There was a time in the not-too-distant past when large companies and powerful governments reigned supreme over the little guy. But new technologies are empowering individuals like never before, and the Davids of the world-the amateur journalists, musicians, and small businessmen and women-are suddenly making a huge economic and social impact.

In Army of Davids, author Glenn Reynolds, the man behind the immensely popular Instapundit.com, provides an in-depth, big-picture point-of-view for a world where the small guys matter more and more. Reynolds explores the birth and growth of the individual's surprisingly strong influence in: arts and entertainment, anti-terrorism, nanotech and space research, and much more.

The balance of power between the individual and the organization is finally evening out. And it's high time the Goliaths of the world pay attention, because, as this book proves, an army of Davids is on the rise.

Endorsements:

"George Orwell feared that technology would enable dictators to enslave the masses. Glenn Reynolds shows that technology can empower individuals to determine their own futures and to defeat those who would enslave us. This is a book of profound importance-and also a darn good read." -MICHAEL BARONE, senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and author of Hard America, Soft America

"Blogger extraordinaire Glenn Reynolds shows how average Americans can use new technologies to overcome the twin demons of corporate greed and incompetent government. Reynolds is a compelling evangelist for the power of the individual to change our world." -ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, author of Pigs at the Trough and Fanatics and Fools

"A smart, fun tour of a major social and economic trend. From home-brewed beer to blogging, Glenn Reynolds is an engaging, uniquely qualified guide to the do-it-yourself movements transforming business, politics, and media." -VIRGINIA POSTREL, Forbes columnist and author of The Future and its Enemies and The Substance of Style

"A student in her dorm room now commands the resources of a multi-million dollar music recording or movie editing studio of not so many years ago. The tools of creativity have been democratized and the tools of production are not far behind (Karl Marx take note). Glenn Reynolds's beguiling new book tells the insightful story of how an 'army of Davids' is inheriting the Earth, leaving a trail of obsolete business models not to mention cultural, economic, and political institutions in its wake." -RAY KURZWEIL, scientist, inventor, and author of several books including The Singularity is Near

'Must-read,' 'gotta have,' 'culture-changing' . . . I am suspicious of blurbs with such overused plugs. But Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids is in fact a must-read new book that you gotta have if you are going to understand the culture-changing forces that are unleashed and at work across the globe. -HUGH HEWITT, syndicated talk radio host and author of Blog and Painting the Map Red

"Glenn Reynolds has written an essential book for understanding how technology and markets are creating a bottom-up shift in power to ordinary people that is changing business, government, and our world. Packed with fresh ideas and adorned with graceful prose, An Army of Davids is a masterpiece." -JOE TRIPPI, author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

AN ARMY OF DAVIDS

HOW MARKETS AND TECHNOLOGY EMPOWER ORDINARY PEOPLE TO BEAT BIG MEDIA, BIG GOVERNMENT, AND OTHER GOLIATHSBy GLENN REYNOLDS

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2007 Glenn Reynolds
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59555-113-9

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................viiIntroduction Do It Yourself..........................................ixPreface..............................................................xiv1. The Change........................................................12. Small Is the New Big..............................................113. The Comfy Chair Revolution........................................294. Making Beautiful Music, Together..................................475. A Pack, Not a Herd................................................656. From Media to We-dia..............................................89Interlude Good Blogging..............................................1157. Horizontal Knowledge..............................................1218. How the Game Is Played............................................1399. Empowering the Really Little Guys.................................15310. Live Long-and Prosper!...........................................17511. Space: It's Not Just for Governments Anymore.....................19512. The Approaching Singularity......................................237Conclusion The Future................................................255Notes................................................................269Index................................................................283

Chapter One

THE CHANGE

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 10,000 BC.

What does the world look like?

Except for the soon-to-be extinct cave bear or saber tooth tiger here and there, the scale is pretty small. The biggest human organizations are band- and tribe-level: at most a few hundred people, but usually only a few dozen. The line between work and play is pretty blurry. Some things are clearly work, and some things are clearly play, but many are in between, and people go from one to another as circumstances dictate, not according to a schedule. Agriculture hasn't been invented yet, though people brew beer from wild grains and are grasping the concept of reseeding: plants tend to multiply in the same places every year, making it easier to brew beer. (What, you think people invented agriculture for bread?)

The few material possessions that exist are homemade, except for a very small amount of stuff purchased from itinerant traders carrying rare luxuries like amber, obsidian, or dyestuffs. Children aren't sent off to school but hang around the adults as they go about the business of the day. The most dangerous activities, like big-game hunting, are off-limits to the kids, but they grow up quickly and are soon a part of all clan activities.

Even in these caveman days, there's plenty of technology around. Humans are tropical animals, and without technologies like fire and clothing, most of the world would be off limits. Finely wrought flint tools are capable of impressive feats (how do you think those saber tooths and cave bears became extinct?), but there aren't any machines as we'd understand them. Probably the most sophisticated device in general use is the spear thrower. The biggest organized human events are mass hunts and the occasional clan gathering. They're limited in size and duration because you can't feed that many people by hunting and gathering in one place for long, and it's hard to store much food: it goes bad, or it's eaten by vermin.

