The age of access by Jeremy Rifkin, review by Pat Boran

The Age of Access. Jeremy Rifkin. Penguin Books. 2000.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Business Post, August 2000)

Not so long ago, saying you were anti-capitalism was like confessing you were a red. But now, even as capitalism delights in finally getting its foot in the door of mainland China - an untapped market of some 1 billion customers - the very idea of the market economy itself is under attack. And the enemy this time is not some foreign power but that very signifier of capitalist might, the computer, and its by-product the internet.

Where Jeremy Rifkin's previous book, The End of Work, noted that the spread of technologies was leading to increasing unemployment in traditional fields and rather fancifully imagined new legions of unemployed devoting their spare time to keeping culture alive (FAS schemes, anyone?), his new book examines the idea that what the rich are trading in order to get even richer is no longer property but access. After all it is generally not things which are being made available over the internet but digital representations of things. An on-line newspaper, for instance, is not selling papers, or even news, any more: it is offering visitors access to news. Nothing changes hands.

To suggest that 'the very idea of ownership will seem limited, even old-fashioned, twenty-five years from now' seems however quite a large jump. It is true that Steven Spielberg's property-less Dream Works company has value because of imagination and talent (non-physical properties), but a track record in generating hard currency returns on investments also helps. As for ownership being old-fashioned, trying telling that to the crowds queueing up to buy property in Dublin.

As Rifkin points out, most laws do have their origins in property and markets, and certainly those two concepts have much changed in the last few years. The digital profusion of music (think MP3 revolution), text and images continues to change the nature of commerce in those areas, but the major physical issues of food and shelter continue to dominate global politics. At one point Rifkin mentions the fact that one half of the world's population has never made a phone call, but an even more shocking truth might be that the other half couldn't care less or, at best, can no longer even imagine what that stray fact might mean.

When Stephen Jay Gould, back in 1985, dismissed Rifkin's then new book Algeny as 'a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship', he was not the last scientist of repute to take issue with the often alarmist style of a man who has more than once been called anti-scientific.

But Rifkin, to be fair to him, has repeatedly brought centre stage the relationship (in the US at least) between technology and economics such as when, to the annoyance of many, back in 1998 he threw his spanner in the works by making an early application for a patent to create human-animal hybrids, solely in an attempt to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Rifkin is, it must be said, excellent on the way in which aspects of traditional media for example - charts, lists, chapters, etc - have paralleled and influenced developments in thinking, and rightly sees all sorts of possibilities for hypertexts no longer under the control - though sadly often without the vision - of a single author.

The Age of Access is ultimately though a disappointment. Rifkin's conclusion that 'Only by making local culture a coherent, self-aware political force will we be able to reestablish its critical role in the scheme of human society' is the wisest though hardly the most original statement here. In the end, it would seem, The Age of Access is a book with two few new ideas to make it a piece of property worth buying.