I didn’t know he was a programmer.
His central thesis seems to be that digital designs, because they’re files and therefore copyable, can be shared online --- and therefore, I suppose, will be; and that this will result in empowering individual inventors: “Would-be entrepreneurs and inventors are no longer at the mercy of large companies to manufacture their ideas.” (p.29)
I’m probably not the best critical audience for this thesis, since it’s a thesis I’ve been promoting myself since at least 1999. So I’m already prepared to believe it.
How could this decentralization and empowerment fail? One way would be in the way that Facebook and Apple have tournamentized software development, creating an incentive structure in which the aggregate value created by “app” vendors is dramatically less than the amount spent creating the apps, and only the very best apps are profitable. Anderson says, (p.61) “Today we are seeing a return to a new sort of cottage industry,” while acknowledging that the original cottage industries “were always at the mercy of the industrialists.” (p.60) He’s optimistic that since the invention and not merely the manufacturing are distributed (indeed, in the model he promotes, it’s the reverse: the manufacturing is centralized in service bureaus) that the new cottage industrialists will have the power to set their own prices and generate high profits.
Anderson’s usual carelessness about the truth is in evidence; on p.44, for example, he talks of “spinning multiple threads of cotton from flax”, a feat worthy of Rumpelstiltskin; on p.47, he repeats the gross distortion that the privatization of common grazing grounds was an “Improved farming method” that “avoided the ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem”, which has been amply rebutted elsewhere; he claims, “The original Moore’s Law, named after Intel researcher Gordon Moore, described the twenty-four-month doubling of processing power per dollar that has characterized the computer industry since the 1970s,” (p.84) which contains at least four factual errors and possibly five; “a mathematical equation of how to make it... [i]s actually the way CAD programs work” (p.85); he consistently misapplies the term “scale-free network” (p.136) in a way that suggests he has no idea what it means: a network where there are a lot of nodes with many more connections than average, such that the fraction of nodes with more than k connections is proportional to k to some power around -2 or -3;
He refers back to his first book, The Long Tail, to explain his thesis: in the absence of shelf-space restrictions, many more books became profitable to sell, and too with music, software, and anything else that you can download. He cites a “shift in culture toward niche goods.” But the strong version of the thesis in The Long Tail was that the majority of Amazon’s sales came from books you couldn’t find in your local bookstore; that is, that niche goods were not only more popular, but more popular than the “mainstream” goods that shelf-space restrictions used to confine us to. That turned out to be wrong, because of bad estimates of Amazon’s sales numbers. You can, of course, make it true by choosing your arbitrary dividing line between “mainstream” and “niche” to be above the median, but it turns out that if you do that, then there’s an awful lot of “niche” books in bricks-and-mortar bookstores too. (“Even Wal-Mart now sells more than a hundred kinds of mustard,” p.78.)
His enthusiasm for his new model of production (“the perfect combination”, p.80; “anyone can get access to manufacturing and distribution”, p.89; “this is revolutionary”, p.97; “MakerBot is...a revolutionary act...a political statement”, p.104; ) turns me off and makes me doubt his objectivity.
One thing that I thought was interesting and new is the distinction he draws between Toffler’s “mass customization” (Dell computers, Nike ID shoes, monogrammed iPads, etc.) and his new prediction of “a mass market for niche products” (p.88).
There are numerous useful tidbits of information; a square foot of laser-cut plywood or plastic might cost US$15 (p.107); the names of popular service bureaus like Ponoko and Pololu (p.107); the names of popular 3-D design web sites like Thingiverse (XXX); “entrepreneurs...price their product at at least 2.3 times its cost” (p.117); the reward hierarchy 3D Robotics uses to entice contributions from DIYDrones members (p.121); unfortunately, I worry that Anderson’s lack of reliability on things I already know means that he’s not a reliable source for information in things I don’t.