'Buzzword' book crashes

The Age of Access
By Jeremy Rifkin
Penguin Books, 2000
$45 (hb), 312 pages

REVIEW BY KARL MILLER

According to the cover notes to The Age of Access, Jeremy Rifkin makes his living from lecturing to "CEOs and corporate management". That is clearly the target audience for this book. What does he lecture on? "New trends in science and technology and their impacts on the global economy, society and the environment."

This is one of those trashy books that claims to predict the future by picking out minor trends in society and exploding them beyond all proportions, meanwhile surrounding them with cool references to pop culture.

Despite being completed around the time of the big demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, Rifkin claims that the supremacy of the market over society, culture and, by implication, ideology is greater than ever.

The Age of Access was also written just before the crash in technology stocks not long after Seattle, making the trend highlighted by the book, the prevalence of all things "virtual", far from convincing. The book's title comes from Rifkin's assertion that physical products will shortly fade from the centre of the market, to be replaced by access to services and experiences. For example, car companies will stop selling cars, they'll sell the experience of driving.

Basically, this is a "buzzword" book that tried to make money from the internet hype. Unfortunately for Rifkin, the internet stock market bubble burst.

From GLW issue 446