The future is bright for Jeremy Rifkin (Image: Sipa Press/REX) Houses with their own solar panels are bringing down the cost of electricity in Germany (Image: Hans Blossey/Imagebroker/FLPA)

The internet and low production costs will free us from work and want, says social theorist Jeremy Rifkin – but what will we do then?


Stephen Jay Gould called an early book of his “a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship”. In the 30 years since, Jeremy Rifkin has been preparing governments, corporations and the readers of virtually every globally important broadsheet for a distinctly post-capitalist future.

Neither a number-cruncher nor a utopian visionary, Rifkin occupies high ground all his own on the futurological landscape – and the view he’s getting from there now is surprisingly bright.

Your book is called The Zero Marginal Cost Society. Why?

Marginal cost is the cost of producing an additional unit of something after the fixed costs of production have already been absorbed. Sellers look for technologies to increase productivity, and to win over consumers by offering cheaper products. But no one ever imagined that marginal costs of producing and distributing goods and services could approach zero, making the products or services potentially free and therefore beyond the market.

Is this the death of capitalism?

“Eclipse” would be a better word. Capitalism will still be around in the future as a robust, powerful niche player, but it will not be dominant.

What is driving this change?

It started over the past 15 years as millions of consumers became what I term prosumers, producing and consuming and sharing their own information goods – music, film, videos, entertainment, blogs, knowledge. This shift from consumer to prosumer devastated the music and media industries – because they have such high overheads it is very hard for them to compete. For a while, industry watchers argued that the more you give away, the more people will be interested in your premium services. But this hasn’t really happened on a major scale.

Where can we see this idea of “free” gaining ground?

It is affecting the provision of energy and physical goods. And it will create extreme productivity like never before. There are over 3 billion sensors operating in the world, embedded in everything from warehouses and assembly lines right down to domestic TVs and washing machines, and they’re continually feeding data to the “internet of things”.

By 2030, the US manufacturing corporation Fairchild Industries estimates there will be 100 trillion such sensors globally. Over that time, the internet of things will evolve into three internets: for communication, energy and logistics.

Take energy. Forty years ago, generating a watt of solar electricity cost $66. Now it costs 66 cents and the price is falling. You have to install that solar panel, wind turbine or geothermal heat pump and pay for it, but once you pay back your investment, you’re then producing energy at near-zero marginal cost.

In Germany, where I work with government, we see near-zero marginal costs are devastating the power and utility companies. Only 7 per cent of new energy is coming from big power companies; most is coming from small players, consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, farmers and people living in cities.

Can big business fight back, or are these technologies somehow irresistible?

Irresistible is the right word. We’ve always said that the ideal efficient economy is one in which you sell at low marginal costs – but neither Karl Marx nor pioneering economist Adam Smith anticipated that these would fall to zero or near zero.

So are people right to worry about losing their jobs?

Over the next 30 years we’ve got to roll out the infrastructure for these internets. We have to put in storage technology, and convert the world’s electricity and transmission grids to an energy internet. There’ll be lots of jobs laying cables and retrofitting buildings – jobs that robots can’t do yet. And the logistics and transport industries will have to switch from internal combustion engines to fuel cells and driverless transport. But let’s be clear – this will be our last big surge of mass employment.

What will happen to professional jobs?

The shift to workerless factories started in the 1960s but took 40 years to fully implement. Conceptual and knowledge workers thought they were immune, but the scary thing is, their jobs are going faster than those on the factory floor. Algorithms and analytics are knocking out lawyers, radiologists and accountants everywhere.

So how are we going to eat?

The thing is, as people in their hundreds of millions start producing their own energy and physical goods, they need less income. The old distinctions between being a seller, a buyer, an owner or a worker break down. There are still going to be a lot of goods and services that are not free, so you’ll still need jobs.

What kind of jobs will still be needed?

There’s an institutional mechanism we all use every single day to obtain an array of goods and services provided by neither government nor private enterprise. Economists, when they factor it into their thinking at all, call it the not-for-profit sector, but it’s bigger than that. It covers everything from producing and sharing things to education, healthcare, day care for children, assisted living for the elderly, cultural events, sport, arts, environmental activities.

All these activities generate social capital, so it’s a huge sector, with a worldwide revenue of $2.2 trillion – and that’s only the small bit we know how to quantify. For the past 20 years, the not-for-profit sector has been growing faster than the private sector. More than 10 per cent of the UK, US and Canadian workforce operates in this sector.

You’ve said this focus on social capital changes our thinking more generally. How?

We’re seeing the emergence of a collaborative commons alongside this social commons. A younger generation is studying in global classrooms, socialising with peers globally on Facebook or gossiping on Twitter, sharing homes, clothes and just about everything online. They are beginning to generate and share green electricity over the energy internet, and share cars, bikes and public transport on the evolving logistics internet. In the process, they are beginning to shift from an unswerving allegiance to unlimited and unrestrained material growth to a commitment to sustainable economic development.

What does this future hold for us as individuals?

The emerging new economy offers greater potential opportunity for self-development and promises more intense rewards than traditional employment. And since intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centred on sustainable abundance rather than scarcity, in a half-century from now our grandchildren may look back at mass-market employment with the same disbelief with which we look upon slavery and serfdom. The idea that a human being’s worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods, services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric.

What could prevent this utopia?

Climate change – and therefore food insecurity – and cyberterrorism.

Are you optimistic we can outrun these risks?

I’m guardedly hopeful, but not naive. Our world is becoming dysfunctional, in terms of the environment we’ve created and the inequalities we’ve contrived. If we don’t embark on this journey, what would be the alternative?

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism Jeremy Rifkin Palgrave Macmillan