Chris Anderson, prize-winning author and editor in chief of WIRED magazine, spoke Monday evening at Cubberley Auditorium about the Internet’s potential to reduce barriers to entry in manufacturing for small-time inventors and entrepreneurs — a concept Anderson termed “democratization of the tools of production and distribution.”
Anderson, who began his storied career in science journalism at Science and Nature, propelled WIRED to nine National Magazine Award nominations and a prestigious 2009 designation as “Magazine of the Decade.” He also championed the application of open-source software and individual online innovation to the production of real-world goods — something he predicted would spark a “new Industrial Revolution” in manufacturing.
Anderson began yesterday’s talk with a discussion of the benefits of “garage tinkering and basement inventing in the Internet Age.”
“The past decade was about finding new social and innovation models on the Web; the next decade will be about applying them to the real world,” Anderson said.
“The Web has been awesome, and it’s blown our minds, but this is just the beginning,” he added.
The world that Anderson envisions, which heralds “the end of the blockbuster monopoly,” is one in which the very idea of what a company should be and look like is radically different from our conceptions of a corporation today.
It’s a universe in which small inventors and entrepreneurs, seamlessly connected to one another via the Internet, streamline and expedite production by efficiently networking ideas in free competition with traditional corporations. It’s a universe of auto-piloted drones designed by high-school dropouts in basements, open-source cars put together in a garage over the weekend and three-dimensional printers that can put ink on a Z-axis.
But most of all, Anderson said, it’s a world in which the people who are best equipped to do a job are assigned to do it — where labor is allocated with almost perfect efficiency.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, which country you live in, or which degree you have — it matters what you can do. If you’re the perfect person for the job, you can be found,” Anderson said. “Whether you went to Stanford or didn’t go to college at all, you’ve got the same access to the marketplace.”
In addition to lauding the Internet’s labor-allocating benefits, Anderson praised the Web’s function as a medium to reduce barriers to entry for the aspiring small-businessperson, who previously faced high startup costs for large-scale manufacturing endeavors.
“Technology opens up marketplaces and it is scale-agnostic,” noted Anderson, whose great-grandfather invented the automatic sprinkler system but lacked the capital to market it on a large scale, eventually losing out to established big business.
He also pointed to low-cost Chinese basic goods, obtainable via the Internet, as key to driving growth in the small-business sector.
“We’ve always known you could outsource to China, but it used to be complicated . . . now they take PayPal,” Anderson said, touting international free trade Web sites like Alibaba.com as essential to the low-cost exchange of goods.
“Now the little guys can make goods at the same rate as the big guys,” he added.
Anderson’s message met with a generally positive response from Stanford students, though, some were unsure about the inevitability of the “new Industrial Revolution.”
“I came because he’s a baller guy and I read WIRED religiously,” said attendee Dan Wiesenthal ’10.
“I’d like to find out a little more about what it means for me, though,” added Wiesenthal, who felt that barriers to entry weren’t quite as low as Anderson predicted.“I still see significant barriers to entry whereas he portrayed there as being none,” he said.