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The Public Should Know That The Liability Issues Here Have Yet To Be Resolved, Or Even Raised. If You're A Farmer And You're Growing A Genetically Engineering Food Crop, Those Genes Are Going To Flow To The Other Farm.

-Jeremy Rifkin

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The Public Should Know

Jeremy Rifkin

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The Public Should Know That The Liability Issues Here Have Yet To Be Resolved, Or Even Raised. If You're A Farmer And You're Growing A Genetically Engineering Food Crop, Those Genes Are Going To Flow To The Other Farm.

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The 10 Largest Antitrust Law Firms In The United States Have Gone Into The Federal Courts Charging Monsanto With Creating A Global Conspiracy In Violation Of The Antitrust Laws, To Control The Global Market In Seeds.

The Greenhouse Crisis Is The Bill Coming Due For The Industrial Revolution. It's Not An Accident. It's The Logical Outcome Of Our World View - The Idea That We Can Control The Forces Of Nature, That We Can Have Short-term Expedient Gains Without Paying For Them, That There Are No Limits To Exploitation Of The Environment, That We Can Produce And Consume Faster Than Nature's Ability To Replenish.

How Do We Address Network Neutrality When The Whole World Is Connected? How Do We Ensure Governments Don't Purloin This For Political Purposes? It's Already Happening. Look At Russia On The American Election. How Do We Protect Data Security When Everyone's Connected? Look What Happened With The Ransomware. How Do We Deal With Cybercrime And Cyberterrorism And The Disruptions Of The System? And We're Seeing This Every Week Now.

We Are Learning That The Earth Functions Like An Invisible Organism. We Are The Various Cells Of One Living Being. Those Who Work To Save The Earth Are Its Antibodies.

With The Communication Internet, Whole Industries Have Been Disrupted. You're In The Publishing Industry, You Understand That. Before, We Had Newspapers, Magazines - Now You're On The Web. I'm In Book Publishing. I Don't Have To Tell You What's Happened To Us. Television Has Taken A Hit. The Music Industry. But, Thousands Of New Businesses Have Emerged On This New Communication Revolution Platform. Not Just Google, Facebook, And Twitter. There Are Thousands Of Operations. Businesses That Are Doing The Platforms, The Apps. They're Mining The Big Data. They're Creating The Connections.

The World's Environment Can No Longer Handle Beef.

If I Were Mark Zuckerberg Or Any Of These Guys, I Would Say, "my God. How Does The World Expect Us To Deal With This?" I Mean, It's Too Big A Responsibility; I Think They're Going To Welcome This. They'll Maybe Keep It In The Private Sector, But They'll Welcome Some Form Of Regulatory Operation Because They've Been So Successful That They Are A Global, Public Good. Everyone Needs Them.

Humanity Cannot Afford To Acknowledge All Of The Blood That It Spills And The Destruction It Inflicts On The World In Its Effort To Perpetuate Itself. Desacralization Is A Process That Allows Us To Sever Any Relationship We Might Feel To Other Living Things. By Draining The Aliveness Out Of Things, We Can Pretend That Our Control And Manipulation Are Of Little Consequence. Man The Trapper Becomes Man The Taxidermist, Disemboweling Nature Of Its Spontaneity And Movement, And Stuffing It With A Leaden Inanimateness.

What I'm Suggesting To You Is That This Could Be A Renaissance. We May Be On The Cusp Of A Future Which Could Provide A Tremendous Leap Forward For Humanity.

Back In The Mid-1980s, Congressional Hearings Were Held After We Brought This Litigation, And Held Up The First Experiment. At That Time, I Went In Front Of Congress, Along With The Major Agencies Involved With This.

I Think Capitalism Will Not Disappear, But It's Going To Increasingly Not Be The Exclusive Arbiter Of Economic Life. It's Going To Have To Find Value In Interacting With The Sharing Economy On Many Levels. And This Hybrid System That's Already Emerging Among Millennials Is Going To Be A Mature System Where, By Midcentury, Part Of The Day Will Be In The Capitalist Market, Part Of The Day In The Sharing Economy, Depending On Your Marginal Costs.

