THE RISE OF THE PROSUMER
Today all these forms of market expansion are reaching their outer limits. Few populations still remain to be brought into the market. Only a handful of the remotest people remain untouched by the market. Even the hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers in poor countries are at least partially integrated into the market and the accompanying money system.
What remains, therefore, is a mopping-up operation at best. The market can no longer expand by engulfing vast new populations.
The second form of expansion is still at least theoretically possible. With imagination, we can still, no doubt, think up additional services or goods to to sell or barter. But it is precisely here that the rise of the prosumer becomes significant. The relationships between Sector A and Sector B are complex, and many of the activities of prosumers depend on the purchase of materials or took from the market. But the rise of self-help, in particular, and the de-marketization of many goods and services suggests that here, too, the end of the process of marketization may be in sight
Lastly, the increasing elaborateness of the “pipeline”—the growing complexity of distribution, the interpolation of more and more middlemen—also appears to be reaching a point of no return. The costs of exchange itself, even as conventionally measured, are now outrunning the costs of material production in many fields. At some point this process reaches a limit. Computers, meanwhile, and the emergence of a pro-sumer-activated technology both point to smaller inventories and simplified, rather than more complex, chains of distribution. Once again, therefore, the evidence points to the end of the process of marketization, if not in our time, then soon after.
If our “pipeline project” is nearing completion, what might (his mean for our work, our values, and our psyches? A market, after all, does not consist of the steel or shoes or cot-Ion or canned food that flows through it. The market is the siructure through which such goods and services are routed. Moreover, it is not simply an economic structure. It is a way of organizing people, a way of thinking, an ethos, and a shared set of expectations (e.g., the expectation that goods purchased will indeed be delivered). The market is thus as much a psychological structure as an economic reality. And its (•fleets far transcend economics.«
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