Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

Bits are thrilling, but when it comes to the overall economy, it’s all about atoms.

Atoms are weighty, and so are the consequences of their failure. When you shut down a website, nobody cares. When you shut down a factory, lots of people lose their jobs, and the debts can haunt the owners for the rest of their lives.

Talk about “controlling the tools of production”: you (you!) can now set factories into motion with a mouse click.

This ability—to manufacture “local or global” at will—is a huge advantage. That simple menu option compresses three centuries of industrial revolution into a single mouse click.

The process of making physical stuff has started to look more like the process of making digital stuff. The image of a few smart people changing the world with little more than an Internet connection and an idea increasingly describes manufacturing, too.

Thus ideas, shared, turn into bigger ideas. Projects, shared, become group projects and more ambitious than any one person would attempt alone. And those projects can become the seeds of products, movements, even industries.

Computers amplify human potential: they not only give people the power to create but can also spread their ideas quickly, creating communities, markets, even movements.

As Marx observed, power belongs to those who control the means of production.

The great opportunity in the new Maker Movement is the ability to be both small and global. Both artisanal and innovative. Both high-tech and low-cost. Starting small but getting big. And, most of all, creating the sort of products that the world wants but doesn’t know it yet, because those products don’t fit neatly into the mass economics of the o