What is the “zero marginal cost society?”
A sustainable and prosperous society enabled by technology innovation.
We were deeply inspired by The Zero Marginal Cost Society, the book by Jeremy Rifkin. His remarks on the demise of capitalism are a bit bold, but this book is exceedingly interesting in terms of offering constructive advice about how we can create a sustainable and happy society through future applications of existing technology. (We are not interested in partaking in approaches that would eschew technology and civilization in an escape to something else, obviously.)
Some readers may be familiar with the term “marginal cost,” as it is used by producers when evaluating their performance.
For example, suppose you convened several planners and engineers and prepared a server in order to launch a web site. You initially must shoulder all of those costs, but your second service could later be deployed on the same server, and your third service could reuse parts of your past plan or products your engineers developed. As you pool production methods in this way, you gradually grill down to the minimum required cost to produce a web site. This is the marginal cost.
Rifkin states that the closer this marginal cost reaches zero, the less we would have to rely on mass production by specific producers; instead, we would go beyond the confines of “companies” or “teams,” pooling or exchanging production methods to achieve synergy and create a society which minimizes marginal cost. The result would be a sustainable future and the maximization of efficiency.
We believe that the future we can achieve through reindeer will lead to this. Allowing production to remain a black box operated by a select few would keep marginal costs high and enable only certain producers to monopolize profits; meanwhile, resources would be consumed and put to waste. That is why we want to use cloud design to visualize the process of building architecture for online services.
Today, online services are indispensable to allowing us to lead richer lives.
We believe this project would drive healthy sharing and exchange of means of production, fostering a zero marginal cost society.
reindeer: from Japan, the world’s first cloud design platform
If you take an interest in the project, we invite you to subscribe to our mailing list or contact us via social media!
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/Hxd2OhLhColSfF-oRB8Thw
Twitter: https://twitter.com/reindeer_press
References:
Jeremy Rifkin (2014). The zero marginal cost society. St Martins Pr
