The New Culture of HyperCapitalism - Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience.
There is an disturbing trend away from property ownership and free public life to their opposites. Some of us aren't fully immersed yet in the sea of leased products and packaged experiences. Still, the eerie vision of a world of gatekeepers paying each other for access to nearly every aspect of human life brings a chilling new meaning to the phrase "pay to play" and should spark some debate over our new cultural revolution.
As examples from business and government experiments with just-in-time access to goods and services and resource sharing show, a new society of renters who are too busy breaking the shackles of material possessions to mourn the passing of public property. Are we encouraging alienation or participation? Can we trust corporations with stewardship of our social lives? If property is theft, leased access is extortion, we should warned of the complex changes coming in our relationships with our homes, our communities, and our world.
HyperCapitalism is everywhere: outsourcing, theme parks, virtual reality games, automobile leasing, etc. The vision of corporate capitalism dematerializing into webs of access of networks of 'virtual' power is startling and compelling.
Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a "paid-for" experience. It's all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business. After several hundred years as the dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from any we have known. Virtually every activity human beings engage in is no longer merely experiential, but a service which is paid for, in business in and in daily life.
The Age Of Access - Jeremy Rifkin
http://tinyurl.com/HyperCapitalism
The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of human time and experience. In the future, we will purchase enlightenment and play, grooming and grace, and everything in between. Will any time be left for relationships of a noncommercial nature? When the culture itself is absorbed into the economy, only commercial bonds will be left to hold society together. Can civilization survive when only the commercial sphere remains as the primary arbiter of human life.
Sprawling from Grace: The Consequences of Suburbanization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPS1y81b1Bw
