Science & Tech Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin’s line is a tidy piece of future-shaping rhetoric: it doesn’t just predict a new frontier, it declares a regime change. “The first step” frames the shift as inevitable and already underway, the kind of phrasing that recruits the listener into a march rather than an argument. And the move from “chemistry and physics” to “biology” isn’t a neutral update in scientific fashion; it’s a reordering of what counts as the master key to power.

The subtext is about control. The age of physics gave us energy, bombs, and big industrial systems; chemistry scaled that into plastics, pharmaceuticals, and mass manufacturing. Biology, in Rifkin’s telling, is different: it turns life itself into the platform. That’s a thrilling promise (cures, longevity, precision agriculture) and a quiet warning (patents on genes, datafied bodies, redesigned ecosystems). His phrasing makes biology sound organic and humane, but it also normalizes the idea that living systems are now legible, engineerable, and therefore ownable.

Context matters because Rifkin built a career as a public intellectual-activist critiquing how markets absorb technology and then rewrite the rules. In the late 20th-century rise of biotech and genomics, he heard not just innovation but a new political economy: corporations shifting from selling products to owning processes of life. The quote works because it compresses a complex thesis into a simple historical pivot, nudging readers to feel they’re crossing a threshold before they’ve decided whether they want to.