Words&Dirt

“The Collaborative Commons is already profoundly impacting economic life.  Markets are beginning to give way to networks, ownership is becoming less important than access, the pursuit of self-interest is being tempered by the pull of collaborative interests, and the traditional dream of rags to riches is being supplanted by a new dream of a sustainable quality of life.

In the coming era, both capitalism and socialism will lose their once-dominant hold over society, as a new generation increasingly identifies with Collaboratism.  The young collaboratists are borrowing the principle virtues of both the capitalists and socialists, while eliminating the centralizing nature of both the free market and the bureaucratic state.

The distributed and interconnected nature of the Internet of Things deepens individual entrepreneurial engagement in direct proportion to the diversity and strength of one’s collaborative relationships in the social economy.  That’s because the democratization of communication, energy, and logistics allows billions of people to be individually ’empowered.’  But that empowerment is only achievable by one’s participation in peer-to-peer networks that are underwritten by social capital.  A new generation is coming of age that is more entrepreneurially self-directed by means of being more socially embedded.  It’s no surprise that the best and brightest of the Millennial Generation think of themselves as ‘social entrepreneurs.’  For them, being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather, a tautology.

Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring bits and pieces of their economic life from capitalist markets to the global Collaborative Commons.  Prosumers are not only producing and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, 3D-printed goods, and massive open online courses on the Collaborative Commons at near zero marginal cost.  They are also sharing cars, homes, and even clothes with one another via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives, at low or near zero marginal cost.  An increasing number of people are collaborating in ‘patient-driven’ health-care networks to improve diagnoses and find new treatments and cures for diseases, again at near zero marginal cost.  And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdfunding new enterprises, and even creating alternative social currencies in the new economy.  The result is that ‘exchange value’ in the marketplace is increasingly being replaced by ‘shareable value’ on the Collaborative Commons.  When prosumers share their goods and services on a Collaborative Commons, the rule book that governs a market-exchange economy becomes far less relevant to the life of society.

The current debate among economists, business leaders, and public officials on what appears to be a new type of long-term economic stagnation emerging around the world is an indicator of the great transformation taking place as the economy shifts from exchange value in the marketplace to shareable value on the Collaborative Commons.”

––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg 19

“‘On to the latest developments in philosophy––Natural, or Unnatural, as you prefer.  Stand and deliver, Doctor Leibniz!  Whatever’s the matter? Bat got your tongue?’

‘The English savants are all busy toiling at practical matters––Mints, Banks, Cathedrals, Annuities.  The French are all under the shadow, if no the actual boot, of the Inquisition.  Nothing of interest has been heard out of Spain since they kicked out the Jews and the Moors two hundred years ago.  So when you inquire after Philosophy, Majesty, you inquire––and I do not wish to seem self-important when I say this––after me.'”

––The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 669