With its subtitle heralding "The New Industrial Revolution", this is a book that never knowingly undersells itself. Every page and every paragraph rams home the same basic message: this is what the future looks like. The good news is that manufacturing is coming back. The bad news – at least for arty-farty types like your reviewer – is that we're going to be doing the manufacturing ourselves. Not in factories, of course, because that's so 20th century, but in our own homes.
According to Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of culture and technology magazine Wired, we will all learn to design our own products using universal software, and then either construct them with "3D printers" that inject plastic mouldings or email our designs to a fabrication unit that will make them for us. "We are all designers now," he writes. "It's time to get good at it."
Thus a new cottage industry will grow that will rebalance a global economy distorted by cheap labour costs. In this revolution, claims Anderson, the workers will finally own the means of production. Innovation will thrive, excellence will prevail, inward-looking companies will be replaced by outward-looking communities, and all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Anderson is no stranger to this Panglossian brand of futurology. He is himself a mini-cottage industry, turning trend-spotting into popular economic manifestos. In his first book, The Long Tail, Anderson argued that the internet had created a new business landscape, in which success meant selling less of more. It became the marketing mantra for every company that dreamed of high revenue from low sales.
His second book, Free, took counterintuition one step further by asserting that giving products and services away for nothing would lead to long-term profit. Although the book was offered as a free download, its thesis didn't find many buyers. As with comedy, the secret of futurology is timing, and 2009 was not the year to preach a cavalier attitude to debt.
The economic meltdown raised profound suspicions about the internet's intangibility, the ethereal limitlessness that seemed to encourage folly and excess. After all, Alan Greenspan thought "advances in technology" could secure endless credit.
In Makers, Anderson plugs into a widespread desire to return to the material world of "atoms". The book is based on a 2010 article Anderson wrote for Wired entitled "In the next industrial revolution atoms are the new bits". The idea is that bits are software and atoms hardware. Up until recently, goes the theory, computer technology had enabled hardware controlled by corporations – books, newspapers, CDs etc – to be replaced by software that can be used by everyone.
The next stage of this process, Anderson contends, is to use software to manufacture our own hardware. He cites the "maker movement" as the vanguard of industrial DIY. These designers and hobbyists are already using open-resource software and state-of-the-art technology (such as 3D printers) to create products that were once the preserve of corporate factories. Anderson compares the movement to Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, from which people such as Steve Jobs emerged.
"The internet democratised publishing, broadcasting and communications," he writes, "and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital. Now the same is happening to manufacturing – the Long Tail of things."
Perhaps. But is that necessarily a cause for celebration? You could replace the word "democratised" with "devastated" and that first sentence wouldn't suffer much of a drop in factuality. Just ask bookshops and the newspaper industry. For who has really been empowered? The masses, or Apple, Google and Amazon?
Nor is it the case that democratisation has effected a dramatic change in the patterns of consumption – the bestsellers remain bestsellers, and the non-sellers disappear into depths. For every Fifty Shades of Grey, there are a million shades of obscurity. By the same token, might not a possible scenario be that DIY manufacturing leads to a few individual successes and a mass of unwanted vanity projects?
Still, it seems churlish to raise such quibbles in the face of Anderson's relentlessly upbeat prose. His book is filled with stories of unlikely characters taking a risk, showing what they can do, and coming out on top of new billion-dollar companies. And it's written in that jaunty, easy-to-understand style that American magazine writers do so well.
But not so well that I really grasp what a "CAD program" is or, indeed, how a 3D printer actually works. For those of us still struggling to master inkjet printers, the future does not look very bright at all.
