Life's Pleasures Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

A “virtual lock” is a perfect Rifkin phrase: it sounds technical, almost abstract, until you picture what it actually means - the ability to decide who gets to plant life. The line isn’t really about seeds; it’s about power hiding inside paperwork. By focusing on “turning those seeds into intellectual property,” Rifkin frames a legal maneuver as an act of conversion, like alchemy with a billable hour. Something biologically promiscuous and renewable is made artificially scarce, not by nature but by contract.

The intent is warning, but it’s also reframing the battlefield. Arguments over GMOs often get stuck in the science (Are they safe? Are they “natural”?). Rifkin drags the conversation to political economy: who owns the means of reproduction in agriculture. “Upon which we all depend” broadens the stakes beyond farmers and activists to anyone who eats, which is to say: everyone. He’s making consumers complicit, or at least implicated, in a system that treats the basics of survival as a revenue stream.

The subtext is about enclosure - a modern rerun of fencing off commons, except the pasture is genetic code. “Virtual” matters: the lock isn’t a padlock on a silo, it’s patent portfolios, licensing agreements, and seed contracts that can forbid saving or replanting. In the late-20th and early-21st century context - biotech consolidation, expansive patent regimes, corporate mergers in agribusiness - Rifkin’s line hits because it turns an invisible infrastructure of ownership into a visceral threat: dependency engineered by design, not accident.