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Rifkin's query comes at the end of an hourlong stump speech he has made dozens of times this past year to governments and corporate audiences from Peoria to Paris. Each time, he aims to plant seeds of skepticism about the wonders of the Internet. He hopes to raise questions about what he considers the potential evils of the personal-data gathering and customized advertising and marketing the Internet makes possible. SPURRING DEBATE. Rifkin, 55, is the founder and president of the nonprofit consumer group Foundation for Economic Trends in Washington, D.C. His performance is part-Jimmy Swaggart, part-Phil Donahue -- and in no small way an infomercial for his 15th and latest book, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience (JP Tarcher; March, 2000). In the book, and on the lecture circuit these days, Rifkin's mission is to spur public debate over technology and its impact on society. His message: Scientists and Internet engineers have created an atmosphere that imposes new technologies on society without considering their broader implications. By "paid for," he means, for instance, that people sacrifice their privacy when Net marketers gather dossiers about them. And they lose out again when those same marketers "personalize" their experiences on the Web by serving them up products and services tailored to their consumer profiles. His goal: to help spawn consumer protections and limits on marketers. "Right now," he says, "marketers are beginning to get to know you personally enough to be able to anticipate your day-to-day needs. They are getting very close to being able to sell you customized products and services and even cultural experiences -- everything from insurance policies that take into account your daughter's three recent fender benders to toothpaste that is sensitive to your recent slew of cavities." "ELECTRONIC DOSSIERS." In his Age of Access, Rifkin says, "marketers will shift from selling you widgets to becoming trusted advisers. They will no longer try to sell a single product to as many customers as possible but will, instead, try to sell a single customer as many products as possible, over a long period of time, over multiple product lines, based on the detailed electronic dossiers they've been able to amass on each individual consumer using digital technology." He tells those assembled in Minneapolis: "It's your job as lawmakers to put more control over information in the hands of consumers and to ask questions of commercial interests as we build the new networked economy of the future." Chiefly, Rifkin is pushing for two forms of action -- both designed to avert a concentration of power over the information that will flow through the massive information networks of the future. First, he says, he wants lawmakers to revisit antitrust laws. Currently, he says, these laws are designed to protect consumers from the aggregation of economic power in the hands of corporations. "BAD NETWORKS." "But these antitrust statutes won't protect consumers in the networked markets of the future," he says. Rather, new laws are needed to discourage the creation of what Rifkin calls "bad networks," which corporations use to gather information and horde it for their own purposes, rather than share it with others for the common good. Secondly, and perhaps most important, Rifkin says, he will begin a large-scale push to oppose the sale of the last pieces of public radio and broadcast spectrum to private interests. "Whoever controls the information pipeline will be able to dictate what consumers can have, whether it's privacy or other protections," Rifkin says. "The public needs to hold on to some ownership, or they will have no control over information, ceding it, instead, completely to corporations." Rifkin says he intends to bring up some of these issues at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. There, Rifkin is scheduled to participate in several panels, including one on biotechnology and another on the challenges of the Information Age economy. THE EUROPEAN CIRCUIT. So far, his exhortations have elicited little response in the U.S. Rifkin seems to be making more headway in Europe, where, in recent months, full-scale debate about how to balance New Economy corporations, e-commerce, and the social interests of European citizens is in full swing among intellectuals and government leaders. In fact, he has been spending so much time on the lecture circuit in France, Britain, and Italy that he recently rented an apartment in Paris to avoid what he calls the "ravages of frequent cross-Atlantic travel." He also has found gold across the Atlantic: Age of Access is the No. 1 best-seller in Italy and No. 3 in Germany, even though it failed to make national best-seller lists in the U.S. And the two other books that complete Rifkin's technology trilogy, The End of Work (JP Tarcher; 