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Narrator: Children aren’t the only ones whose lives are over-programmed. Commentator Jeremy Rifkin says our whole society is being pushed to be more and more efficient.
Rifkin:
It used to be that efficiency was more of a metaphysical word and referred to divinely inspired acts. In the late 19th century, efficiency was reinvented as a machine time value, a way of measuring energy flows. Now we define efficiency as maximizing outputs in a minimum time.
Fact: We are creating every kind of efficient technology imaginable, to secure more valuable time for ourselves in this new e-commerce society.
Fact: It's not working. We feel like we have far less time available to us than any other humans in history. That’s because the great proliferation of labor and time saving technologies and services only increases the diversity, pace and flow of activity around us. No wonder we’re all increasingly time deprived.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Machine time has eclipsed human time. The turning point came when we introduced the nano-second. We find ourselves increasingly dependant on a time measurement that lies far below the realm of perception. No wonder we’re stressed out. Does anyone really believe they’re going to catch up in this 24/7 world, operating at warp speed? Perhaps we need to reassess our long-standing relationship with efficiency and ask:
Are there other more elegant and sustainable ways to organize our time in the future?
What comes after hyper-efficiency?
How about sufficiency? Instead of trying to produce more and more, in less and less time, why not produce just what we need to sustain our relationships over an extended period of time?
Interestingly, sufficiency is beginning to challenge efficiency in a growing number of businesses.
Here’s how it works: Carrier, the largest manufacturer of air-conditioning equipment, now offers cooling services. Instead of selling an air-conditioner, Carrier provides air-conditioning services to its clients. Carrier installs it’s equipment on the client’s premises, and charges a service fee for maintaining an agreed upon level of comfort
Unlike traditional product based sales, in which a company attempts to sell the largest capacity air-conditioner it can, which often means the customer uses far more energy than is necessary, in a service relationship the idea is to find ways to minimize the use of energy in order to save on the cost of the service. Carrier provides auxiliary services including lighting retrofits and installation of super windows so that the client will use less energy to maintain the necessary comfort level. The cost savings increases the bottom line for the company, while cutting down on the wasteful use of energy resources, and the emission of greenhouse gasses.
Is there a lesson to be learned here?
While efficiency is based on maximizing outputs in the minimum time, sufficiency is based on optimizing relationships over an extended time in a sustainable manner. Imagine just how different our world would be if sufficiency, rather than efficiency became the prevailing time value in both our personal, as well as our commercial lives.
Narrator: Jeremy Rifkin is the author of the Age of Access. |