Fast-forward a few thousand years and not all that much has changed. Advances in agriculture and organization make some difference: more people can live closer together, thanks to the higher efficiency of farming over hunting and gathering (though because farming is hard work, those people are usually less well nourished and harder working than the hunters and gatherers). There's still not much in the way of sophisticated machinery. There are tools a caveman wouldn't recognize, but nothing he couldn't figure out in a few minutes.

Things stay pretty much this way, in fact, until the Industrial Revolution. Agriculture, written language, and a growing facility for procuring and using metals allow big empires to organize large numbers of people, but not very efficiently. Doing things on a large scale is usually less efficient than cottage industry, because coordinating all those people is so much trouble. You can build big things, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, but at enormous cost, and only by making people choose between hauling bricks or being killed. For most of human history, this was the norm.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

But the Industrial Revolution changed things. Improvements in organization, communications, and machinery meant that it was often much more efficient to do things on a large scale than on a small one, as Adam Smith observed in his famous description of a pin factory:

A workman not educated to this business ... could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in one day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper.... Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.... But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

Division of labor allowed large groups to be organized in ways that were actually more efficient than smaller groups or collections of individuals acting independently. Big machinery allowed big jobs to be done, but because the machinery itself was big it could only do big jobs efficiently. When the smallest efficient steam engine is big enough to power a whole factory, it doesn't make sense to use it for anything less: the cost is the same, but the return is smaller. Thus the "minimum efficient scale" turns out to be pretty big. And lots of capital and lots of time and energy are required to fuel these big operations.

The line between work and play is a lot sharper in the Industrial Age too. Industrialists like Henry Ford didn't think much of levity:

In 1940, John Gallo was sacked because he was "caught in the act of smiling," after having committed an earlier breach of "laughing with the other fellows," and "slowing down the line maybe half a minute." This tight managerial discipline reflected the overall philosophy of Henry Ford, who stated that "When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two."

Most of the developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed this pattern. You can't run a railroad as a family business. The same is true for steel mills (the Chinese Communists tried backyard steel-making, disastrously, with their "little steel" program, but learned better) and, after the very earliest days of the automobile industry, auto factories. Other than a few shops serving NASCAR and very rich car collectors, people don't build cars one at a time any more.

Big organizations doing big things: it's the story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, it was so much the theme of those centuries that it's easy to forget what a departure this was from the rest of human history. But it was a huge departure, brought about by the confluence of some unusual technological and social developments.

And it was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it made people in industrialized countries a lot richer, healthier, and longer-lived. Really, a lot. In his book, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, historian Robert Fogel notes that the improvement in living conditions for the working classes in industrial countries during the Industrial Revolution is without any parallel in human history. Life expectancies got much longer (from thirty-two in 1725 to seventy-six in 1990 in the UK); people got taller, were sick less often, with much better nutrition. The poor of today are much better off than the aristocrats of the pre-Industrial era.

THE DOWNSIDE

On the other hand, industrialization created a lot of social strain as traditional ways of living were disrupted by new ways of doing business. William Blake's "Dark Satanic mills" weren't as bad as they're remembered today-if they had been, people wouldn't have flocked to them. Or maybe it's fairer to say that, bad as they were, they were still better than life as a subsistence farmer. But this new industrial world was very different from life on the farm.

Parents and children were separated. Husbands and wives were separated. "Work" became something separate from the rest of life, something fast-paced and foreign. An old-style blacksmith made a plowshare or a sword from beginning to end. A worker in Adam Smith's pin factory, or Henry Ford's automobile factory, performed a single repetitive task with no real connection, emotional or intellectual, to the overall product. Nor-unlike those old-time craftsmen-did factory workers have much of a connection to the economics of the business. Although factory workers did much better economically than peasant farmers had done, their share of the proceeds was trivial compared to that of the people who financed and ran these large capital-intensive operations-people who became known as "capitalists."

This divide between workers and financiers led to talk about worker "alienation" and the perceived problematic separation of labor from ownership of the means of production. This was the foundation of Marxism and of efforts-universally disastrous-to replace capitalists with government-controlled capital in communist countries. Government replacements for free-market capitalists were, if anything, more rapacious. They were also much worse at actually producing wealth. Much of the twentieth century was spent in making this clear in various unfortunate and lethal ways.

The large-scale operations hit their zenith in the mid-twentieth century, with American business revolving around huge entities like General Motors and IBM. Economists like John Kenneth Galbraith began arguing that big corporations were protected from failure by their size, and that the kind of massive organization and information-processing available to these huge enterprises meant that smaller businesses couldn't possibly compete. Bigger was better, and the power resulting from the managerial class "techno-structure" that ran these big corporations was more important than crude things like profits. Or so the theory went.

