Think of waking up one day to find out that every aspect of your
being has become a purchased affair, that your life itself has become the
ultimate shopping experience.
The emerging "age of access" is defined, above all else, by the
increasing commodification of all human experience. In business circles,
the operative term is the "life-time value" of the customer--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.
To calculate the LTV of a customer, a firm projects the present value
of all future purchases against the marketing and customer-service costs
of securing and maintaining a long-term relationship. Credit card
companies, magazines and mail-order catalogs, which rely on subscriptions
and memberships, have long used LTV cost-accounting projections. Now the
rest of the economy is following suit.
Determining a person's LTV is made possible with the information and
telecommunications technologies of the network economy. Electronic
feedback and bar-code data provide continuously updated information on a
person's purchases, giving companies detailed profiles on dietary
choices, wardrobes, states of health, recreational pursuits and travel
patterns. Using computer modeling techniques, it is possible to use this
mass of raw data to anticipate a person's future desires and needs and
map out targeted marketing campaigns to lure him or her into long-term
commercial relationships.
Many in the information sciences are even suggesting that the new
technologies be thought of as relationship technologies, or
R-technologies. "We need to turn away from the notion of technology
managing information and toward the idea of technology as a medium of
relationships," says Michael Schrage of the MIT Sloan School's Center for
Coordination Science. French economist Albert Bressand says that
R-technology is an appropriate way to describe the new technologies
because "relations rather than material products are what is processed in
these machines."
Rich webs of interconnections and relationships between suppliers and
users are creating the opportunity to quantify and commodify every aspect
of a person's lived experience in the form of a long-term commercial
relationship. The goal is to become a ubiquitous presence, an appendage
of the customer's very being, operating on his behalf in the commercial
sphere.
For example, consider financial planning. Many investment companies
are making the transition from simply trading stocks and bonds and
managing client portfolios to handling every aspect of the client's
financial dealings for a lifetime and beyond, including yearly business
plans, personal budgeting plans and retirement income plans; estate
planning; tax and accounting services; legal assistance, and other
services. In return, the client gains access to specialized expertise and
trusted advisors who act on his behalf, often as surrogate or advocate.
On the down side, customers may become embedded within a dense web of
ongoing commercial relationships and dependent on commercial forces that
they little understand and over which they may have less and less
control.
R-technologies can be used to reconfigure the most fundamental
categories of social existence. Already, in marketing circles, the talk
runs to ways of using R-technologies to create new kinds of "communities"
made up of like-minded people who come together in a particular activity
or pursuit because of their shared interest in the company's brand,
products and services. Holiday Inn's Priority Club brings together
between 500 and 1,000 of its most frequent guests, twice a year, at one
of its resorts for a weekend of entertainment and recreation, peppered
with several round-table discussions with hotel management. The idea is
to provide a time and place for club members to meet and form bonds of
intimacy with one another and Holiday Inn executives.
Although a day is limited to 24 hours, new kinds of commercial
services and relationships are limited only by the entrepreneur's ability
to imagine new ways of commodifying time. And while we are creating every
kind of labor- and time-saving device and activity to service one
another's needs and desires in the commercial sphere, we feel like we
have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That is
because the great proliferation of labor- and time-saving services only
increase the diversity, pace and flow of commodified activity around us.
The network-based economy does indeed increase the speed of
connections, improve efficiency and make life more convenient by turning
everything imaginable into a service. But when most relationships become
commercial relationships and every individual's life is commodified 24/7,
what time is left for relationships of a noncommercial nature based on
kinship, neighborliness, shared cultural interests, religious
affiliation, ethnic identification and fraternal and civic involvement?
The fact that marketing professionals and corporations are seriously
engaged in developing what they call long-term "customer intimacy" and
are actively experimenting with a host of vehicles and venues for
establishing deep "community bonding" is disturbing enough. What is more
worrisome is that these large-scale efforts to create a surrogate social
sphere tucked inside a commercial wrap are, for the most part, going
unnoticed and uncritiqued, despite the broad and far-reaching potential
consequences for society.
When virtually every aspect of our being becomes a paid-for activity,
human life itself becomes the ultimate commercial product, and the
commercial sphere becomes the final arbiter of our personal and
collective existence.
