Undoing the Industrial Revolution

In "Undoing the Industrial Revolution," Jakob Nielsen asserts that the internet will help us get back to the way things were before the Industrial Revolution. I chose this one simply because it sounded interesting. He believes that the Internet will help reverse the "bad" things brought about by the industrial revolution, started more than 200 years ago by the invention of Watt's steam engine in 1769.

Implications of Industrialization

The following consequences came about as a result of the industrial revolution (by the way, there is no differentiation between the classic industry and other forms of industrialization):

Mass-produced products give everyone the same thing, with few variations.
Centralized manufacturing and businesses emerged due to the cost of establishing efficient factories.
Big companies emerged in response to these economies of scale.
Distance between decisions and execution increased as companies grew and thus required several management levels between executives and workers.
Employment and jobs became the predominant way to make a living.
Centralized cities (and later suburbs) attracted most of the population to a small area in a country.
Work and leisure separated, with each occupying fixed times and places.
Mass media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, and so on) emerged and began broadcasting a small set of messages to a large number of people.
Mass marketing used mass media to sell mass-produced products to the working masses.
Image building became a primary means of sustaining market position in a mass-marketing environment crowded with similar products.

These results have driven much centralization. This is different from our normal development through the ages where we knew everyone, worked as a team, and had tightly integrated work and lives.

The Pastoral Internet

The internet will take us back to the pre-IR positive, but lost aspects of our lives:

Custom-built products instead of mass-produced ones. A computer can control processes in a plant using directives received from a user in his home ordering from that company thousands of miles away in just seconds.
Niche products. Example: 57% of Amazon's sales come from 2.2 million non-best-selling books. Individually, such books sell so few copies that they're not even carried by real-world superstores with 130,000-title inventories. At Amazon, each of these books sells only a few copies per year, but there are a lot of them.
Virtual companies instead of big firms in centralized locations. Collaborative software will enable people to work from all over to accomplish a single goal, perhaps without ever seeing the other workers face to face.
Geographically dispersed companies and services. This is effective because it allows people the opportunity to work from where they want, and also makes it more difficult for terrorists to strike.
Work/life integration. People combine work and home life through IM, email, and the like. This came about because of advances in technology.
Narrowcasting and one-to-one media are what the Web is all about: providing exactly what individual users want in each individual moment.
Reputation replaces image as the way to build a company, product, or brand position. An example is Google, they place the most highly rated offers first, regardless of the vendor's size.

These trends drive decentralization and reduce the advantages of being big.

The Experience Switch

"In the physical world, you win by being big, with economies of scale in manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and branding. Most of these benefits accrue even if you're mediocre, and in fact, you usually benefit from targeting the lowest common denominator.

In the virtual world, you win by being good: Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the Internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans."

The switch from centralization to decentralization will be good because it will drive up quality. That is very beneficial because it will make life better for everyone. Things are slowly changing right now, and the ten years of internet has not done away with the 200 years of the IR, but it will help to drive the changes that make things better.

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