The Age of Access

Visionary activist and author Jeremy Rifkin exposes the real stakes of the new economy, delivering "the clearest summation yet of how the Internet is really changing our lives" (The Seattle Times).

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 taking place in the nature of business, 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.

Part I: The Next Capitalist Frontier
Chapter One: Entering the Age of Access
Chapter Two: When Markets Give Way to Networks
Chapter Three: The Weightless Economy
Chapter Four: Monopolizing Ideas
Chapter Five: Everything Is a Service
Chapter Six: Commodifying Human Relationships
Chapter Seven: Access as a Way of Life

Part II: Enclosing the Cultural Commons
Chapter Eight: The New Culture of Capitalism
Chapter Nine: Mining the Cultural Landscape
Chapter Ten: A Postmodern Stage
Chapter Eleven: The Connected and the Disconnected
Chapter Twelve: Toward an Ecology of Culture and Capitalism

Notes
Bibliography
Index

"One basic economic rule, as Mr. Rifkin 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." --The New York Times

"Rifkin's vision of corporate capitalism dematerializing into webs of access of networks of 'virtual' power is startling and compelling." --William Greider, author of One World, Ready or Not

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.