Atoms

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Atoms, by Chris Anderson.

The past decade has been an extraordinary adventure in discovering new social models on the Web—ways to work, create and organize outside of the traditional institutions of companies, governments and academia. But the next decade will be all about applying these models to the real world. Atoms are the new bits!

Just take one example: making stuff. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participants and participation in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and little bit of self-taught expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production. They are a virtual microfactory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; everything is assembled and drop-shipped by the contractors, who can serve hundreds of such small customers simultaneously.

Today, there are microfactories making everything from cars to bike parts to local cabinetmakers with computercontrolled routers making bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is now about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into entrepreneurship, no tooling required. "Three guys with laptops" used to describe a web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC—all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real.

Chris Anderson is Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, and the author of The Long Tail and FREE. He also runs a micromanfacturing robotics company at diydrones.com