Once upon a time, when you bought something, you had to buy it from the guy who made it. It was mostly unique and personalization was the default. You didn't ha

Once upon a time, when you bought something, you had to buy it from the guy who made it. It was mostly unique and personalization was the default. You didn't have many options, and he didn't have many customers. Both of these were problems of distribution. And distribution was a Hard Problem. Then we built factories and distribution chains. This provided a solution to the problem. It offered more choice, and more customers. There were drawbacks, as with anything. It centralized wealth, which was worrisome. It decoupled the value created from the value the creator received. It made producing identical products easy, and custom products intractable. It built cities, and long commutes. But it was worth it. A couple hundred years passed, and we built computers. We built the Internet. We made solving the Hard Problem so easy children could do it. But we forgot that there were drawbacks we took on. And instead of shrugging them off, we used the tools that could remove those drawbacks to expand those drawbacks.