Companies That Actually Survive And Flourish Are Going To Change Their Business Model From Production To Aggregating The Networks And The Network Services And Solutions. If You're A Construction Company Or An It Company Or A Logistics Company Or An Information Data Operation, To The Extent That You Can Find Ways To Help Build The Commons, You Can Get Some Commercial Value In That.

President Obama, I Voted For Him. I Think He's A Mature Politician, But Here's What Happened. Obama Wanted A Green Economy. He Spent Billions Of Dollars Of Tax Money To Create A Green Economy And It Didn't Happen. The Question Is Why.

Deep Play Precedes Deep Work.

I Wanted To Make Sure That This Be The First Scientific And Technology Revolution In History In Which The Public Thoroughly Discussed All The Potential Benefits And All The Potential Harms, In Advance Of The Technology Coming Online And Running Its Course.

The Eu Constitution Is Something New In Human History. Though It Is Not As Eloquent As The French And U.s. Constitutions, It Is The First Governing Document Of Its Kind To Expand The Human Franchise To The Level Of Global Consciousness. The Language Throughout The Draft Constitution Speaks Of Universalism, Making It Clear That Its Focus Is Not A People, Or A Territory, Or A Nation, But Rather The Human Race And The Planet We Inhabit.

Facebook's A Wonderful, Incredible Way To Bring Humanity Together. They've Brought Together 2 Billion People In The Largest Fictional Family In History. So Young People Are Starting To Empathize With Each Other Through Facebook Across The Globe. This Is Wonderful. However, When Everyone Needs Facebook Because It's So Successful That Everyone's On It, Then It Starts To Look Like A Global Public Utility, A Public Good. Same With Amazon.

We Were Making The First Step Out Of The Age Of Chemistry And Physics, And Into The Age Of Biology.

Europe Will Not Accept Genetically Modified Foods. It Doesn't Make Any Difference In The Final Analysis What Brussels Does, What Washington Does, Or What The World Trade Organization Does.

The American Public Is Not Aware That There Might Be Potential Allergenic And Toxic Reactions. With Regular Food, At Least People Know Which Foods They Have An Allergy To.

Cosmologies Are Made Up Of Small Snippets Of Physical Reality That Have Been Remodeled By Society Into Vast Cosmic Deceptions.

James Watt Patented His Steam Engine On The Eve Of The American Revolution, Consummating A Relationship Between Coal And The New Promethean Spirit Of The Age, And Humanity Made Its First Tentative Steps Into An Industrial Way Of Life That Would, Over The Next Two Centuries, Forever Change The World.

The Transition Of World Agriculture From Food Grain To Feed Grains Represents An...evil Whose Consequences May Be Far Greater And Longer Lasting Than Any Past Examples Of Violence Inflicted By Men Against Thier Fellow Human Beings.

We Now Have An Opportunity, Though, To Do Something We Didn't Do In The Industrial Age, And That Is To Get A Leg Up On This, To Bring The Public In Quickly, To Have An Informed Debate.

We Have Come To Discover What We Suspect Is A New Political Mindset Emerging Among A Younger Generation Of Political Leaders Socialized On Internet Communications. Their Politics Are Less About Right Versus Left And More About Centralized And Authoritarian Versus Distributed And Collaborative.

We Need A Game Plan To Deploy It Very Quickly To Both Move The Economy Forward And Create The New Businesses And Jobs, And Address Climate Change. It's A Pretty Big Task. Pretty Challenging.

Today We Are Raised With The Notion That To Be Secure Is To Be Financially Autonomous. Amassing Wealth Is Viewed As The Primary Rite Of Passage To A Secure, Autonomous Existence.

