Planes, rockets, cars, ships, clothes, medical devices — all physical goods that require industrial-scale production.
Even your smartphone (the symbol of miniaturization) requires giant semiconductor fabs that cost $20–$30 billion each. That's not garage tinkering — it's industrial might.
"You can't 3D-print a Boeing 787 in your basement." Industrial capacity still matters.
The cost advantages of mass production haven't disappeared:
- Making a t-shirt in a giant factory in Bangladesh is still far cheaper than making it in a distributed, miniaturized way
- Energy production, mining, agriculture — still benefit from large centralized systems
Even if information flows freely, the state still controls:
- Ports
- Roads
- Factories
- Power grids
- Farmland
- Armies
A government can shut down a semiconductor fab, seize oil fields, or blockade food imports.
This means that physical necessity anchors power, and sovereignty can't vanish just because information is free.
- Microchips are small, but the fabs that produce them are enormous, ultra-complex, and heavily state-subsidized (TSMC, Intel, Samsung)
- SpaceX makes reusable rockets (a triumph of engineering miniaturization/optimization) — but it also employs thousands of factory workers and relies on giant steel plants
- The cloud (AWS, Google, Microsoft) relies on vast data centers cooled by rivers of electricity — not something an individual sovereign person can just spin up alone
Yes, a viral tweet can move markets. But if you need to eat, you still depend on logistics chains, supermarkets, and farms.
Complexity theory doesn't eliminate scarcity — it just shows how unpredictable outcomes can be when systems are interdependent.
You can't eat code, wear Bitcoin, or fly on decentralization. The information layer is revolutionary, but the material layer still runs on industrial power, which states and corporations dominate.
True, but factories themselves are becoming hyper-automated:
- A chip fab might employ 20,000 people today, but in 20 years, maybe 2,000
- Robotics + AI are shrinking the human role in large-scale production
- Fewer workers = less political leverage for nation-states
Example: Tesla's Gigafactories → giant, but run by software, not labor unions. The "factory" is still there, but its control layer is informational.
Distributed production is already nibbling at the edges:
- 3D printing → from prosthetics to aerospace parts
- Biotech "bio-printers" → custom drugs, lab-grown meat
- Maker movement → small-scale but proof that production can decentralize
Information + modular tech → shrink the minimum efficient scale. In the long run, economies of scale might give way to economies of scope and customization.
Think: a local 3D print shop making one-off parts vs. a factory mass-producing identical ones.
Sure, but information power routes around chokepoints:
- Bitcoin shows you can build a parallel financial system outside central banks
- Starlink and satellite internet bypass state-controlled telcos
- AI models can be trained on distributed networks rather than a single state-owned supercomputer
The marginal power of states declines when citizens can move capital, identity, and productivity into cyberspace. Even if they hold the ports and roads, much of the value creation escapes.
Yes, fabs are giant, but the value add is in designs, algorithms, IP, not steel and concrete:
- TSMC builds chips → but Apple captures most of the profit via chip design (M-series, A-series)
- Infrastructure is commoditized; ideas eat margins
- Over time, open-source hardware + AI-driven design may reduce reliance on mega-fabs (e.g., chiplet architectures, RISC-V, 3D-printed circuits)
True, you can't eat Bitcoin — but Bitcoin can redirect who controls food systems:
- Farmers already use blockchain to bypass middlemen in supply chains
- Virtual economies (e.g., gaming, digital goods) already generate real wealth without touching physical goods
- The "nonlinear revolution" doesn't abolish material constraints, but it reshapes incentives and power so radically that industrial-era institutions can't keep up
Factories, scale, and chokepoints still exist, but the center of gravity is shifting:
- The strategic high ground is no longer who owns the mine or the smokestack, but who owns the design, the code, the network
- Industrial power is becoming a commodity, while informational power is becoming sovereign