When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.
Jeremy RifkinA half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.
Jeremy RifkinWe were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
Jeremy RifkinIt is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.
Jeremy RifkinThe antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.
Jeremy RifkinWhat's really clear to all of us in the business community is that GDP is slowing everywhere. And the reason is productivity has been declining now for 15 or 20 years all over the world. So we've got very high unemployment, and it's structural. And it's compounded by real-time climate change - that's really a game changer.
Jeremy Rifkin