Imagine a world where you are never able to buy property or goods, where virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family is a paid-for experience, and the majority of the earth's population are permanently excluded from technology such as computers and telephones.
This is the chilling picture of life in the year 2050 that futurist and best-selling author, Jeremy Rifkin, outlined on a visit to Europe this week to promote his new book The Age of Access.
Mr Rifkin, the man who coined the phrase "Frankenstein food" to alert people to the dangers of GM food, has turned his attention to the impact of technology on global capitalism in his latest offering.
"The new Web-based technologies such as e-commerce and business-to-business transactions are creating a new economic system very different to global capitalism," says Mr Rifkin.
Technological innovations spawned by the Internet and its network-based transaction model are comparable to the huge shifts brought about during the Middle Ages, when capitalism and the concept of private property replaced the feudal order, says Mr Rifkin. "Because of the nature of the new technology, a traditional market with the buying and selling of goods is too slow," says Mr Rifkin. In the new era, services are leased to users through licensing agreements and people pay for experiences rather than owning products, he says.
Napster, Microsoft.Net and a subscription strategy recently announced by EMI/Sony that gives users 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week access to music are the first examples of this changing economic model, says Mr Rifkin.
These types of network arrangements will tie consumers to corporations, making it more difficult for them to switch to competing products. "Ford in Italy for example has a renewal rate of 54 per cent on its leased cars compared to 25 per cent for cars bought in the open market," says Mr Rifkin.
This will have far-reaching consequences for antitrust law. Mr Rifkin is currently part of a group taking a private antitrust action against Monsanto. He believes the legal concept of antitrust will have to change to adapt to increasing globalisation.
"Monsanto is an example of a bad network. When it provides a seed to a farmer it doesn't want to sell it but rather lease access to the seed's DNA for a time period," he claims. "This will keep the farmer beholden to the company."
And it is the poor areas of the world that will suffer most in the new economy, says Mr Rifkin. "At the moment 62 per cent of the world's population have not made a phone call and we can't be naive to think this will change in the next 50 years."
It is not all bad news though. The environment will benefit because companies that traditionally aimed to sell large quantities of goods to maximise revenue, will now, through leasing arrangements and a network, seek to maximise efficiency.
But the potential negative consequences for human psychology, society and the cultural sphere are huge, according to Mr Rifkin.
"What happens when you wake up one day and almost every activity you engage in must be paid for, and you are enmeshed in one global network and culture becomes commoditised? Can society survive?"
