The search for transcendence and meaning

"In the coming era, deep play in the Collaborative Commons becomes as important as hard work was in the market economy, and the amassing of social capital becomes as valued as the accumulation of market capital. Attachment to community and the search for transcendence and meaning comes to define the measure of one's life rather than one's material wealth.

[...] If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet Of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons. Many – but not all – of our basic material needs will be met for nearly free in a near zero marginal cost society. Intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centered on abundance rather than scarcity. 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."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 161]