A Half Century From Now, Our Grandchildren Are Likely To Look Back At The Era Of Mass Employment In The Market With The Same Sense Of Utter Disbelief As We Look Upon Slavery And Serfdom In Former Times. The Very Idea That A Human Being's Worth Was Measured Almost Exclusively By His Or Her Productive Output Of Goods And Services And Material Wealth Will Seem Primitive, Even Barbaric, And Be Regarded As A Terrible Loss Of Human Value To Our Progeny Living In A Highly Automated World Where Much Of Life Is Lived On The Collaborative Commons.

We're Finally Going To Get The Bill For The Industrial Age. If The Projections Are Right, It's Going To Be A Big One: The Ecological Collapse Of The Planet.

One Thing I've Learned Over These Last 30 Or 40 Years Is That People Make History. There's No Fait Accompli To Any Of This.

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Wikipedia Is An Amazing Construct. It's A Commons That Works. I Don't Know How Jimmy Wales Came Up With It. I'm Sure All Of Us Would Have Said, "this Is The Stupidest Thing We've Ever Heard Of. That'll Never Work In A Million Years."

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We Need A Change In Consciousness To Go With This Technology Platform. We Need A New Narrative: We Need To Shift From Geopolitics To Biosphere Consciousness In One Generation. The Biosphere Is Understood Here As What Goes From The Biosphere To The Depths Of The Ocean 40 Miles Where All Living Beings Interact With All Chemicals To Create A Very Complex Choreography That We Call "life On Earth". That Is Biosphere That Is Our Indivisible Community.

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So My Attorneys Brought Litigation In The U.s. Federal Courts. The Judge Ruled In Our Favor.

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The Prospect Of Cheap Fusion Energy Is The Worst Thing That Could Happen To The Planet.

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Being Both Entrepreneurial And Social Is No Longer An Oxymoron, But Rather A Tautology.

Entrepreneurial

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We Are Already Producing Enough Food To Feed The World. We Already Have Technology In Place That Allows Us To Produce More Than We Can Find A Market For.

We Are Entering A New Phase In Human History - One In Which Fewer And Fewer Workers Will Be Needed To Produce The Goods And Services For The Global Population.

They're Now Turning Those Seeds Into Intellectual Property, So They Have A Virtual Lock On The Seeds Upon Which We All Depend For Our Food And Survival.

The Electronic Media Introduced This Idea To The Larger Audience Very, Very Quickly. We Spent Years And Years And Years Meeting With Activists All Over Europe To Lay The Groundwork For A Political Response, As We Did Here.

Generations Of Human Beings Were Transformed Into Machines In The Relentless Pursuit Of Material Wealth: We Lived To Work.

Can We Reach Biosphere Consciousness And Global Empathy In Time To Avert Planetary Collapse?

Economic Activity Is No Longer An Adversarial Contest Between Embattled Sellers And Buyers "in The Distributed Economy, Where Collaboration Trumps Competition, Inclusivity Replaces Exclusivity And Transparency And Openness To Others Becomes Essential To The New Way Of Conducting Business, Empathic Sensibility Has Room To Breathe And Thrive. It Is No Longer So Constrained By Hierarchies, Boundaries Of Exclusion, And A Concept Of Human Nature That Places Acquisitiveness, Self-interest, And Utility At The Center Of The Human Experience."

Basic Income Is Not A Utopia, It's A Practical Business Plan For The Next Step Of The Human Journey.

The Public Should Know That The Liability Issues Here Have Yet To Be Resolved, Or Even Raised. If You're A Farmer And You're Growing A Genetically Engineering Food Crop, Those Genes Are Going To Flow To The Other Farm.

A Refuge Is Supposed To Prevent What? The Genes From Flowing Out Of Sight? This Refuge Idea Won't Stop Insects From Moving Across Boundaries. That's Absurd.

It Seems Disingenuous For The Intellectual Elite Of The First World To Dwell On The Subject Of Too Many Babies Being Born In The Second- And Third-world Nations While Virtually Ignoring The Over-population Of Cattle And The Realities Of A Food Chain That Robs The Poor Of Sustenance To Feed The Rich A Steady Diet Of Grain-fed Meat.

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