Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Can we eclipse the Apocalypse?: Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (2011) by Jeremy Rifkin
This is the must-read of the decline-of-western-civilization books I’ve been devouring lately. It provides the inkling of hope for the future that The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca Costas fails to give. Rifkin shows how government and society are being restructured around the global environmental changes that we are already experiencing and the developing distributed capitalism that is replacing the old order. He gives solid examples of how the transition is already in motion.
In future, each building, including our homes, will generate its own energy and sell surplus to the grid. Many people have already started doing this, including a neighbor down the street who installed a giant wind turbine in his front yard a couple of years ago. But in the book, Rifkin gives the example (on p. 175) of an African woman who sold one of her animals to buy a small solar panel from which she could charge her cell phone, and power a light bulb or two. This facilitated the minute-scale business she built that improved her family’s lives.
The chapter on distributed capitalism cites examples that are already up and running, such as Linnex, Etsy, Gramen Bank, CSA farming, and Zip Car. The idea of open source and free or micro-payment sharing is coming into play. Centralized distribution of goods is going the way of the Berlin Wall. Brick-and-mortar has had to move to etail too, to survive. Now sellers can sell directly to their customers with only a website as a middle man. If a culture of trust can be cemented, sharing can go even more local with such activities as car sharing (I could rent out my car to my neighbors, for instance) and already exists in the phenomenon of couch surfing.
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Rifkin is a true bleeding-heart rose-colored-glasses-wearing liberal who bases his theory of civil society on the empathetic nature of human beings. He says people seek community for the good of the whole. I’m not sure I see that, but rather feel that people will operate as a community, collaborate, for their own survival, as now they share for their own benefit or self-advancement. I’m not sure I agree with him that humans are such great beings, but I buy his paradigm of the Third Industrial Revolution because I can see it already getting underway. My consciousness is changing along with the community of which I’m a part, and I want to embrace the coming way of using energy, working, and sharing goods and services on my small scale. Like the Smart Car commercial says, instead of “BIG BIG BIG,” I want “small.” And local, like from here in my little house.
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Here are my notes:
P. 130 - Seeing the Big Picture
P. 178 - UAE’s Masdar, post carbon city
P. 183 - Pacific NW’s PNWER
P. 210 and 224 - “Biomimicry”
P. 216 - intellectual property in a lateral world
P. 217 - a fossil fuel economy in the hands of a few giant corporations will seem odd to youth of 2050
P. 218 - Financial Capital Versus Social Capital
P. 219 - “sharing is to ownership...”
P. 221 - The Dream of Quality of Life
P. 224 - “A new scientific worldview...”
P. 225 - “efficiency needs to make room for sustainability...”
P. 233 - The Most Outdated Institution in the World
P. 235 - Biosphere Consciousness
P. 251 - what is “awesome”?
P. 253 - “How can we expect present and future generations to attend to the long-term stewardship of the biosphere, which requires focused attention and patience stretched out over lifetimes of commitment, when they are so easily distracted from moment to moment by a blur of signals, images, and data screaming out for their immediate attention.” (Reminded me of Super Sad True Love Story)
P. 265 - Rethinking Work
P. 266 - “While the civil society...”
P. 267-268 - “Many of the brightest young people around the planet are eschewing traditional employment in the marketplace and government in favor of working in the not-for-profit third sector. The reason is that the distributed and collaborative nature of the third sector makes it a more attractive alternative for a generation that has grown up on the Internet and engaged in similar distributed and collaborative social spaces.... And like the Internet, the core assumption is civil society is that giving oneself to the larger networked community optimizes the value of the group as well as its individual members.”
P. 268 - “Just as the industrial revolutions...”
Labels: access v. ownership, book review, culture, dystopia
// posted by Janiasea @ 11:16 AM 
