Why ever go to a store ever again?

Digital distribution will be the chief form for delivering any product within my lifetime.

This may occur by the next decade. It’s already happening in stages. We’ve become increasingly comfortable with digital transmission of media. Amazon already earns more every year selling eBooks than physical books.

The main hang-ups are still in the manufacture and distribution of tangible products that are more than just images, text, software, video, and audio. I can download software, but I can’t download and print a chair yet.

My thinking on this topic was re-ignited by the book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Caron back in 2010.

Sci-fi involving replicators and nanotechnology excited me about this topic many years before that, but I had filed it away as a distant advance before I started reading more on the topic. I’m confident that this is the most important and under-examined technological trend that there is today. It’s understood that digital distribution is one of the most successful business stories of the last few years. But it’s not widely understood that digital distribution will completely supplant traditional retail rather soon.

Take the case of the 3D-printed bikini available on Shapeways. 

Shapeways is an intermediary for the design. The customer orders the bikini, Shapeways manufactures it. The customer gets the bikini in the mail.

This is not the way that I anticipate it working in the future.

Some time in the next couple decades, instead of that process, I would expect a woman to have a digital wallet or a series of subscriptions to different designers that she uses to craft her clothing on demand. Instead of a wardrobe overflowing with dresses, a woman will have a massive digital collection of designs accrued to her account that she can use at any time.

A game on Steam is not a fundamentally different thing from the design for a bikini. They can both be reduced to data and transmitted over a network.

The tough task is to lower the cost of decentralized manufacturing so much that few products actually need to be delivered.

One weakness of many retail business models — both online, like Amazon, or hybrid online-physical, like Walmart — is an over-reliance on public infrastructure. That infrastructure is unlikely to be maintained over the next few decades in the United States and elsewhere. As the government cannibalizes itself to wage foreign wars and bribe old people with existing transfer programs, less money will be available to run highways. The financial condition of the US Postal Service is driving up shipping costs for retailers of all sizes.

We’re within reach of a future in which there is no more public postal service.

Large retailers have thrived thanks to many subsidies that the general culture has become inured to. Walmart runs its warehouses-on-wheels and its Just-In-Time inventory system effectively because it can externalize so many costs onto other people through the government. Companies reliant on massive trucks that cause wear and tear on Federal highways can expect other taxpayers to pick up those bills for them.

Companies like Amazon relentlessly digitize everything that can be possibly digitized. The next step is to cut reliance on shipping products . Shipping increases the delay between purchase and gratification. This is why Amazon uses services like Prime to enhance the experience of its most loyal customers — two day shipping at a flat rate plus other perks. There are many intermediary steps between that and a delay of two hours while your home fabricator crafts the sneakers that you just downloaded a pattern for.

The largest stumbling block for decentralized manufacturing, however, is that centralized manufacturing seems to be getting cheaper even faster. The cost of 3D printers has dropped to less than that of a home computer with the recent release of the Replicator by Makerbot, but it’s still cheaper — if not yet consumer-friendly — to manufacture most complex products through conventional methods using foreign factories.

It’s now possible to buy or download the design for a toy for your kid on the internet and then print it out a few minutes later.

College kids will one day torrent and print the designs for new sheets instead of buying a new set from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Instead of buying a new set of IKEA furniture every few years when it breaks, you could subscribe to IKEA’s service and download a new set when you get sick of the old one.

Although I thought it was just my idle babbling as I started writing this post, I discovered from this Fast Company article that Jeff Bezos has indeed taken a personal interest in the success of 3D printing companies like Makerbot:

“In a culture with no widespread experience of 3-D printing–and thus no real way to gauge its mass appeal–it is difficult to imagine how big MakerBot might get. But in recent months, Pettis’s company began selling prebuilt printers and taking its first steps into traditional retail. “I think it’s an enormous business,” says Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group, a firm that led MakerBot’s venture-capital round and has also invested in Zynga. Jeff Bezos’s venture-capital vehicle put some money in too–after Pettis met the Amazon founder at a conference and Bezos proceeded to grill him about the MakerBot strategy for half an hour.”

The reason why is clear: why deliver stuff thousands of miles when you can send the product in the form of data over a network, like you can with a book sent to Kindle?

Investors like Bezos don’t need to give any fucks about the limitations of the present.

When you have a scads of money, what the world is going to be like in ten years becomes more important than how the world is now.

The world now runs on huge stupid trucks running on these long roads made out of petroleum byproducts. It’s ugly and stupid and I want to tear it all up, and I’m sure that there are at least a few people like me who want to destroy the old world and build at better one in its place. 

Instead of having a cluttered suburban megahouse full of crap,you could have all of your crap keyed to your accounts. If you want something new, you can make it, as long as you have the materials on-hand.

The computer needed decades of development before it could be mass-adopted as the primary means of production and consumption world-wide. Decentralized manufacturing will need a similar sustained push to promote it as the superior alternative.

Technological change does not happen through a magical Hegelian process of ‘societal forces’ — it occurs thanks to the tremendous amount of capital, blood, and snot expended by entrepreneurs and investors.

I consider this technology as an outgrowth of digital distribution. It’s about expediting delivery times and almost eliminating the need for maintaining inventory.