Visionary activist and
author Jeremy Rifkin exposes the real stakes of the new economy, delivering "the
clearest summation yet of how the Internet is really changing our lives" (The Seattle
Times).
Imagine waking up one day to
find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become
a "paid-for" experience. It's all part of a fundamental change taking place in
the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After several hundred years as the
dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning
to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from
any we have known.
"One basic economic
rule, as Mr. Rifkin points out, has not changed since Roman times: caveat emptor. In the
brave new wired world, it will be ever more difficult for the buyer to beware of
technology speeding forward in nanoseconds, controlled by global giants." - The New
York Times
"Rifkin's vision of
corporate capitalism dematerializing into webs of access of networks of 'virtual' power is
startling and compelling." - William Greider, author of One World, Ready or Not
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I: The Next Capitalist
Frontier
Chapter One: Entering the
Age of Access
Chapter Two: When Markets
Give Way to Networks
Chapter Three: The
Weightless Economy
Chapter Four: Monopolizing
Ideas
Chapter Five: Everything Is
a Service
Chapter Six: Commodifying
Human Relationships
Chapter Seven: Access as a
Way of Life
Part II: Enclosing the
Cultural Commons
Chapter Eight: The New
Culture of Capitalism
Chapter Nine: Mining the
Cultural Landscape
Chapter Ten: A Postmodern
Stage
Chapter Eleven: The
Connected and the Disconnected
Chapter Twelve: Toward an
Ecology of Culture and Capitalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
312 pages