I believe you are correct. In fact, I believe it so much that I left my 14-year job last March with no intention of seeking another. I am priveleged to ride the ‘first wave’ as it were of this new economy since I’m a software engineer who literally grew up online. I live in an area with a very low cost of living, so I knew I had to give freelancing a shot. I haven’t starved yet.

I do want to remark, though, that this is not new. I have been thinking about what the impact of technology will be upon our society for years. And our move towards a place where most goods are basically heterogenous isn’t new — it’s old. You nailed it on the head when you mentioned standardization as a consequence of industrialization. Like everything, it has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, standardization allows you to handle extremely high volumes. On the other hand, it makes your organization slow to change, impenetrable to personalization.

This goes to the single issue at the heart of why everything is changing. Volume. That companies can scale to large volumes is not just a strength. They also have the weakness of REQUIRING large volumes. They simply cannot serve niche markets. Their distribution networks absolutely require standardized goods which are produced in large number and targetted at the most average consumer. Back when this corporate structure was the only way possible to solve the problem of distribution, that was fine. But distribution is solved. Through a combination of technologies and computer science, it is now easier for me to personally get a good to an end customer than it is for Walmart to do it. The customer doesn’t even need to leave home to get the item from me. The item can be exactly what they desire, and they can get personal service with it. Walmart can’t adapt to this. They, like most all companies, were built to solve the problem of distribution and that has become a nearly-worthless problem to solve.

However, there is a missing piece. Amazon takes the many-headed hydra of the population of consumers and funnels them into the many-fewer-headed beast of producers. We need something that interfaces with a many-headed hydra on BOTH sides. There are a lot of unique challenges that this provides, but all of those challenges will be met with software. I expect the eventual change, though it might take longer than any of us care to wait, will probably be one of those breakneck disruptive things. It will be larger than anything in well over a century though. The last change of this magnitude was when we changed away from an economy of craftspeople creating goods for their local village/city to centralized factories producing large volumes of identical goods for wide distribution networks. It fundamentally reshaped everything, from family structure to home architecture, from education to sociology. It invented our current anti-sex mindset. The impact was really so huge that it cannot be overstated. And this will be no different. Will we go back to living in houses with no private bedrooms, only common rooms? Will we go back to kids apprenticing with craftspeople and starting families when they are adolescents? Only time will tell. Interesting that it’s technology that is enabling us to basically undo the changes we made thanks to technology in the first place!