A fascinating article in the Economist discusses a new business on the brink: 3D printing. It’s just as it sounds. If you have the software capability and know-how to design a certain product, or even the ability to download a design off the internet, you can press print and cut out the manufacturing industry to have a new pair of sneakers on your desk. Additive manufacturing, as it is known is on the cusp of emergence. Timberland already uses it to create models that would cost up to 20 times the original amount. Here’s an article about how it’s done.

The implications for business are multifarious. The notion that anyone could design whatever they need has led some to speculate about a reversal of the effects of industrialization and business to business design, which according to a Marxian teleology (progression of capitalism into socialism), isn’t so far off. Empowering the individual to create and design whatever he needs, just as he wants it cuts out the middleman, and means less money spent.

Just imagine a future Manhattan composed entirely of skyscrapers and apartments, where people can get whatever they need within a three block radius. Sounds pretty green to me.

The best part about this new technology is that it isn’t fifty years away. Right now, a 3D printer costs less than one of the original ones did in 1985. It looks like this century may be about deindustrialization.