Starvin Larry

“There is an industrial revolution going on.  Like these things tend to go it starts small, in garages.  Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s the idea of making things for yourself or repairing things sort of became passe for just about everybody.  Products became disposable.  The electronic kits of my youth from RadioShack and Heathkit went out of business.  Most of  the hobbies like modelbuilding or trains were replaced by videogames, at least for the kids with an accompanying closue of  a good portion of the hobbystores, at least in my area.  It looked like DIY was dead.

In the late 2000’s all that suddenly changed.  All of a sudden you started seeing people hacking stuff together and making stuff.  There were the wonderful new tools to play with.  What happened is that people started to realize that things that were heretofore expensive weren’t any more.  and that the precision required by computer components could be use for other things.  Take apart a CD or DVD dive and there are all those parts to play with. And people have.

The innovation of America is not dead.  People from all walks of life are discovering their inner innovator.  One reason for this is that it’s never been easier to access the powerful tools and technologies that can make things happen.  As manufacturing declined a bunch of old lathes and mills have ended up in peoples garages.  As well as oscilloscopes, voltage sources and all the tools that can build anything in electronics. Add to that computer controlled tools and robotics where the price has dropped to toy levels and it all adds up to massive increase in the availability of powerful tools in the hand of average people.”

“This is important because real technological change doesn’t come from big corporate or government research facilities.  The atmosphere in those places tends to stifle real creativity of the kind that creates revolutions.  Industrial revolutions start in garages using all those great tools the big guys build and then can’t figure out what to do with because they are too busy being large bureaucracies.

It’s the small businesses and startups where the revolutions start.  And it’s happening.  In spite of the worst economy in almost a century, it’s happening. It’s chaotic and messy, a glorious churning of new ideas and I doubt that anybody really understands what and why things are going on, but there it is.    This is the coming revolution.”

Bits To Atoms, The New Industrial Revolution, A Let’s Build Special