** DRAFT IN PROGRESS** — This piece is unfinished. I'm working through these ideas in public because I don't have answers, only sharper questions.
What does it mean to work when the product is increasingly your life as content?
I don't mean influencers. I mean the rest of us. The software engineer whose GitHub commits double as a résumé. The consultant whose LinkedIn presence is the practice. The gig worker whose rating history follows them between platforms like a credit score they never asked for. The boundary between living and producing has become gossamer-thin, and we've mostly stopped noticing.
The conversation about the "future of work" wants to be about automation and AI displacement and remote work policies. These are real forces. They're also symptoms of something deeper—a structural mutation in how capitalism extracts value from human beings.
The Access Thesis
In 2000, Jeremy Rifkin published The Age of Access and identified what now looks obvious in retrospect:
"We are shifting from an economy based on the exchange of property as the essential commodity, to an economy based on the short-term access to experiences."
The word "experiences" is doing heavy lifting. It sounds benign—almost pleasant. But Rifkin was describing something colder: the transformation of every human relationship into a renewable subscription.
Consider his observation about car leasing, which in 2000 was already capturing a third of vehicle transactions:
"If Ford sells me a car, then I only have a relationship with Ford at the time the sale is negotiated. But if Ford leases me a car, the company has commodified my time 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."
The transaction model gave way to the relationship model. And with it came a metric that should make your skin crawl: LTV—Lifetime Value of the Customer. Rifkin defines this as "the theoretical measure of how much a human being is worth if every moment of his or her life were to be commodified in one form or another in the commercial sphere."
This is the operating logic of the modern economy. Subscription software. Cloud infrastructure. Platform work. The gig economy. Rent-the-runway. Rent-the-car. Rent-the-scooter. Rent-the-workout. Rent-the-meditation-app-that-will-help-you-cope-with-renting-everything.
We don't buy things anymore. We maintain relationships with the companies that let us use them.
Workers as the Outsourced Factory
Here's where the work implications get uncomfortable.
Rifkin noted that Nike—perceived as a manufacturer—is actually "a research and design studio with a sophisticated marketing formula and distribution mechanism. It owns no factories, machines, equipment or real estate to speak of." Everyone, he observed, wants to be Nike. Nobody wants to be GM.
Twenty-five years later, the Nike model won. And here's what that victory looks like from the labor side: most workers have become the outsourced factories.
The platform companies—Uber, DoorDash, Upwork, Fiverr, the emerging AI agent marketplaces—are design studios. They own the brand, the algorithm, the customer relationship. The workers own nothing. Not the tools (those are rented). Not the customer relationships (those belong to the platform). Not even their own reputations (those are platform-denominated ratings that don't transfer).
This isn't a bug. It's the model working exactly as intended. The access economy requires that access can be revoked. If workers owned their customer relationships, they'd have leverage. The whole point is that they don't.
When Rifkin wrote about the shift to "servers and clients accessing each other's resources," he framed it neutrally. But let's be honest about who accesses whom. The platforms access worker time, labor, and increasingly, their entire waking attention. The workers access... the privilege of being accessed.
The Gatekeeper Problem
Rifkin warned that "whoever controls the gates to cyberspace exercises vast potential control over people's day-to-day lives."
In 2000, he was thinking about AOL and early search engines. Quaint. Today the gatekeepers are vastly more powerful:
Platform algorithms that determine not just who sees your content, but whether your labor is visible at all. One algorithmic tweak at Uber can make the difference between a living wage and poverty. Workers optimize for systems they cannot see, appealing to gods that do not explain themselves.
AI screening systems that decide who gets interviewed, who gets surfaced to recruiters, who gets past the first filter. Résumés are now written for machines first, humans second.
Credential gatekeepers who control access to the networks that control access to work. LinkedIn isn't a professional network; it's a toll booth on the highway to employment.
API providers who determine what independent workers can even build. When OpenAI changes their usage policies or Stripe decides they don't like your business model, there is no appeal. You are a client. Clients don't have rights; they have terms of service.
The age of access means someone controls the access. For workers, this creates a dependency that differs from the old employer-employee relationship in one crucial way: employers were at least visible. They had addresses. They were subject to labor law. Platforms are mist. They're everywhere and nowhere. You work through them but not for them—a distinction that lets them capture the upside of your labor while disclaiming responsibility for your welfare.
What Would Aligned Work Actually Look Like?
Rifkin identified something genuinely hopeful amid the wreckage: gainsharing arrangements where companies co-manage outcomes rather than simply purchasing inputs.
His examples were from healthcare. Baxter Healthcare managing Duke University's surgical supply costs, guaranteeing ceilings, sharing savings. Eli Lilly developing programs to keep patients well—making money by preventing illness rather than treating it. "Instead of profit transactions in a market between seller and buyer," Rifkin noted, "you are sharing the savings in a network between servers and clients."
This is elegant. It's also almost completely absent from the gig economy. Why?
Think about what gainsharing would require for a DoorDash driver: the platform would have to want that driver to succeed. To develop expertise. To build customer relationships. But that's precisely what the platform fears—because an expert driver with customer relationships has leverage. Better to keep drivers interchangeable. Better to ensure that no driver matters.
What would gainsharing look like for a freelance designer? Not hourly billing, not fixed-price projects, but genuine partnership in the client's outcomes. If the brand you design actually moves units, you share the upside. This model exists—it's called equity, and it's reserved for founders and executives. Everyone else gets the hourly rate.