1995) and The Biotech Century (JP Tarcher; 1999) are enjoying renewed popularity. Next month, on a hectic schedule of European appointments, Rifkin will meet with the leadership of the French Parliament. His ideas have had an impact in Europe in the past. The End of Work warned that the Internet would eliminate many traditional jobs and pushed for a 35-hour workweek, which is now French law. And Italy's Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema, dedicated most of an hourlong press conference to The Biotech Century -- about the dangers gene-splicing poses to the environment -- when it came out in Italy last year. "OUR JEREMIAH." Rifkin has fans in the U.S., too. Gary Chapman, director of the 21st Century project at the University of Texas at Austin, which studies the social impact of technology, calls Rifkin "our Jeremiah, possibly our Cassandra, who is unique, iconoclastic, insightful, angry, dogged, and in the end, hopeful and romantic about what the future of technology will spawn. We'd be poorer without him." But his critics are as passionate as his supporters. To some e-commerce heavyweights, Rifkin is a Luddite, whose opposition to DNA research, and now the Net, is based on skewed science and misplaced mystical zeal. "First he predicted that the Net would eliminate the middleman. But instead, there are more middlemen rising up as a result of the Net than the number displaced," says Paul Saffo, the director of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., a think tank that studies technology trends. But even Saffo accords Rifkin some grudging respect." Jeremy is usually wrong in very provocative ways. Jeremy paints things in sharper contrast to mobilize people into action." JUST TECHNICIANS. Rifkin is undaunted by the critics. To him, their jabs are merely evidence that he's on the right track. "My job," he said in a recent interview, "is to point out some of the problems that might arise in new technologies. Scientists, computer and software engineers are not Gods -- they're just technicians. They're just human beings, with all the good and bad intentions of everyone else. If you criticize them at all, you're stopping the drive to Utopia. But there has to be both sides." Rifkin wasn't always a rabble-rouser. He grew up on Chicago's southwest side, the son of a plastic-bag manufacturer, and was, he says, "more interested in having a good time than anything else." In the late 1960s, while a student at the Wharton School, Rifkin was famous locally for being both party animal and class president. He got his start as a professional protester one day in 1966, after he walked past a group of students picketing the administration building and was amazed to see, as he recalls, that "my frat friends were beating the living daylights out of them. I got very upset." He organized a freedom-of-speech rally the next day. From then on, Rifkin quickly became an active member of the peace movement. AGITATING. Later, as a graduate student at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy outside Boston, he continued his antiwar activities. He avoided the Vietnam War by volunteering for active service in Vista and "saw action," he says, in New York's Brooklyn and East Harlem ghettos while offering his services as a tutor and agitating for civil rights. In 1975, his first of 15 books, Common Sense II, popularized the idea that workers and communities should have a vote in decisions, such as plant closings, that affect their lives. Two years later, Rifkin and fellow activist Ted Howard launched the Foundation for Economic Trends and have been railing about the need to assess the social impact of technology ever since. During a recent interview in his Washington office, a modest suite just off the lobbyists' K Street corridor about a mile from the Capitol, Rifkin emphasized the need to sound alarms about the overcommercialization of culture that the Internet, he says, is "putting into hyperdrive." DESIGNER-LABEL CULTURE. In a nutshell, Rifkin says, people's chief economic activity will be buying access to real or virtual cultural experiences, signaling a hollowing out of society and of the human spirit. "Consider designer labels. When someone buys a Zegna shirt, a Bill Blass lamp, or an Eddie Bauer customized car, he or she is purchasing access to a lifestyle, an image of a way of life he or she would like to have and experience," Rifkin says. With the Web, he worries, designer-label culture will spread even more widely, and people will be bombarded daily with empty come-ons that are hard, ultimately, to resist. While his ideas may be a bit abstract, and he may seem at times to be tilting at windmills, Rifkin is no Don Quixote, supporters say. He took on biotech and genetic engineering and has had an impact. When it comes to the Net, he's just getting started. Stepanek covers info tech strategies and Net culture for Business Week in New York |
