Reddit reviews The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

Economic issues seems top of the list of futurological issues right now for many people, I think because it is the one thing technological change is forcing on us now & we are living through it. I also have the feeling we have very stormy weather just ahead of us on that front & that the headwinds of that storm are already starting to rattle our windows.

Of all my futurological reading, the one book that has been making the most sense to me lately about this is - is The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin.

IMHO, he seems the best at clarifying just what it is that is that is going on & putting things like automation, technological unemployment & basic income in the right context.

In brief, his thesis is that we are moving towards a zero marginal cost economy on everything - industrial goods, energy, digital goods & as capitalism is basically redundant & unnecessary in this scenario, it's in the beginning of it's decline to being only a small part of our economy (he still see's a role for it in some areas, but they are small in comparison).

If you accept this premise, I think the next pertinent question is - how as societies do we handle the decline of capitalism ?

He outlines what will follow after this decline as being very similar to how we have always handled the non-profit sectors of our economies in developed societies now. However where capitalism has been centralized and hierarchical - whatever follows will be many flat, decentralized networks.

I think we can sort of get a glimpse of this now with blockchain technologies (I've no idea whether they will eventually play a a major role). But you can see in the work people are starting to do with that idea to expand it well beyond bitcoin, a vision of how a decentralized financial future would work.

Interestingly, if this thesis is correct - wealth redistribution & the problem of the 1% - becomes much less of an issue. A great deal of their wealth would evaporate as capitalism shrinks. The trouble is viewed through the economic eyes of just capitalism (with no nod to he future just around the corner) - this process looks like an apocalyptic disaster. Stock markets disintegrating, global debt defaults & (within the capitalist portion of the economy) huge economic depressions.

Which perhaps, takes us back to that pertinent question - how as societies do we handle the decline of capitalism ?

The Second Machine Age, by McAfee and Brynjolfsson.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Rifkin.

Ending Aging by De Grey.

Although I would personally argue that you get a good understanding of their material from the numerous talks they give, and learning the background science is probably more important for assessing their claims than simply reading their books.

Thanks, will do, a lot of the stuff I've read is because of reddit or my early interest in Sci-Fi, but even reddit is getting filled up with snappy one liners as Digg once was as well. ;) But regardless of how financially unequal our society is getting, it's still the freedom I 'defended' in the military, like Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

It is sad that Jim Inhofe is such an Koch swilling ass, as I much prefer Jared Diamonds take in Guns, Germs, and Steel. But I did read Rifkin's latest as well. It is very interesting. I also liked David Brin's prescient work The Transparent Society as well.

And Neil Stephenson's REAMDE was awesome. Spoiler alert, don't read the full wiki if you want to actually read the book.

> That being said, large publicly traded corporations are bastardizations of private enterprise, and more often than not they are in bed with the State to seek favors and crush competition.
>
> Small, privately owned corporations tend to avoid cultural degradation, and they are frequently attacked by the government, such as Gibson Guitars were a few years back.

Then perhaps the problem is public trading; well, among other things. Wall Street has been shown to be problematic in several areas.

> I believe that is not only wrong but completely destructive thinking. People like yourself seem to fail to grasp the enormous complexity in the problem of allocation, distribution, and categorization of goods. If it was as simple as identifying that there are goods at point A and people at point B that need them and so we should move them from A to B, there wouldn't be the entire logistics discipline. Amazon, UPS, Fedex - they all employ thousands of people just to solve their little part of the allocation problem.

I can recognise that this is an enormously complex problem; however, the development of the solution to it is occurring as we communicate. You are no doubt aware that logistics technology, as with all other forms, is currently advancing at an exceptionally rapid rate. Because of this, the word, "impossible," needs to be at least periodically redefined.

> I've never heard "Resouce Based Economy" explained in a way that makes any sense. Care to give it a shot?

I don't necessarily know how Jacques himself would define it; but the way I do, is that it is essentially based on the idea that certain items become sufficiently cheap to produce, that they acquire a monetary value of zero, or near zero; and that as a result of this, we simply stop charging money for the specific commodities that have reached that state. Money would return to its' original purpose; as a regulator of genuine scarcity, and as such, things that truly were scarce would retain an appropriate market price. The only things that would be taken out of the economy, would be those things that we would be producing in sufficient volume, that they no longer needed to be represented monetarily.

Jeremy Rifkin has actually written a book on this as well, called The Zero Marginal Cost Society. I know this seems difficult to believe, but I've seen some truly radical agricultural technologies being developed over the last decade or so. I'm not claiming that this could occur with all or even a large subset of commodities, but I genuinely believe that it could occur with some. Apparently American farmers are already given some sort of incentive by the government to avoid overproduction. There is another book online, New Rules For The New Economy, which goes into some depth about this, as well; although that book does not necessarily presume post-scarcity in quite the sense that I am talking about.

I'm truthfully also inclined to believe that the development and use of BitCoin is a reflection of this, in the sense that it has been said that BitCoin has no direct relationship with the hard value of real goods within the economy, but is instead based on the perceived value of whatever they are paying for. If we are at the point where we can already afford to have a currency that is essentially based on thin air, then that tells me that we are already a lot closer to practical post-scarcity than we might think.

> We've already seen how market-based solutions to the reputation network problem have created vastly superior outcomes. Ebay and other online marketplaces tend to work quite well. Silkroad was completely divorced from the State justice system and State reputation networks, and it worked extremely well. Quality was high, bad actors were limited, and people genuinely experienced vastly better service than on the street.

If those sorts of systems work, then we should keep implementing them, by all means.

> War is stopped by 1 thing above all - trade. As long as people and goods can move freely over borders, tanks and missiles will not.

There does seem to be good evidence for this as well, yes.

There are options outside of the two extremes of unfettered classist schism and government-controlled income distribution. We will more likely see an economic system paradigm shift in the next decade or so. Something on the order of what Rifkin describes in The Zero Marginal Cost Society.