Jeremy Rifkin, in his book Age of Access, posits the idea that the commercialization of cultural experiences is the final stage in the capitulation of society to capitalism. To me this raises the question what comes next?
Rifkin is big on the idea that information brokers and knowledge merchants are the future of our society, with smaller and smaller portions of our workforce being dedicated to production of traditional capitalistic products. He may be spotting an emerging trend, and I’m sure that there are people living this lifestyle today. I’m fairly sure that I know one or two.
It took the penetration of the small computer into our homes to start this landslide. For culture to be sold to us in any mass-market way, there has to be an immediacy to it. Otherwise, we’d all just go to the opera. No, modern culture is Halo3 on your Xbox 360.
But doesn’t the wholesale commodification of our culture strongly imply that we are all not only going to buy these, but contribute to them?
A generation ago, it was small desktop publishing operations that started breaking down the barriers to publishing. Information, cultural by definition, was fighting for freedom.
Then something unexpected happened. The tools got too familiar, and their use fell off. There are very few desktop publishers around today, compared to a decade ago. I was one, and I knew perhaps a dozen others. None are still in the industry. Our clients got their own computers, and the applications on them theoretically (but not in practice) got good enough to replace us.
But they didn’t replace us, not exactly. Once everybody could do rudimentary desktop publishing, they stopped going to professionals, but they also stopped doing it themselves. It’s as if simply having the tools is sufficient comfort to the people who would otherwise agitate for a place to express their views. They may not be expressing themselves, but as long a they have the option to, that’s OK.
It’s just as well that we’ve been placated. At a time when we’ve been acquiring the tools to allow us to speak, to hear more voices, there has been a massive, tragic amalgamation in the mainstream media. Oh well, who cares? Anybody can put out an alternative media. But (almost) no one does.
The desktop publishing explosion was eventually overtaken by the Internet. Now anyone could have an opinion, and many do. There are millions of blogs (daily diaries) out there, freely distributed. But how do you find any that are intelligent, or right for you? The distribution may have become incredibly inexpensive, but the means of marketing information, the means of making it handy to the multitudes, is still held by an incredibly small number of companies.
When Rifkin talks about information marketers, it is more likely that he means Time Warner than you or me. In this perspective, information, cultural or otherwise, becomes a strangle point and diversity, cultural, political, economic, die on the vine. This, apparently, is the fulfillment of capitalism, when taken to its logical end.
The one question that Rifkin doesn’t answer, and that I’m dying to figure out, is what comes next? If capitalism is in its final phases (and by definition, capitalism needs new commodities and new markets to continue to survive), then what comes next?