This turned out not to be the case. Even as Galbraith's book, The New Industrial State, was appearing in 1966, the seeds of change were taking root. The year before, in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, Gordon Moore had first proposed "Moore's Law"-essentially saying that computing power was doubling every two years and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Giant corporations weren't nimble enough to keep up such a pace.

DESKTOP REVOLUTION

It was a while before the impact of this trend on Galbraith's formulation became obvious, but the growth of cheap computing power has already undercut the importance of big organizations in many areas. That cheap computing power is now being coupled with cheap manufacturing-including, increasingly, what Neil Gershenfeld calls "personal fabrication," in his book Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. But even without the kinds of progress that Gershenfeld describes, manufacturing, including custom manufacturing, has become cheap and versatile enough to neutralize many of the advantages that large organizations once held.

For activities that, ultimately, are about processing information, the computer revolution itself has drastically reduced the minimum efficient scale. A laptop, a cheap video camera, and the free iMovie or Windows Movie Maker software (plus an Internet connection) will let one person do things that the Big Three television networks could only dream of in Galbraith's day, and at a tiny fraction of the cost. The same laptop with a soundcard, a couple of microphones, and software like Acid, Cubase, or Audition can replace an expensive recording studio. Change the software to Lotus or Excel and it can replace an office full of Galbraith-era accountants with calculators, pencils, and paper, and access-filtered through a priesthood of programmers and machine operators-to big 1960s mainframe computers.

This observation is commonplace now, of course, but its implications for Galbraith-era economics have gotten somewhat less attention. It's not just that fewer people can do the same work, it's that they don't need a big company to provide the infrastructure to do the work, and, in fact, they may be far more efficient without the big company and all the inefficiencies and stumbling blocks that its bureaucracy and techno-structure tend to produce.

Those inefficiencies were present in Galbraith's day too, of course. People have been making jokes about office politics and bureaucratic idiocies long before Dilbert. But in the old days, you had to put up with those problems because you needed the big organization to do the job. Now, increasingly, you don't. Goliath's strength compensated for his clumsiness. But now the Davids can muscle up without all of the unnecessary bulk.

So why be a Goliath? As technology moves toward smaller, faster, and cheaper approaches to many jobs, we're likely to see an army of Davids taking the place of those slow, shuffling Goliaths. This won't be the end of big enterprises, or big bureaucracies (especially, alas, the latter), but it will represent a dramatic reversal of recent history, toward more cottage industry, more small enterprises and ventures, and more empowerment for individuals willing to take advantage of the tools that become available. We're likely to see a movement from the impersonal, imposed means to an end to a more individualized, grassroots way of doing things. In fact, we're already starting to see that, as many people-laid off or voluntarily departed from big organizations-start small businesses. Working from home, their daily lives look more like what we saw in the pre-Industrial Revolution era than like the classic Man in the Gray Flannel Suit lifestyle.

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CUBICLES

One of the most significant consequences of this shift is that the empowerment of individuals may lead to an interesting twist on Karl Marx's goal: workers control the means of production, all right, but it's a far cry from communism. Marx's view was tied to an outdated technological paradigm, but his desired outcome, a world in which "capital" is in the hands of the masses, not just the few, may ironically come about through the technological capitalism that Marx's heirs (though not Marx himself, really) despised.

Technologies that are still on the horizon, like molecular nanotechnology (whose enthusiasts predict will lead to machines that can make anything out of "sunlight and dirt") and biotechnology, may bring this trend to complete fruition, but everyday technologies are already moving us a long way in that direction.

(After the hardcover edition of this book came out, I was approached by a University of Tennessee undergraduate who had read it. She informed me that she had paid her way through college-and set aside a nest egg along the way-by taking advantage of eBay and the Internet. She had contracted with a company in China to make adult-sized diapers, which she purchased at very low cost and then resold to the "adult diaper fetish market" in the United States via eBay. I neglected to ask what had given her the idea for this business, but it would seem the perfect illustration of the way technology allows a mix of small and big players to address niche markets, and turn a profit while doing so.)

The worker's paradise may turn out to be a capitalist creation after all.

In the coming chapters, I'll look at the way this change is playing out in the worlds of business, media, the arts, and even national security. I'll also look at the downside of empowering individuals: if amateur musicians or bloggers are empowered by technology, so in a different way are terrorists.

Overall, I consider the trend to be a positive one. Whether you agree with that assessment or not, the existence of this empowerment is undeniable and irreversible. Love it or hate it, it's worth close consideration.

As William Gibson has remarked, "The future has already arrived-it's just not evenly distributed." The pockets of the future that we'll be surveying are not only interesting in themselves, but provide a look at how a lot more of the world is likely to operate before long.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from AN ARMY OF DAVIDSby GLENN REYNOLDS Copyright © 2007 by Glenn Reynolds. Excerpted by permission.
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