Or consider the emerging world of AI prompt engineers and automation consultants. Right now, they're largely paid for deliverables—"set up this workflow," "fine-tune this model." But the value they create persists. The automation keeps running. The fine-tuned model keeps generating output. A gainsharing model would have them participate in the ongoing value. Instead, they're compensated for initial setup and then severed from the value stream they created.
The pattern is clear: gainsharing is structurally incompatible with the access economy's fundamental logic. The access economy requires that workers remain accessors—perpetually renting their relationship to value creation. Ownership of outcomes would collapse the whole model.
The Commodification of Everything, Including Time to Be Human
The deepest problem isn't any particular business model. It's totality.
"One day we wake up and find that every relationship we have is contractual and commercial, and there is no more room for the rest of our lives. We only have 24 hours in the day. But the entrepreneurial ability to imagine ways of commodifying our time—through memberships, leases, subscriptions, etc.—is unlimited."
Rifkin wrote this in 2000. Before smartphones. Before social media. Before the notification economy that treats your attention as a resource to be strip-mined.
The access economy isn't just reshaping work. It's eliminating the distinction between work and non-work. Every hour is potentially billable. Every interaction is potentially networking. Every moment of creativity is potentially content. Every opinion is potentially personal brand building. Every meal is potentially photographable. Every experience is potentially monetizable.
Where does work end?
Not at 5pm. Not at the office door. Not even when you sleep—because your sleep tracker is collecting data that your wellness app will use to sell you something.
This is what it means for capitalism to commodify "human time itself." Not just the hours you sell to an employer, but the hours you exist as a data-emitting, content-creating, relationship-maintaining node in an infinite network of commercial relationships.
Culture Precedes Commerce
Here's Rifkin's most important insight, almost throwaway in his original text:
"Economists believe that if you have a strong economy you have a strong culture. That is absolutely wrong. What you realize in cultural anthropology is that culture always precedes commerce. Communities always precede markets."
This inverts everything we're told. The policy conversation assumes: make the economy work better, and people will flourish. Get the incentives right, and good outcomes follow.
But Rifkin is saying something more radical: you can't build community through commerce. You can only commodify communities that already exist. The app doesn't create friendship; it monetizes the loneliness left behind when friendships atomize. The gig platform doesn't create work; it captures and repackages the labor that used to occur within institutions that, whatever their faults, at least acknowledged their workers as more than interchangeable inputs.
What kinds of communities and cultures do we want—and what forms of economic participation would they support?
This question never gets asked. We only ask: what skills do workers need for the economy of the future? As if the economy were a natural phenomenon, like weather. As if we were not, collectively, building it every day.
Where This Is Going
I don't have conclusions because this is an open-ended dialectic, but this should sharpen our critical understanding of the situation.
On generative AI: Rifkin wrote before social media and smartphones. His framework predicted much of what happened. But generative AI isn't just another platform extracting value from human attention. It can produce. It can replace the very labor that the access economy was supposed to intermediate. If AI can do the work, what do the platforms need humans for? Data labeling. Feedback. Training. The human becomes an input to the machine that will replace them. The access economy finds its terminal point: you access the privilege of training your replacement.
On life-as-content: The access economy commodifies experiences. The attention economy commodifies perception. Put them together and you get something that doesn't have a good name yet—an economy where the product is your selfhood, offered up continuously for evaluation. Your LinkedIn presence. Your Twitter takes. Your Instagram aesthetic. Your professional "personal brand," which is to say the part of your person that you've successfully made into a commodity. We are all, perpetually, performing ourselves for an audience that includes algorithms we cannot see, optimizing for metrics we cannot control, building brands in a market that reserves the right to deplatform us without appeal.
On dependency and ownership: Traditional employment was dependency too. But it was dependency within a relationship that both sides acknowledged. The employer needed you; you needed them. The access economy promises freedom from that dependency—you're not an employee, you're an independent contractor! A creator! An entrepreneur!—while creating dependencies that are far more total. You depend on the platform, but the platform does not depend on you. This is not symmetry. This is something new.
On what we owe each other: The access economy's answer is: nothing. You access resources; you owe nothing but payment. But human beings cannot survive on access alone. We need ownership—of our time, our relationships, our work, our selves. Not in the capitalist sense of property rights, but in the human sense of: this is mine, it cannot be taken, it is not for rent.
"It's not a question just of who gains access but rather what types of experiences and worlds of engagement are worth seeking and having access to. The answer to that question will determine the nature of the society we will create for ourselves."
Rifkin ended his book there. It's a beautiful sentence, but it lets us off too easy. It frames the question as one of individual choice—what will you seek access to?
The harder question is structural. The access economy isn't offering us a menu of experiences to choose from. It's reshaping the substrate of choice itself. When every interaction is mediated, measured, monetized—when there is no outside from which to evaluate the options—the question isn't what access we want. The question is what we're becoming by wanting only access.
And whether we can still want something else.
Status: Draft. Incomplete. The critique of the access economy is clearer now than the alternatives. The policy implications remain underdeveloped—deliberately, because I'm suspicious of policy thinking that starts from "how do we make the economy work better" rather than "what kinds of lives are worth living." But that suspicion is itself a dodge. At some point I'll need to stop gesturing at the problem and propose something. Not yet.
Pushback welcome. Collaboration more so.
Further Reading:
- Rifkin, Jeremy. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience. (2000)
- Knowledge at Wharton: "An Excess of Access and Other Dangers of 'Hypercapitalism'"