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

of the needs, desires, and wants of buyers and servicing them that capitalist entrepreneurs thrive. An entrepreneur or firm that is not looking out for the welfare of prospective customers is not going to stay in business for very long.
    In other words, it’s in an entrepreneur’s self-interest to be sensitive to the well-being of others if he wants to succeed. Henry Ford understood that and made it his life’s mission to provide a cheap, durable automobile that could put millions of working people behind the wheel and ease their lives. Steve Jobs understood this as well. Servicing the needs and aspirations of a highly mobile, globally connected human population by providing cutting-edge communication technologies was his all-consuming passion. It is this dual role of pursuing one’s entrepreneurial self-interest by promoting the welfare of others in the marketplace that has moved us ever closer to a near zero marginal cost society.
    The march toward near zero marginal costs and nearly free goods and services has not only partially validated the operating logic of the invisible hand but also, interestingly enough, the utilitarian arguments offered up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and others in defense of market capitalism. Recall that Hume and Bentham argued that private property exchanged in the market is a purely human convention with no basis in natural law and is justified because it is the best mechanism to “promote the general welfare.” Were they right?
    Since the market mechanism has helped take us to near zero marginal costs and the promise of nearly free goods and services, which is considered to be the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare, Hume and Bentham’s claim that private property, exchanged in markets, is the best means of promoting the general welfare has proven its utilitarian worth. The irony is that when near zero marginal cost is reached, goods and services become nearly free, profit margins evaporate, and private property exchanged in markets loses its reason for existing. The market mechanism becomes increasingly unnecessary in a world of nearly free goods and services organized around an economy of abundance, and capitalism shrinks to a niche economic realm.
    So we would have to say that Hume and Bentham’s particular brand of utilitarianism, wedded to the exchange and accumulation of private property in the capitalism marketplace, was never meant to be an eternal verity but only a specific description of the particular economic forces at work that would come to span the First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No doubt, the nineteenth-century utilitarian economists and their twentieth-century progenies would be aghast at the prospect that the very theory they espoused would eventually run its course, but not before taking society to the cusp of a new economicorder where promoting the general welfare is best achieved through collaborative pursuits operating in vast networked Commons in an evolving social economy.
    Admittedly, the very idea that an economic system that is organized around scarcity and profit could lead to an economy of nearly free goods and services and abundance is so counterintuitive that it is difficult to accept. Nonetheless, this is exactly what is unfolding.
    Passing judgment on the capitalist system at the end of its reign is not an easy matter. The capitalist market was not the savior its zealous supporters claimed. Nor was it the devil incarnate that its vocal critics claimed. Rather, it was the most agile and efficient mechanism at the time to organize an economy whose energy and communication matrices, and accompanying industries, required large concentrations of financial capital to support vertically integrated enterprises and accompanying economies of scale.
    So, while I celebrate, with qualifications, the entrepreneurial spirit that drove my father and so many others, I don’t mourn the passing