This is one of those posts that would be more impactful with the Amazon emails embedded in the post. When you can have the bad guy in the piece playing their own part it really resonates, if you're reading PA consider just putting in their responses to your questions. The only nit on this is this bit: "The only way to meet their demands would have been to mass-produce huge volumes of speakers featuring no customizati…
If you think down this path, that craftmanship needs a very fast route to market, and it's going to be a very big industry - with the capitalistic logic, you end up with solutions like drone transport, automated machines that create custom things fast, and robots/ai to test products. And you probably also end up with manufacturing clusters doing most of the work - and not in small towns spread around, but maybe still…
1) A market maker that can create the visibility / confidence that allows a high touch bespoke market to exist (sort of eBay or Amazon or Alibaba for craft people. I thought this might be Tindie at one point but that doesn't seem to be their focus at this stage.)
2) An infrastructure/raw materials market for the craft people. I've seen this with people who do this sort of custom work that finding suppliers is a huge issue and qualifying them and working with them.
3) Tooling and engineering services, where each craftsperson requires a specific set of tools which are by definition low volume but also high tolerance precision kit. My Dad's engraving setup for example was put together with "the" engraving vice, and "the" compressor, and "the" engraving tool and bits. The company that makes all of the tooling is facilitated by an engravers guild which has a large number of members which provides an economical place for the tool manufacturer to serve, but is it possible to create a business that can make bespoke tools at a price that allows the person purchasing them to recover the costs in a reasonable amount of time?
Fundamentally, I am asking whether it is possible to build a "factory" that is not so specialized that it could supply the needs of a variety of users in different activities. Could we build such a facility in a 'small town' and be able to staff it? Or put another way, what is the smallest unit of economic self sufficiency given a global shipping market.
I'm having a hard time expressing this clearly but consider the following analogy/question. Let's say you have a town, SmallVille, that has a functional economy because there is a car parts factory that employs 1/3 of the working aged people. Their salaries go, in part, to shopping for groceries, haircuts, meals out, movies, etc, which employs a second third of the working aged people, and those businesses and the local governance employs the remaining third. Its a nice small town, everyone has a job, and life is good.
Now historically, we've seen that car parts factory close because car parts could be made cheaper elsewhere and the entire economy of the town collapses as you get 1/3 of the population out of work and so competeing with the remaining 2/3rds for their jobs, and without that money coming in the number of services businesses that are needed goes down so there are actually fewer of the remaining jobs available, which further crushes the life out of the town.
Basically without that parts plant feeding money into the town in exchange for car parts the town fails. So can we replace that car parts factory with a factory that can reasonably serve a much wider variety of needs? Can we create a nexus of production which is dynamically assignable to what ever is needed?
My thesis is that if you can crack that nut, and create such a facility, then you can create a 'fractal' economy, one which is geographically distributed and yet nimble in the face of changing economic output needs. Can a car company publish a 'spec' to any of these universal factories and say "I need 600,000 door knobs like this." and get various amounts from 1k to perhaps 100K from a number of factories with good quality control that would depend only on scheduling factory time. And yes, I know this hasn't been accomplished before (hence the 'it may be impossible') and yes I've dealt with trying to get two manufacturers building the same part such that you couldn't tell which factory made the part when you were assembling systems (in that case it was front panels for NetApp filers but I'm sure there are similar stories from anyone who has built product) it is really really hard and maybe not possible. The reward though would be tremendous, a 'factory on demand' of arbitrary size would be to goods production what AWS was to information technology company production.