To wrap this up for now: yes, manufacturing is in relative decline across the developed world, although most Americans think the situation is worse than it really is. And yes, the decline of high-wage, mass-employment manufacturing is part of the worsening pressure on median-income earners, also around the world. So anything that can spur new manufacturing is a plus—with an emphasis on the new, given the repeated findings by the Kauffman Foundation that essentially all net job creation in the United States is from companies in their first few years of existence. (Explanation here. Short version: Older companies, in aggregate, gradually reduce their total workforce over time, as some go out of business and some get streamlined. Thus, the net job growth is from newly-formed companies.)

What might the maker movement have to do with that? It has made it surprisingly easier for new companies, in manufacturing, to start. Why? It has to do with tools.

New Tools, New Firms

Here’s how I finally understood the difference that a new generation of production tools has made: by comparing it to my own business, writing and publishing.

Everyone in journalism knows the line attributed to A.J. Liebling, in The New Yorker: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Liebling wrote that in 1960. As more-or-less recently as that in historical terms, if you wanted to disseminate your thoughts to people outside your household, you simply could not do it yourself. You had no option but to work through a limited number of powerful, capital-intensive enterprises. You had to convince a newspaper or magazine to publish your writings—because only they controlled the printing presses, delivery networks, and newsstands. (I remember the olden days of wanting to react to something in the news, and then making phone calls or sending letters—!!!, yes, real letters in the mail on paper !!!—to the handful of gatekeepers who ran op-ed pages, hoping you could get their interest.) You had to attract the attention of TV or radio reporters, since only they could get you on the air. If you had a longer story to tell, you had to convince a publishing house to put out your book. Short of going door-to-door with flyers, there was no way to avoid the middleman in this industry. And the people who served as middlemen—the publishers, the broadcasters—were buttressed by the very expensive printing and transmitting equipment they controlled.

Wave after wave of disruption in publishing have been bad for everyone who used to hold that middleman role. (The Atlantic is doing very well right now—so thanks for reading and subscribing!) But the new tools fostered an unprecedented outpouring of expression. Blogs, Tweets, YouTube videos, Instagrammed photos, podcasts, Reddit and Facebook communities, billions upon billions of daily texts messages … One by one many of these might be trivial and some of them destructive. But taken together they produced a totally different form of communication and knowledge, and countless millions of new business operations, all because an advance in production tools.