Ruby Irene Pratka: Call it “An Inconvenient Truth” for the market economy. In “The Third Industrial Revolution,” American economic and social theorist, business school professor, and policy adviser Jeremy Rifkin lays out a bleak vision of a near-future world devastated by climate change, mass extinctions, slow economic growth, and rising levels of extremism and inequality. “This is no longer imminent; it’s at the door and in the house,” Rifkin says, giving a lecture to an audience of several dozen people at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, New York, before launching into a Q&A session. “If it were fully explained, our human family would be terrified.”

Over the course of the filmed lecture, Rifkin charts a course out of the quagmire. For Rifkin, creating a more sustainable world within the next two generations is necessary for humankind’s continued survival. This sustainable world, he says, will depend on increasing interconnectedness between people, places, and objects. Youth engagement, the Internet of things, renewable energy, and the sharing economy will play pivotal roles. Together, they will create a network of data hubs in buildings and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, generating data that can be mined by app developers to create useful, shared tools. The end result, Rifkin says, will be a “distributed nervous system that will allow everyone on the planet at low cost to engage directly with each other.”

This model “works best when it’s collaborative and open, and more and more people join the network and contribute our talent,” he says, referring to already-existing examples of open-source knowledge-sharing networks, such as Wikipedia and Massive Open Online Courses. Widening the network would open the door for a “vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism,” he says. “You already spend part of your day in the market economy, and part of it in the sharing economy with car sharing and Wikipedia.” The sharing economy, he says, “as murky as it is now, is the first real new economic system since capitalism and socialism… I don’t think capitalism will disappear, but it will find value by developing a relationship with the sharing economy.”

He posits that the shift in perspective created by the sharing economy — from a focus on owning property to a focus on accessing goods, services, and experiences — will lead to a renewed awareness of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and a more sustained response to the troubles the planet is facing.

“We have one generation to lay down biosphere consciousness,” Rifkin says. “No other generation has had this weight, one generation called upon to save the species. We need to join together in the virtual and physical world to make this happen.”

Fittingly, the feature-length documentary itself, distributed by Vice Media, has been made available for free on YouTube. Watch it here.

Header image is a screenshot from the film

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the 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything

Regarding the question in the title above, my own proposal would be to place this in 1993, the date of the invention of the browser for the world wide web, because it made the massive interconnection of minds possible from that moments onwards (the decade before it was reserved for the scientific elite). I believe it makes sense to divide the network era into an era in which computers were either unconnected, or only connected by the elite, which used it to create the basis of the neoliberal re-organization of our global economic system. However, if we take a non-technocratic view, we could argue that the capabilities of universal interconnectedness and global cooperation had their cultural roots in the great cultural revolution that took place in 1968, and the birth of post-capitalist values in the cultural sphere. Why does this matter? Because some historians, like Elisabeth Eisenstein in her history of the effects of the printing press on European society, argue that it takes four generations for such a full societal change to play out. So it matters when we begin counting!

Kevin Kelly‘s hypothesis however, which is focused on the full technical capability to interconnect all things, starts his calculation more or less in 1996, the date of birth of the commercial internet, while I would place it at the birth of the civic internet.

Here is what he writes:

“If digital innovations, millions of apps, the vast social networks that are being woven are increasing our living standards where is the evidence in the GDP?

I think the key sentence in (Robert) Gordon’s paper is this:

“Both the first two revolutions required about 100 years for their full effects to percolate through the economy.”

Repeat: it took a century for the full benefits of the innovations to show up.

By my calculation we are into year 20 of this 3rd upheaval. Gordon wants to start the clock on the 3rd Industrial Revolution in 1960 at the start of commercial computers. That’s an arbitrary starting point; I would arbitrarily start it at the dawn of the commercial internet because I don’t think unconnected computers by themselves are revolutionary. Unconnected computers did not change much. Standalone personal computers hardly changed our lives at all. They sped up typing, altered publishing, and changed spreadsheet modeling forever, but these were minor blips in the economy and well-being of most people. Big mainframe computers helped the largest corporations manage financial assets or logistics, but a number of studies have shown that they did not elevate much growth.

Everything changed, however, when computers married the telephone. This is when ordinary people noticed computers. They could get online. Everything went online. Retail changed, production changed, occupations changed. This communication revolution accelerated change elsewhere. Processes and gizmos got smarter because they were connected. Now the advantages of personal computers made sense because in fact they were just local terminals in something bigger: the network. As the Sun Computer company famously put it: the network is the computer.

So the 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. And in that regime we are just at the beginning of the beginning. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full affect of this revolution to be revealed.

In the year 2095 when economic grad students are asked to review this paper of Robert Gordon and write about why he was wrong back in 2012, they will say things like “Gordon missed the impact from the real inventions of this revolution: big data, ubiquitous mobile, quantified self, cheap AI, and personal work robots. All of these were far more consequential than stand alone computation, and yet all of them were embryonic and visible when he wrote his paper. He was looking backwards instead of forward.”

Photo by Emilio_13

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