Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience

Description

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 transforming the nature of business and daily life, 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 of the most popular social thinkers of our time, Jeremy Rifkin is the bestselling author of The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work. A fellow at the Wharton School's Executive Education Program, he is president of The Foundation on Economic Trends in Bethesda, MD.

'One basic economic rule, as the author 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. His view of corporate capitalism dematerialising into webs of access of networks of 'virtual' power is startling and compelling.' New York Times