Postmodern Theory and Internet George Ritzer

distributed at their marginal cost of production—zero—they cannot be created 

and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales 

to consumers to cover their [fixed set-up] costs … [companies] must be able to 

anticipate selling their products at a profit to someone.”

Summers and DeLong opposed government subsidies to cover up-front costs, 

arguing that they destroy the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead they supported 

short-term monopolies to ensure profits, declaring that this is “the reward 

needed to spur private enterprise to engage in such innovation”. They realised 

the trap this put them in, recognising that “natural monopoly does not meet the 

most basic condition for economic efficiency: that price equal marginal cost” 

but nonetheless concluded that in the new economic era, this might be the only 

practical way to proceed.

The pair had come up against the catch-22 of capitalism that was already 

freeing a growing amount of economic activity from the market, and threw  

up their hands, favouring monopolies to artificially keep prices above marginal 

cost, thwarting the ultimate triumph of the invisible hand. This final victory,  

if allowed, would signal not only capitalism’s greatest accomplishment but also 

its death knell.

While the notion of near-zero marginal cost raised a small flurry of attention 12 

years ago, as its effects began to be felt in the music and entertainment industry 

and newspaper and publishing fields, the consensus was that it would likely be 

restricted to information goods, with limited effects on the rest of the economy. 

This is no longer the case.

Now the zero-marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial 

sectors. The precipitating agent is an emerging general-purpose technology 

platform—the internet of things. The convergence of the communications 

internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics 

internet in a smart, inter-operable internet-of-things system is giving rise to  

a third industrial revolution.

Siemens, IBM, Cisco and General Electric are among the firms erecting an 

internet-of-things infrastructure, connecting the world in a global neural 

network. There are now 11 billion sensors connecting devices to the internet 

of things. By 2030, 100 trillion sensors will be attached to natural resources, 

production lines, warehouses, transportation networks, the electricity grid  

and recycling flows, and be implanted in homes, offices, stores, and vehicles— 

continually sending big data to the communications, energy and logistics 

Capitalism is making way for the age of free ………………………………………………… Jeremy Rifkin

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism-age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift#comments

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internets. Anyone will be able to access the internet of things and use big data  

and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can speed efficiency, 

dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing  

and distributing physical things, including energy, products and services,  

to near zero, just as we now do with information goods.

Summers and DeLong glimpsed that as marginal costs approach zero, “the 

competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate” for organising commercial 

life, but admitted “we do not yet know what the right replacement paradigm 

will be”. Now we know. A new economic paradigm—the collaborative 

commons—has leaped onto the world stage as a powerful challenger to the 

capitalist market.

A growing legion of prosumers is producing and sharing information, not 

only knowledge, news and entertainment, but also renewable energy, 3D 

printed products and online college courses at near-zero marginal cost on the 

collaborative commons. They are even sharing cars, homes, clothes and tools, 

entirely bypassing the conventional capitalist market.

An increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to operate 

at the edges of the new economy, finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit, 

primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to 

flourish as a powerful niche player. But it will no longer reign. Hundreds of 

millions of people are already transferring bits and pieces of their lives from 

capitalist markets to the emerging global collaborative commons, operating on  

a ubiquitous internet-of-things platform. The great economic paradigm shift  

has begun.

Capitalism is making way for the age of free ………………………………………………… Jeremy Rifkin

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism-age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift#comments

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Work and Money 

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger. Work and Money. From Remote Control: Power, Cultures,  

and the World of Appearances. Whether rendered by hand or caught by camera, 

a picture is never opaque. To say that it is, to speak of mysterious evocativeness, 

results in just another promotional mystification. We see an image and we 

start guessing meanings. We can embroider stories or supposed narratives. 

Photography’s ability to replicate, its suggestion of evidence and claim to 

“truth” point to its problematic powers but also suggest a secular art which 

can connect the allowances of anthropology with the intimacies of a cottage 

industry. It is a trace of both action and comment. In my work I try to question 

the seemingly natural appearance of images through the textual commentary 

which accompanies them. This work doesn’t suggest contemplation: it initially 

appears forthright and accessible. Its commentary is both implicit and explicit, 

engaging questions of definition, power, expectation, and sexual difference. 

Some of us, with one or two feet in the “art world”, might think that our 

work is all cut out for us, while others are interested in changing the pattern 

and defining different procedures. Many of us work in areas outside of our art 

production. Whether out of necessity or adventure, we are at the same time 

secretaries, paste-up people, billing clerks, carpenters, and teachers. At times 

our jobs inform our work and vice versa. For instance, teaching, which is a 

collective process within the hierarchies of education and academia, intervenes 

in the production of cultural work. Art schools reproduce artists and, in turn, 

art. It’s all work. And most people work for money. But unlike laborers who sell 

moments of their lives for a short reprieve at the end ( the awaited or dreaded 

retirement), artists buy work time with job money. Of course, whether this 

routine is really necessary depends on the good or bad fortune of your fortune: 

whether you must really work for your money or are merely waiting to inherit 

it. Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the 

tragedies and triumphs of our social lives. It makes art. It determines who we 

fuck and where we do it, what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and 

what kind of shoes we wear. On both an emotional and economic level, images 

can make us rich or poor. I’m interested in work which addresses that power 

and engages both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation. 1981 

Work and Money ……………………………………………………………………………… Barbara Kruger

http://breakingnewts.blogspot.be/2011/09/barbara-kruger.html

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