First, web-based distributors like eBay and Amazon so changed the process of selling and buying that Chris Anderson’s landmark 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More described a transformed commercial world. Now, web-based collaboration tools and small-batch technology such as cheap 3D printers, 3D scanners, laser cutters, and assembly robots are transforming manufacturing, and Anderson’s new book describes the arrival of a “long tail of things.”

Suddenly, large-scale manufacturers are competing not just with each other on multi-year cycles, they are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance in a few weeks. Anybody can play; a great many already are; a great many more are coming. A Maker Revolution is in its early stages, driven by the young.

As the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog forty-some years ago, I find Anderson’s book completely thrilling. This is the democratization of skills and tools we were encouraging, now fully realized. An enormous release of ingenuity worldwide is under way.

Long a fine journalist (at The Economist) and editor (of Wired), Anderson adds particular substance to this book because he himself is a player, a maker. “Along with 3D Robotics, which I cofounded,” he writes, “I’ve worked with Autodesk, Ponoko, and others to help steer this evolution, sometimes as a member of the company’s advisory board. This book is built on my experience at the front lines.”

–Stewart Brand

Inside The Book

Twenty years ago, what would have been the chances that when the editor of Wired magazine decided to start an aerial robotics company, he would end up partnering with a nineteen-year-old high school graduate from Tijuana? Yet today it seemed like the most natural thing. Why wouldn’t you start a company with people with whom you were already working well, who had already proven their mettle? It seems so much riskier to take a flier on someone you don’t know, just because that person has a degree from a good school.

This is the Long Tail of talent. The Web allows people to show what they can do, regardless of their education and credentials. It allows groups to form and work together easily outside of a company context, whether this involves “jobs” or not. And these more informal organizations are much less constrained by geography; talented people can live anywhere and shouldn’t have to move to contribute.

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Making things has gone digital: physical objects now begin as designs on screens, and those designs can be shared online as files. This has been happening over the past few decades in factories and industrial design shops, but now it’s happening on consumer desktops and in basements, too. And once an industry goes digital, it changes in profound ways, as we’ve seen in everything from retail to publishing. The biggest transformation is not in the way things are done, but in who’s doing it. Once things can be done on regular computers, they can be done by anyone. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen now in manufacturing.

Today, anyone with an invention or good design can upload files to a service to have that product made, in small batches or large, or make it themselves with increasingly powerful digital desktop fabrication tools such as 3-D printers. Would-be entrepreneurs and inventors are no longer at the mercy of large companies to manufacture their ideas....

Today there are nearly a thousand “makerspaces”—shared production facilities—around the world, and they’re growing at an astounding rate: Shanghai alone is building one hundred of them.

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Think of a digital product design not as a picture of what it should be, but instead as a mathematical equation of how to make it. That is not a metaphor—it’s actually the way CAD programs work. When you draw a 3-D object on the screen, what the computer really does is write a series of geometrical equations that can instruct machines to reproduce the object at any size in any medium, be it pixels on a monitor or plastic in a printer. Increasingly, those equations don’t just describe the shape of a thing, but also its physical properties—what’s flexible and what’s stiff, what conducts electricity and what insulates heat, what’s smooth and what’s rough.

So everything is an algorithm now.

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Open source is not just an efficient innovation method—it’s a belief system as powerful as democracy or capitalism for its adherents.

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In April 2012, crowdfunding became part of President Obama’s Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which he signed into law. The act makes it easier for small companies to use regulated Web-based crowdfunding sites such as RocketHub, Crowdfunder, and Launcht to raise up to $1 million in investment money from regular people, not just qualified Wall Street investors, without the laborious accounting and public disclosure rules of a traditional stock market listing.

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