The new company zero marginal cost.
The Internet of Things. The emergence of collaborative communities and the eclipse of capitalism - Jeremy Rifkin - Edition Les liens qui libèrent - Sept 2014 - 512 Pages

The rules of the global economic game are changing. Capitalism is dying and a new paradigm that is going to shake everything up is taking hold: collaborative communities.

Capitalism will give way to an economy of exchange and sharing.

In this book, the American essayist predicts a paradigm shift in our time. The shift from the verticality of the coal-oil era to the horizontality of the internet era that could lead us to a greener, more sustainable and more democratic world.

It is a new collaborative economy that is developing where the use value takes precedence over property, already well established with car-sharing, crowfunding, A.M.A.P., couchsurfing, contributory producers of green energy or even objects with 3D printers offer a space where billions of people are engaged in the deeply social aspects of life. A space made up of millions (in the literal sense of the word) of self-managed organizations that create the social capital of society. What makes them more relevant today than at any other time is that the development of the Internet of Things optimizes as never before the values and principles that animate this form of institutionalized self-management.

Without us even being aware of it, the Internet of Things is already omnipresent in our daily lives. It is materialized by these billions of sensors placed on natural resources, production lines, implanted in homes, offices and even human beings, feeding Big Data to an integrated global network, a sort of planetary nervous system.

At the same time, capitalism, undermined by its internal logic of extreme productivity, makes the marginal cost, which is the cost of producing an additional unit of a good or service, almost zero. If producing each of these additional units costs nothing, the product thus becomes almost free and profit, the sap that sustains capitalism, dries up. With the emergence of a vast class of "prossomators-consumers" who have become contributing producers, Jeremy Rifkin sees the first signs that the capitalist era of abundance in which we live is coming to an end...

Of course, nothing's settled. Capitalism is trying to stifle the communals by multiplying new barriers by patenting everything from living things to the manipulation of atoms. Climate change is threatening. This book is also a call for individual and collective action.

After The End of Work, The Age of Access or The Third Industrial Revolution, the American essayist continues his reflection on the paradigm shift of our time, and shows here the strength and coherence of his thinking and draws this new collaborative paradigm that will lead to an intelligent and sustainable society ...

- Read Jeremy Rifkin's interview in Les Inrocks