates and Alvin Toffler and my friend John Nesbitt – none of them have a social vision that’s powerful enough to share these fruits in a way that’s a leap forward for humanity. It’s all about cell phones and e-mail."

Rifkin argues that commerce has become the primary institution; culture, co-opted and commercialized, is derivative. This, he believes, is breaking social trust with possibly dire consequences.

"Unfortunately, the market has become the defining presence in our lives," says Rifkin, "and it is deconstructing that whole civil and cultural sector. The AOL-Time Warners, the Bertelsmanns and the Sonys, what they’re really selling is the cultural diversity of thousands of years of human life – everything from travel and tourism to destination entertainment centers."

Rifkin’s critics will probably call him a neo-Luddite. To some degree, his main argument – that our life experience is being commodified – seems implausible for those who know the difference between Disneyland and a walk in the park. Yet in the new economy, access to consumers is becoming more important to the bottom line than selling actual products. The AOL-Time Warner deal, which took place while Rifkin’s book was at the printer, is item No. 1 in defense of his arguments.

New existence

Yet there are dubious arguments in his book. Rifkin describes the "protean persona" in the Age of Access when people no longer define themselves in terms of good character or strong personality – as their grandparents did – but in terms of being "creative performers" who "move comfortably between scripts and sets as they act out the many dramas that make up the cultural marketplace."

Supposedly, this postmodern person is constantly on the hunt for new experiences in the form of paid-for performances, entertainment and fantasies; he is even beginning to exhibit multiple personalities, particularly in cyberspace, where donning and discarding identities can be accomplished in a blink of an e-mail. Rifkin writes that this new person, a networking junkie, will believe: "I am connected therefore I exist."

Rifkin realizes he may be out of bounds in describing the dot-com generation. "The jury is out," he says. "You can also make the case that kids are multitasking, they’re parallel processing, they’re more connected with the rest of this planet." In the end, he says his main concern is that young people be aware that their "postmodern play" is taking place in a commodified cultural marketplace.

According to Rifkin, the way out of the hypercapitalist conundrum is through social movements, such as the campaigns for biodiversity and cultural diversity. "If we lose the sense of place, the sense of being, if you will, we may lose our sense of responsibility to intimate relations," says Rifkin. "The contrarian rallying cry of our time should be ‘Geography counts, culture matters!’"

Rifkin is hopeful that those cries will grow louder. "I think Seattle was the beginning of a powerful coming together of movements that can provide an antidote to the forces of global cultural production," he says. "Suddenly we had the biodiversity groups coming together with the cultural diversity groups and organized labor – and these groups are all lodged in geography, which is where intimacy and empathy and real solidarity happens."

Yet Rifkin is skeptical about social progress. After mentioning Seattle, he adds: "It is not out of the question that cultural diversity can be exhausted. If you lose the rich cultural diversity of thousands of years, it’s as final and devastating as losing biodiversity."

Rifkin’s postmodernist colleagues are undoubtedly nodding in agreement. The question is whether business leaders, or better, politicians, will pay attention.

Tamara Straus is a staff writer for Alternet.