Makers: The New Industrial Revolution

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 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.

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

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 beauty of the Web is that it democratized the tools both of invention and of production.

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.

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.

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

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