Science & Tech Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin is selling a radical idea with the mild diction of a policy memo: that the public should get veto power over the future. The sentence stretches out like a procedural safeguard, full of qualifiers ("make sure", "thoroughly", "all the potential") that signal both ambition and anxiety. He’s not just advocating for better PR around new tools; he’s arguing that democratic deliberation should be built into innovation itself, before path dependency and sunk costs make dissent moot.

The subtext is a critique of the default modern script: technology arrives first, society negotiates the damage later. By invoking the "first" revolution to do this, Rifkin implies that earlier ones - industrialization, electrification, nuclear power, the internet - were effectively conducted as live experiments on the public, with consent retrofitted after the fact. His choice of "coming online" is telling: it’s the language of systems and inevitability, as if technology is a server you can’t stop once it boots. That phrasing dramatizes the asymmetry he’s trying to correct: corporations and labs act; publics react.

Context matters because Rifkin’s career has been built on warning that hype is a governance failure. From biotech and genetic engineering to climate infrastructure and AI-adjacent automation, he’s long argued that the benefits are real but the distribution of risk is political. The line doubles as a demand for anticipatory regulation and as a rebuke to the cult of innovation: if progress is so good, it can survive being questioned before it’s irreversible.