Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

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

Some of us say that we “live online,” but it’s not true when it comes to spending or living our everyday lives. Our commercial lives reside mostly in the real world of bricks and mortar, of food and clothes, of cars and houses, and, until some sci-fi future arrives where we’re just disembodied brains in vats, that will continue to be the case.

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.

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.

The Web Age has liberated bits; they are cheaply created and travel cheaply, too. This is fantastic; the weightless economics of bits has reshaped everything from culture to economics. It is perhaps the defining characteristic of the twenty-first century

The biggest transformation is not in the way things are done, but in who’s doing it.

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

The simple act of “making in public” can become the engine of innovation, even if that was not the intent.

The past ten years have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and work together on the Web. The next ten years will be about applying those lessons to the real world.