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

and its destructive excesses.)
    I grew up in an entrepreneurial home. My father, Milton Rifkin, was a lifelong entrepreneur. After a brief but unsuccessful stint as an actor in early films in Hollywood in the late 1920s, my dad turned entrepreneur, a vocation that consumed the rest of his life. Not too surprising. In many ways, entrepreneurs are artists of the marketplace, continually in search of creative new commercial narratives that can capture an audience, tell a compelling story, and bring people into the universe they’ve invented—think Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurs from Thomas Edison to Sergey Brin and Larry Page have thrilled the multitudes with innovative inventions that have transformed their daily lives.
    My own father was one of the early pioneers in the plastics revolution. And, before the snickers, I will tell you that when Mr. McGuire turned to a young Ben in the film The Graduate and whispered just one word to him, “Plastics,” I shrank down in my chair in the movie theater, half amused and half embarrassed, thinking that was my dad whispering to me. My father would corral me over the years, attempting to entice me into the family plastics business, regaling me with the bright future that awaited the human race in a society wrapped in plastic—the miracle material.
    My father was, to my knowledge, among the very first manufacturers to convert polyethylene into plastic bags in the early 1950s. While young people today can’t possibly comprehend a world without plastic, in those early years it was a novelty. Packaging was usually in the form of paper bags, cardboard, burlap, or metal, glass, and wood containers.
    I remember my father sitting the family down around our tiny kitchen table each night entertaining us with new ideas about how plastic bags might be used. Why not package groceries in plastic bags, laundry from the cleaners, appliances from the department store. We may have been the first family to wrap all of our furniture in plastic. I can still recall the sticky feeling of the plastic covers on a hot summer day when I plopped down on the couch in my shorts.
    My dad’s excitement was contagious. Every bit the performer, he drew prospective buyers into his storyline and they became converts and players in the plastic makeover of the world.
    During his nearly 25 years as an entrepreneur in the plastics industry, I never heard my father talk about the financial rewards of his work. While I’m sure it was always in the back of his mind, he was far more concerned with the entrepreneurial game itself. He saw his efforts in creative terms as more art than industry. He wanted to make a difference in people’s lives by giving something of himself that could make their lives a little better. Although his efforts were on a very small scale compared to some of the great entrepreneurial giants that created the capitalist economy, biographical accounts of other inventors and innovators follow pretty much the same script.
    That is not to say that pecuniary interests are not at play, but many entrepreneurs I’ve met over the years are far more driven by the creative act than the almighty dollar. The pecuniary fetish generally comes later when entrepreneurial enterprises mature, become publicly traded in the market, and take on shareholders whose interest is in the return on their investment. There are countless tales of entrepreneurs driven out of their own companies by professional management brought in to transform the enterprise from a creative performance to a sober, “financially responsible” business, a euphemism that means focusing more attention on the bottom line.
    Of course, my father could never have imagined in the early years that the millions of plastic bags he was selling would end up in landfills and pollute the environment. Nor could he have foreseen that the petrochemicals used to extrude the polyethylene would emit carbon dioxide and play a key role in altering the climate of the